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Screening For Biased Content in Instructional Material

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Screening For Biased Content in Instructional Material

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What's In This Guide?

Like any program or initiative, it's best to always start with your goals. To that end, let's begin by covering some of the benefits that implementing an ePortfolio program can offer all members of a school community.

A short summary of the benefits looks like this:

Let's break this down in a bit more detail...

Student Benefits of ePortfolios

We know all students have individual strengths and weaknesses but in a system often driven by pre-set curriculum and assessments, it can be difficult to cater to each student and celebrate their uniqueness.

An ePortfolio can be used to capture each student in a way that standardized tests or end-of-course summative exams simply cannot. Some students may have difficulties showing their true strengths in traditional assessments but may be marvelous at expressing themselves through video, music, art, spoken word, design, coding, or creative writing - mediums that are easy to embed into a digital portfolio. You might also find that some students who are more reluctant to speak up in a busy classroom really find their voice and shine in a digital space.

Educator Matt Renwick stresses the value of a digital portfolio as a wholistic method of assessment,

Students are more than a score. They are unique individuals, each possessing different motivations and talents. To distill an understanding of their current status and future potential down only to a symbol, such as grades or levels, is at best a misrepresentation of their abilities and at worst educational negligence. We can do better.

An ePortfolio can also help students develop independence as they're given the responsibility of shaping and maintaining their own space on the web. Students can be granted the autonomy to capture, curate, document, and share their learning. There's a lot to be said for the power of choice and ownership to motivate students to improve.

The overarching purpose of portfolios is to create a sense of personal ownership over one's accomplishments, because ownership engenders feelings of pride, responsibility, and dedication.
Paris and Ayres (1994)

With traditional assignments and assessments, students make note of their grades in the moment. By keeping track of their successes, failures, and everything in between over time, students are able to understand where they need to improve and celebrate how far they've come. Combined with ownership of their digital space and autonomy of expression, student results can soar.

A lot has been said about the essential skills our students need to prepare them to thrive in a rapidly changing world and job market. Perhaps a digital portfolio program could play a part in your school community in helping students develop these essential skills.

You might be familiar with The Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum (2018) that ranked as the top 5 skills for the 2020 workforce. The report demonstrates that skills growing in prominence include analytical thinking, active learning, and technology design, along with "human skills" like creativity, critical thinking, and complex problem-solving.

Similarly, a national survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2015), revealed that 93% of employers believe that "a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than his or her undergraduate major".

Critical thinking, communication, and problem solving are precisely the sorts of skills that students can develop as they work on their digital portfolios throughout their education. What an added bonus!

Digital portfolios help to shape students' digital footprints. While we naturally may want to shield and guide students, we know that having no digital footprint at all is no longer an ideal option. It's no secret that potential employers and higher education institutions increasingly consider individuals' online profiles and search results when making selections.

Students who use a digital portfolio may be at an advantage as they embark on life outside of school or university. Maintaining a polished record of their work can help students accomplish a variety of goals as they near the completion of their studies such as scholarships, internships, or even jobs. As an added bonus, helping your students succeed can reflect well on your school or institution.

Overall, an ePortfolio can put options and opportunities into the hands of each student.

"How can you make sure that every student who walks on graduation day is WELL GOOGLED by his or her full name?"
Will Richardson (2012)

Educator Benefits of ePortfolios

We all seem to be busier than ever. The planning, assessing, and reporting cycle is never ending, amongst all the other responsibilities. A well established ePortfolio program can help with this and make life easier for faculty and administrators.

It can be challenging to organize and track students' work while assessing their progress over time. As we mentioned earlier, students themselves may not even be able to gauge their own development without a system for monitoring their academic growth. A digital portfolio enables both the student and their instructors to measure progress over time - both academically and in other ways.

Just as important, digital portfolios give instructors insight into students' educational journeys so they can deliver targeted feedback seamlessly.

Educators work hard; sometimes much harder than outsiders realize. Digital portfolios can help make the efforts of both educators and students more visible to everyone. In a culture of transparency, everyone can thrive.

A School-Wide Approach

When thinking about implementing an ePortfolio program, some schools or institutions feel most comfortable starting small - perhaps having ePortfolios in pilot courses or classes. While starting small and then rolling out to everyone can be a great place to begin, we see the greatest benefits when portfolios are implemented school-wide, department-wide, or in more than one course at a time.

The important thing here is that the same portfolio or website is used across classes and even from year-to-year. Why? There are a number of reasons:
1) The Focus Can Move From the Technology to the Content and Learning
When students spend more than one year working with digital portfolios, they learn and know the tool. This means students aren't bogged down with learning the technical stuff. They will become fluent with the technology and be able to concentrate on creation, curation, reflection, connections, and all the things that will really drive their learning.
2) Progress Can be Documented From Year to Year and Class to Class
How often do students make great strides in a particular class only to then have to start from scratch in their next class with a brand new teacher? A lot of time can be wasted as teachers scramble to find out where their new students are at and where they need to go next. An ongoing ePortfolio program solves this dilemma.

Through browsing a student's digital portfolio, educators can get a snapshot of a student's strengths, weaknesses, and learning journey. The transition to a new class or new school year can become seamless with limited interruption to learning.
3) More Meaningful and More Impactful How many times have you seen a school with each teacher alone in their classroom using different technology tools and teaching approaches? While some autonomy and creativity is fantastic, educators can end up working harder than they need to on their own "islands" while students can end up confused as they constantly switch tools. A school-wide approach to digital portfolios means teachers and students can work together to navigate and perfect their program. Some educators and students may become natural leaders of the program and enjoy sharing their skills and assisting others.
Given the regional and unique differences of school systems, many words can be used to describe the same concept. Different subject areas and disciplines have their own vernacular too.

To help us through the rest of this post, we'll define terms here so we all start with the same frame of reference going forward.

A digital portfolio is simply a collection of artifacts of learning. These artifacts can demonstrate the acquisition of skills, knowledge, or capabilities over time. Reflection is typically an integral part of an ePortfolio as is feedback. Digital portfolios can document achievements or processes for accountability, personal development, employment, or opportunities beyond the school gates. Portfolios can be shared with a small audience (teacher, peers, family) or a broad audience (employers, admissions officers, professional learning networks, the public).

Irish National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (via EUfolio, 2015)adopts the following description in their implementation guide (PDF),

ePortfolios are student-owned dynamic digital workspaces wherein students can capture their learning and their ideas, access their collections of work, reflect on their learning, share it, set goals, seek feedback and showcase their learning and achievements.

You'll notice that we use the terms digital portfolios and ePortfolios (electronic portfolios) interchangeably. In fact, we could really just be using the term "portfolio" because here in the 20s, is the modifier "digital" truly necessary?

While academics and thought leaders may debate the correct terminology, ultimately, the terminology you choose to adopt in your school or university is up to you, however, consistency across your campus is definitely a good idea!

A useful alternative term to ePortfolio or digital portfolio might be " blogfolio". That is, a digital portfolio/ePortfolio that's built on a blogging platform. And while we're talking semantics, a blog is simply a type of website that often has some static pages and is regularly updated with posts. Blogs also allow for feedback and interaction through comments.

Silvia Tolisano describes a blogfolio using the analogy of glue,

Blogfolios are the glue that can hold all curricular content, goals and objectives as well as support school initiatives, observations, assessment and accountability requirements or personal passions, interest and projects together.

There are clear benefits to using a blog for a portfolio and we'll explore more of these in chapter 4.

Most crucially, blogging can provide an environment in which to explore the relationship between theoretical knowledge acquired in lectures and other life and learning experiences. It is through the power of such dialogues that learners gain a clearer vision, not only of the immediate demands of the curriculum, but even potentially of their future career paths.
Effective Practice with e-Portfolios. Supporting 21st century learning (PDF). JISC. 2008.
Vocab At A Glance:
Chapter References and Resources

Getting us back to discussing the goals of your portfolio implementation, it can be helpful to think through the different types of portfolios your students could create.

There are four main types or functions of ePortfolios in schools and higher education:

Showcase or presentation

Process or learning

Assessment

Hybrid

Let's take a look at these four types of portfolios so you can decide what might work best in your school or university.

1) Showcase or Presentation Portfolio: A Collection of Best Work

These types of portfolios focus on the portfolio as a product and are also typically called professional portfolios, formal portfolios, or career portfolio.

The content that's added to showcase portfolios is written after the learning takes place, often with reflection from the student. Some schools like LaGuardia Community College adopt the mantra of, "collect, select, reflect, connect" ( PDF Hughes, 2008). The connect element is an interesting and perhaps overlooked part of ePortfolio programs. It involves sharing student work with others (probably beyond the teacher) and actively seeking an audience and feedback.

The showcase portfolio is often used to share a student's best achievements or evidence of learning. Students are generally given the choice to decide what is published.

These sorts of portfolios can assist with self-marketing, online branding, or building a positive digital footprint. In higher education, we see commonly see showcase portfolios that highlight a student's CV or resume to suit a particular purpose such as attracting potential employers or college admissions officers.

2) Process or Learning Portfolio: A Work in Progress

The second type of portfolio that we commonly see is more of a running record of learning. The purpose is to capture the learning process. It's also called a development portfolio, a reflection portfolio, or a formative portfolio.

Entries and artifacts are added during the learning process. A process portfolio is not always a collection of a student's best work; it can include a variety of learning attempts or unpolished documentation along with reflections on struggles and challenges.

These types of portfolios demonstrate a work in progress and allow for self-assessment and reflection.

One trap you might want to try to actively avoid if you're using process portfolios is the "digital dump". That is, over time, students can end up adding a lot of artifacts to their portfolio without much organization, reflection, or purpose. A process portfolio is a fabulous way to demonstrate learning as it happens but you may want to consider how to keep the portfolio well-organized and meaningful.

3) Assessment Portfolio: Used For Accountability

The assessment portfolio is used to document what a student has learned, or demonstrate that they have mastered elements of the curriculum.

These types of portfolios may not be the most popular choice for schools as they are not student-centered; artifacts are chosen based on the curriculum. Likewise, reflective comments will focus on how artifacts align with curriculum objectives.

These types of portfolios may be more formal than a showcase or process portfolio. While they may be very useful within the school environment to provide evidence of learning to teachers and administrators, an assessment portfolio may be less useful for overall student development.

Assessment portfolios are commonly part of certification programs or even part of requirements for earning a degree.

4) A Hybrid Approach

The 4th type of portfolio you'll commonly come across is a combination of the showcase, process, and/or assessment portfolio.

Canadian EdTech leader George Couros explains how two types of portfolios can come together with some examples,

Learning [process] portfolio: If a student were to take a video of them reading in four consecutive months, you would see all readings over time to see development and growth.

Showcase portfolio: If a student were to take a video of them reading in four consecutive months, they would pick the best one from the four samples.

What is beautiful in using a blog as a portfolio is that you do not have to choose; you can do both.

George advises looking in to the different types of portfolios before implementing a program, and suggests the hybrid approach may be best.

Does this show the student's progression over time (learning), or just the best stuff (showcase)? There are considerable benefits to both over time and a combination, from my experience, is the best path to pursue.

Some educators find it's easiest to start out with a showcase portfolio, or a collection of best work. From there, they can evolve into the process or hybrid approach. You might also find your portfolios are fluid in nature, for example, students may move pieces from a process portfolio into either an assessment or showcase portfolio.

This movement might be through having multiple blogs, or through using blog posts for process entries and blog pages for documenting assessment or showcasing artifacts. Alternatively, tags and categories can be used to identify assessment pieces or "final work" within a student's portfolio.

Making choices about which process artifacts to move to a more "final" product involves a great deal of deep consideration and reflection: a rich experience in itself for students.

Knowing which type(s) of portfolio you will be focusing on will help inform decisions around choosing a platform and building a template portfolio.

There are many tools and platforms available that allow students to publish online. Naturally, these options come with pros and cons.

No matter what you choose, the most important items to consider include:

Data exportability - can students easily download and take their content with them after graduation or leaving?

Authentic experience - will the skills learned to use the tool transfer and be able to be used outside of the portfolio program?

Room for self-expression - do all portfolios look the same? Can students personalize and make the space their own?

Integration - does the platform make it easy to login and does it play nice with your Learning Management System?

Cost - will implementing the platform leave room in your budget for other needs?

Resources and training - can you easily find docs, videos, and other useful information to help with rolling the platform out?

Management tools - what's available? This includes on-boarding new users, creating new sites, monitoring portfolios, and providing feedback.

We'll cut to the chase - given the above requirements, we believe that WordPress should be at the top of your list when considering a portfolio platform.

Why WordPress? It comes down to 4 key areas:

Let's break down these 4 reasons for choosing WordPress in more detail.

Popularity

Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's a good choice for your school or university, that's for sure. However, it's hard to ignore the fact that WordPress powers 37% of all websites in the world. Not just school websites, but ALL websites. Full stop.

Think about that for a moment: out of all the websites you and I browse every day, more than a third run on WordPress. This includes big brands like Walt Disney, Sony, and TechCrunch. In the world of education, WordPress dominates too with institutions small and large building websites with it.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Is WordPress a good choice because it's popular or is WordPress popular because it's a good choice?

We think it's the latter. Since WordPress was established back in 2003, it's grown from a simple blogging platform to a dynamic and highly customizable piece of software that allows you to claim your space on the web in a way that's just right for you. It's a robust and flexible tool. That's why it's popular.

The one size fits all approach just doesn't cut it in the classroom anymore and with WordPress, you can customize your digital portfolios to meet your unique needs.

Data Exportability

When you're considering a web service for your school or university, choosing an export friendly platform should be a high priority.

We strongly believe that digital portfolios should always be set up on a platform that allows the student to archive their work or take it with them. You want students to know from day one that what they write is theirs to keep and use as they wish. A platform like WordPress gives you the means to easily archive or transfer a student's library of work.

Sadly, students often don't have the chance to export their portfolios for two reasons - either the school doesn't realize this function isn't available on their service's plan until the end of the school year rolls around or the online service closes unexpectedly. These scenarios can ignite a panic if teachers and students have built up a lot of content that they won't be able to export or transfer.

For the record, WordPress is not going anywhere. It is open-source software that's freely available and is developed by communities all around the world. When you put your trust into web services that are not open source, you run the risk of losing access and ownership of your content if the company collapses or chooses to close down their service. Someday, WordPress will evolve into something else, but whoever that is, it's a safe bet that it will make it easy to import content from WordPress too.

It only takes minutes to export your WordPress blog as a XML (WXR) file. You can then import this content to another site, or locally to your computer. If you were to use a closed proprietary platform, you would probably be very restricted in your choice of where to host your content if you decided to move on.

One student who took his high school WordPress portfolio with him and turned it into a thriving website still heavily used today is Myles Zhang.

Back in 2013, Myles' high school English teacher asked him to set up a digital portfolio. Myles told us more about his experience on a post on The Edublogger,

Over the following years, the website organically outgrew its initial use for high school and became an art portfolio, a place to publish my academic research in college, and a platform to spread awareness of issues like gentrification and traffic affecting my community.

I don't know what to describe the site as now. I suppose it's a "digital portfolio". However, it's more than just that ... For me, it's a creative opportunity to ask myself: " What work am I proudest of? And how can I best showcase this work online? "

Building and curating a website helps me answer these questions, and gain self-knowledge too.

There's something powerful about establishing an online space that is yours. Perhaps even with your own domain name. The domain name part can come later on in a student's education, or even upon graduation.

Education writer Audrey Watters has written about the benefits of students having their own domain,

The importance of giving students responsibility for their own domain cannot be overstated. This can be a way to track growth and demonstrate new learning over the course of a student's school career - something that they themselves can reflect upon, not simply grades and assignments that are locked away in a proprietary system controlled by the school.

It would no doubt give teachers great joy to see how their students can flourish when a seed is planted in school. An ePortfolio program can really help to launch students into amazing opportunities.

Flexibility

WordPress used to be solely for blogs, however, that has changed. It's now a highly customizable content management system that allows you to precisely meet the needs of your students, school, and community. After all, your learning goals and intentions come first. The technology comes second.

Some educators may gravitate towards a platform that's built for education with almost no learning curve. These can be useful starting places, however, let's not forget that easy doesn't necessarily mean better.

Once you get started, you might be sacrificing features, customization, flexibility, authenticity, and growth, for simplicity.

As Seymour Papert (1998) famously said, perhaps we should consider if "easy" is what we're really striving for.

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's - boring.
Seymour Papert

Let's not underestimate what educators and students can do with a highly flexible and highly customizable tool like WordPress.

Authenticity

There are a lot of tools out there that are built for education but from the day students step outside into the "real world" these tools become irrelevant.

Canadian EdTech leader George Couros makes no secret of the fact that he is a fan of WordPress for student portfolios.

Many of the technologies that I have seen used for portfolios do not transfer easily to any other site and are meant for just doing "school stuff" and are usually discarded after a student's time in school. If we are spending a bunch of time in schools using technologies that are never used outside of school for anything other school purposes, we shouldn't be surprised that students (and often staff) are asking the question, "What's the point?"

New York administrator Ross Cooper echoes these thoughts in his article "Digital Portfolios and Blogs: Use Authentic Technology, Not Technology Made for School". He promotes WordPress as the best tool to use for student portfolios as it enables authentic learning about digital citizenship and online safety, it allows students to learn about entrepreneurship and marketing their work, and it permits students to build their online presence and show up in a Google search.

In education, authentic learning is everything. It's no longer enough to prepare students for the real world, they should be thriving in the real world as they learn and develop. Authentic learning allows students to feel engaged while having the chance to be change agents and opportunity seekers. In a modern digitalized classroom, authentic learning begins with choosing an authentic tool. For digital portfolios, the best choice is WordPress.

About CampusPress

And here is our only real advert in this guide. Promise.

CampusPress has built tools on top of WordPress to make it even easier to use for portfolios. These include:

Single sign on integration to manage usernames and passwords

Canvas and LTI integration (with Google Classroom to come shortly)

Class management tools to moderate and follow students

Network tag and category search and feeds

Private comments between teachers/faculty and students

Support for dozens of plugins and tools most commonly used in education

With all security, hosting, and support fully managed by our team of experts - most of which have previously worked in schools or higher education (or both!).

We are happy to setup demos or pilots, and be a resource to help with getting a new portfolio program up and running.

If you are interested in WordPress or CampusPress, please get in touch.

One of the best ways to really get into a new portfolio program is for instructors to create their own model portfolios. Use the chosen tool to create at least one example of a completed site, with any specific artifacts and other requirements included.

By creating a sample template site, you will discover possible decision points not otherwise considered and navigate potential technological hurdles.

Let's go through some questions and tips that you'll want to consider when building a template site.

The Look and Feel

Your options may be limited depending on the tool you're using, but you will want to think through the look and feel for the portfolio.

Some questions to answer:

Will all portfolios basically look the same?

If using WordPress, will they all use the same theme, or will you allow for choice?

Will you require or need branding of your school like logos or colors?

Common Requirements

You'll need to think through if there are any common pages or set information that you want all portfolios to have. For example, we see portfolios that require an "About" page where students include biographical information. You might also have requirements for pages about different learning objectives and outcomes.

It's much easier to go ahead and create pages for students as part of the template that they can then edit and make their own. We also recommend providing choice whenever possible, as this can increase engagement and ownership by the student.

Some questions to answer:

Are there common pages that all portfolios should start with?

What items should be in the main menu navigation?

Will you let students change the navigation menus or add additional items?

Artifact Organization

To know what should be in the template header and menu navigation, it helps to know how artifacts should be managed or archived. For example, in WordPress, we recommend using categories or tags, which you can link to in the navigation menus. You can have a category for each subject/course and then a tag for each learning outcome or objective.

When students create artifacts (or publish posts in a blogfolio), they can add the appropriate category and tag so that it can easily be found later.

Some questions to answer:

Are there set learning objectives that students should demonstrate?

Should you pre-set specific tags or categories, or allow the students to add their own?

Are there other items that need to be considered to organize artifacts?

Settings and Other Features

Many tools, including WordPress, will allow you to create a template site (or multiple templates) that then get applied to all portfolios as they get created for students. This helps set the students up for success and pre-populates everything they need to get started. This means you will also want to consider more than just the content and look of the template.

Some areas to explore:

Are there default privacy settings that can be configured in the template?

Are there advanced features (or plugins in WordPress) that should be enabled or disabled in the template?

How will sites be created from the template?

Can you pre-populate any content based on the student information, such as name, year, program, etc.?

We've already mentioned that WordPress offers you a great deal of flexibility and the issue of privacy is another area where you have choices. You can have your whole network of portfolios protected by passwords, or alternatively individual portfolios or even particular posts can be password protected.

When you're setting up your portfolio program, you will no doubt find yourself weighing up the importance of visibility against the necessity of security.

There are pros and cons to having public or private spaces. Let's take a look:

Pros Of Public Digital Portfolios

Students may be interested in using their work to attract potential employers or college admission officers. This is more difficult if a student's portfolio is private, however, as a compromise, students can provide login credentials to particular individuals. The downside to this is not having the student's name show up in an organic Google search.

Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon sum up the benefits neatly in their whitepaper 10 Principles For Schools Of Modern Learning,

Increasingly, there is an expectation from employers and others that students have built an online portfolio of work that shows creativity, curiosity, collaboration, and persistence.

Students can learn how to build a positive digital footprint every time they hit publish. Traditionally, educators may have spent a lot of time advising students on what they should not include in their digital footprint, but not what they should include.

Students of all ages need to learn how to be happy, safe, and productive digital citizens. Public blogfolios offer an authentic opportunity to learn about digital citizenship in a supported and structured environment. Learning about digital citizenship on a closed platform just doesn't have the same impact. The same could be said for learning about copyright and Creative Commons - it's hard to learn about the importance of these topics without publishing publicly.

If you hide student work behind passwords, you're losing out on connections, extended dialogues, and the motivating factor of working for an authentic purpose.

Edtech leader Wesley Fryer stresses the importance of making it as easy as possible for families and other visitors to read and comment on blogfolios,

I've found that the more barriers (like logins requiring userIDs and passwords) we put up for online student content, the FEWER parents will visit and comment. It's VERY hard to get parents to not only look at student digital work online amidst our busy lives today, it's even harder to get them to comment. If you make your classroom blog private, you'll likely rob your students of the opportunity to receive feedback from outside your classroom walls. Feedback is what makes interactive writing powerful and even feel magical at times.

Have you ever thought about the transformative effect simply writing down your thoughts has on clarifying your thinking?

In his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson tells us,

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it's only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

This transformative experience can happen with a public or private portfolio, however, Alan Levine takes this idea one step further when he says,

Writing in public ... makes you accountable for your ideas. Stating your ideas in public is fearful if you think of it being a means for people to criticize, but it also makes your writing and thinking stronger if you take a public stand.

Cons Of Public Digital Portfolios

Schools have a duty of care to protect their students from harm and a public digital presence does open up questions about revealing identifying information, interacting with strangers, and even copyright concerns.

Do students want their artifacts public forever? There's no denying that if you and I look back at some of our work from high school or college, we might cringe. What might have seemed okay at the time may now embarrass us and the last thing we'd want is for that work to be out on the web for anyone to see.

When students are publishing for a public audience, educators may need to spend more time monitoring or moderating to make sure their students are publishing appropriate content and being safe and responsible.

Some students may feel more comfortable expressing their thinking and revealing their true thoughts if they know they don't have a public audience.

Allowing Students To Make Choices About Privacy

It's important for students to realize that there are times when our work should be private. Maybe we don't want to share every inner most thought,"failed" attempt, or evidence of messy learning. While there are benefits to documenting the process of learning, weighing this up with the goal of constructing a positive digital footprint is crucial.

George Couros put it well in his post on (nearly) invisible portfolios when he said,

The learner should have the option of what they want the world to see, not the teacher. The conversations that can come from this are so crucial. Asking the learner why they chose the piece of work that they did to share with the world, is a critical conversation that we are not having enough with our students, because frankly, we aren't giving them this opportunity enough.

If you're hosting your site with CampusPress, you can easily apply passwords to student portfolios in a variety of ways. A few quick setting adjustments will enable you to require registration, restrict visibility to administration, or password protect sites within your network.
Here are some practical ways you can offer choice and flexibility with privacy:

Let students choose: At The Geelong College, students are encouraged to decide for themselves (along with parents) whether their portfolios will be public or password protected.

Block search engines: Blocking search engines is easy and reduces the chance of random visitors landing on your blog. In WordPress, you'll find this option in Settings > Reading. You can also go to Settings > Discussion and choose "Users must be registered and logged in to comment". This way, not just anyone can leave a comment.

Make moderation easier: If you're teaching children or adolescents and they have portfolios that are open on the web, some moderation of posts and/or comments is generally a good idea.

Protect your students' identities: Having a public blogfolio doesn't mean you have to post personal information such as surnames, photos, location and so on. Some students even publish publicly with a fictional pen name and no identifying photos or information. We've shared some best practices for posting images of students online in this post on The Edublogger.

Remember, not every post has to be public: You can always create a public blogfolio but password protect certain posts or pages. Or, some educators and students use a blogfolio publicly and use other avenues for private work such as a learning management system, or more traditional tools (e.g. word processors, or pen and paper!).

An ePortfolio program that uses WordPress offers you a great deal of choice about privacy. It's worth considering the best way to set up your blogfolios so your students can reap some advantages of having an audience while feeling comfortable and safe.

One of the great advantages of using a blog for a digital portfolio is the ability to embed a wide range of artifacts. In the past, students may have only been able to share their learning through written content or hand-drawn illustrations. Now there's a multitude of ways that students can share what they've created, what they're working on, and what they're inspired by.

Let's take a look at some of the things that can be included in a student's digital portfolio.

Text including hyperlinked writing

Images, photography, and artwork

Video

Audio

Social media

Other embeddable content

Text

When students are publishing in their digital portfolio, there's probably going to be a lot of text including students' own written content as well as quotes from others.

One of the key benefits of writing on the web is the ability to hyperlink writing. That is, link to other sources to cite studies, backup opinions, provide background information, explain a train of thought, or provide examples.

Instead of merely substituting analog writing for digital (e.g. publishing in a blog post what would have once been handwritten or typed in a word processor), the use of hyperlinks can help students to engage in higher-order thinking and reflection.

Silvia Tolisano has been advocating for hyperlinked writing to feature in the classroom for many years. She explains that hyperlinked writing is an important genre that can be overlooked.

As learners create digital writing artifacts, it is important to require them to embed relevent links to individual words or phrases to extend readers' experience. Doing so adds a depth to the digital writing that aids readers in making stronger connections with the writer's message, and not just satisfying the teacher or completing a task.
A Guide to Documenting Learning (Tolisano and Hale, 2018)

You can read more about the topic of hyperlinked writing on Silvia Tolisano's blog or in her book, A Guide to Documenting Learning (2018).

Images, Graphics, and Artwork

Images really are an essential part of sharing and consuming information. With a digital portfolio, there are many possibilities for creating images.

Apart from creating drawings by hand or taking photographs, students can:

Use images from a Creative Commons site (a fantastic way to learn about copyright).

Take screenshots of work completed in other programs, perhaps with annotation.

Create mindmaps using a tool like Bubbl.us (or even hand-drawn and photographed).

Create digital artwork using a wide range of web tools. Some examples are Google Drawings, emoji.ink, Toy Theatre Art Tools, Bomomo abstract art, Tate Kids street art, Draw Island, and Auto Draw.

Make infographics, posters, or illustrations using a tool like Adobe Spark or Canva. Both of these tools offer free education accounts.

Demonstrate data with graphs, charts, and spreadsheets using tools like Google Sheets, BEAM, or Canva.

Evelyn is a student in the Performance Learning Program at Seycove Secondary in Canada. She has created a signature style for the feature images for her posts on her blogfolio: customized bitmojis. Here's an example for her entry about maximum surface area.

Video

Video is transforming education and students can be both video consumers and creators.

Videos can bring learning to life and engage students while helping them understand key curriculum concepts. Students can watch videos from sites like YouTube or Ted ED and then embed these directly into their digital portfolio with an accompanying reflection.

It's now easier than ever to create videos as well. Students can make screencasts, stop motion, explanatory videos, animations, dramatizations, interviews, photo montages, and many other types of videos. You could even consider the recording of a video conference to be a worthwhile artifact.

According to Hani Morgan ( 2013), assigning students the task of creating videos can lead to many positive outcomes such as improved writing, research, and communication skills, along with higher-order skills like problem-solving and critical thinking. At the same time, students can benefit from being creative and collaborating with others.

Student created videos can be excellent artifacts for digital portfolios as they allow pupils to demonstrate their learning and understandings in truly unique ways.

Check out The Educator's Guide To Using Video In Teaching And Learning to learn more about popular tools that students can use to create their own videos.

Audio

You've probably heard of the theory of learning styles? That is, the idea that an individual learns better if they can receive information and produce work according to their preferred learning style, for example, auditory, visual, or kinaesthetic. While the evidence for learning styles may be mixed, many teachers still indicate a strong belief in the learning style theory (Newton and Miah, 2017).

Writing isn't for everyone but some students really shine when they can use audio instead of, or alongside, text. There's a lot students can do with audio when building their digital portfolio.

Podcasts: These are simply audio files that are published online. Students might like to make a series of podcasts to coincide with a subject they're studying or a project they're working on. Anchor.fm is a popular free service for recording, hosting, and distributing podcasts.

Audio interviews: Students could record interviews with others to create rich artifacts for their portfolios. Interviews can expand students' understandings, challenge beliefs, and reinforce learning.

Audio reflection: For some students, typing written reflections can be laborious. An audio recording may be a preferable option for some students or an essential accessibility tool for others, for example, those with vision impairment or learning difficulties.

Music: Audio doesn't have to just be speech of course. There are so many ways music can be embedded into an ePortfolio. Students can record themselves playing an instrument, or if they don't have instruments, they might try a program like GarageBand or a simpler web tool such as Chrome Music Lab.

Recording audio is now quite simple on any device. If students are using a tablet like an iPad there is a simple Voice Memo app. Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers has shared three tools for making short audio recordings on the web without an account. The files can be downloaded as MP3s and then uploaded to the portfolio. Some other tools like Anchor.fm allow you to embed audio files into a blog post.

Check out The Edublogger's Guide to Podcasting to learn more about tools that can be used for creating audio.

Social Media

You might not have considered using social media as artifacts in digital portfolios, but if you teach older teens or adults, there is a lot of scope for using this type of content. Of course, if your students are younger, particularly under 13, then social media artifacts aren't an option.

Most social media platforms now provide an embed code to display a post within a website. You might want to embed tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Pinterest pins or boards, or even a TikTok post.

Why would you want to embed social media? Well, social media is now the way a lot of us learn and connect. It can influence our thoughts and expand our thinking. Embedded social media content can serve as interesting artifacts to demonstrate what students are thinking, learning, or creating.

Social media is expanding learning beyond the school day with content and meaningful interactions on specific topics. When combined with meaningful engagement, social media technology can be a powerful tool to reinforce learning, establish effective communication abilities, and provide the career and necessary life skills for students in the 21st century.
Mark Stevens (2014)

Here's an example of what an embedded tweet looks like. As you can see, you can consume the content without leaving this site or click through to Twitter to engage on that platform.

We've been continuously updating our Complete Guide To WordPress #Accessibility. Look for more videos and info to be added to the guide soon, which is more like a mini-course than a typical blog post.

Take a look and please share! https://t.co/FnySGuXcQt#a11y #WordPress pic.twitter.com/qhi7QY9Khx
- CampusPress (@CampusPressWP) May 26, 2020

Other Embeddable Content

Digital portfolios really open up a world of possibilities for creating diverse artifacts that can easily be embedded. Some of these don't fit neatly into a category.

Here are some more examples of other content that students could create and screenshot or embed into their blogfolios:

Google Suite Creations: Google Sheets, Google Drawings, Google Docs, Google Forms, and Google Slides all allow you to embed your creations into a blog or website.

Comics: Students can demonstrate their learning or thoughts creatively using a comic creation tool like Make Beliefs Comix.

Maps: Students of subjects like geography or history could add fantastic content to the portfolios by embedding custom maps or directions using Google Maps.

Puzzles and Games: Embedding games or puzzles can make digital portfolios become interactive. In many cases, students can even code their own games, for example, games created with Scratch can be embedded. Other free options for creating custom content include puzzles from Jigsaw Planet, interactive games from Class Tools, or learning activities from Educandy.

Quizzes and Forms: Students can interact with their readers or collect data by publishing quizzes, forms, or surveys on their blog. Google Forms is a good way to create a quiz or survey, or you could use a tool like Crowd Signal.

Memes: As Sharon Serena explained in a post on the ISTE blog, "Memes are a great educational device for teachers and students alike to promote clarity, pedagogy and humor."

GIFS: Like memes, GIFs might provide another fun option to add humor and creativity to a student's portfolio. Warning: popular GIF sites generally contain content that is not appropriate for children. Gifs4Kids is an online resource with student-friendly animated GIFs. Check out this post by Julie Smith for more advice on tools for creating GIFs.

Learn More About Quality Artifacts

As educators and students progress through their ePortfolio learning journeys, you might come up with some tips or standards of what makes a quality post in a blogfolio. Your own standards will be personalized based on your style of portfolio, platform, and age of your students amongst other things.

Below is an example list of guidelines from a post on The Edublogger about quality student blog posts.

You might even put these sorts of ideas into an assessment rubric which we'll discuss in the next chapter.

The Reflection Process

If we don't create a process of reflecting and framing them, then we are leaving learning up to chance.
Jackie Gerstein, ISTE Panel discussion, 2016

A portfolio will normally comprise more than just the artifacts themselves and will include some form of reflection.

Students can reflect on what they've learned, their successes and "failures", their problem-solving processes, and their future plans or goals. Reflective entries can give educators an insight into how students are learning, rather than just what they have learned.

Sometimes students are given prompts or frameworks to drive their reflection. You might naturally think of the reflective part of a portfolio as being text entries but for some students, they find more success and enjoyment creating audio or video reflections.

Dr. John Spencer is an educator with a lot of experience using portfolios. Dr. Spencer suggests a dual layered approach to reflection.

Have students reflect on both the learning process and the final product. There's a common mantra in the education community that "it's about the journey and not the destination." I'm not sure I agree. Sometimes the product drives the process. So, have students reflect on both.

While most educators embed a culture of reflection into their portfolio program, there are other educators who feel that the push to reflect can be premature and students should be given some freedom on their online space initially.

Educator Jabiz Raisdana, has documented some compelling thoughts on student blogging. He advocates for freedom, stating that:

If you want your students to blog effectively, give them the freedom to experiment and write about what interests them.

Stay away from portfolios and forced reflections on their learning, at least until they get the hang of it.

Wait until they find a voice, find an audience... before you push your agenda of meta-cognition and reflective learning.

Perhaps on the other end of the spectrum is the argument from Matt Renwick in his article , Think You're Doing Digital Portfolios? Think again. Matt implies that reflection is a non-negotiable in an effective digital portfolio program,

Of course, all of the posted artifacts of student learning are accompanied with reflection, self-assessment, and goal setting for the future. Otherwise, it's only sharing content. Nice, but not necessary for students' education.

As with most topics, you might want to try a balanced approach to reap the benefits of reflection while ensuring students still have the freedom to express themselves naturally and be creative.

Assessment and feedback are integral parts of any teaching and learning process. When you're using ePortfolios, you have some choices in the way you'll approach assessment and the feedback process.

While assessment can take on a variety of forms, two of the main types are formative and summative assessment.

Formative assessment is designed to get feedback on student performance during instruction. The purpose is to guide the teacher in making changes to their planning and instruction to best meet student needs. Formative assessment is sometimes called assessment FOR learning as it focuses on student growth.

Summative assessment provides teachers, administrators, students, and families with an understanding of a student's overall learning. This sort of assessment generally happens at the end of instruction. Summative assessment is sometimes called assessment OF learning as it focusses on the learning product.

If you have trouble remembering the difference between these two types of assessment, you might enjoy this image from @bryanmathers.

The great thing about ePortfolios is they allow for both formative and summative assessment. Some educators prefer to focus on formative assessment for their portfolio program so students can redesign and improve their artifacts throughout their course.

Betsy Gilliland is an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi Māno. She has written an interesting article where she reminds us that ePortfolios allow teachers to be more than just assessors but perhaps collaborators or coaches.

Though teachers can still assign grades to individual assignments, they may choose to make those grades placeholders, where students can revise texts and submit them for reevaluation through the portfolio.

Assessment of Transversal Skills 2020 ( ATS2020) is a European learning model that's based on formative assessment. The project which was co-funded by the European Commission focused on the implementation of ePortfolios with 10,000 students aged 10-15 years.

The ATS2020 learning model contains a cycle of 6 phases as illustrated in the diagram below. The model offers a student-centered approach. Teachers take on the role of coach and assessor while students actively work towards developing skills and competencies.

This interesting framework might provide some inspriation for your own approach to learning and assessment with ePortfolios.

Feedback

Ongoing meaningful feedback throughout a course can help students achieve their full potential so much more than if they wait until the end of semester to receive their grades. When using digital portfolios, educators can offer students feedback in the portfolio platform or via private communication such as in-person or email.

A useful model for feedback is presented by John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) as Feed Up, Feed Back, Feed Forward. In this model the learner considers three questions:

1. Feed Up: Where am I going (what are my learning intentions?)​

2. Feed Back​: How am I going (what does the evidence tell me?)​

3. Feed Forward: Where to next (what are the next steps or goals?)​

Educators aren't the only ones who can offer students feedback on their ePortfolios of course. Feedback from peers or even the wider community can be very valuable.

In terms of peer feedback, some educators find it helpful to come up with a system that doesn't leave feedback to chance. For example, high school ceramics teacher Heather Alexander set up a system to ensure all students would receive constructive peer feedback on their blogfolios.

I have students work in "peer blog mentor" groups. They self-select a group of 3 -5 peers and then I match their group with a group in another class. I moderate the comments so I can check for accuracy and completion before they are published.

Anecdotally, many teachers will tell you that peer feedback is powerful and this is backed up by research. Stefani et al. (2007) observe that "Peer-commenting on student work is an excellent incentive for improving the quality and effort that students invest in their work. Furthermore, those who comment learn as much from devising their comments as those who receive feedback on their work."

When a portfolio is made publically available on the web (or login credentials are provided), students can enjoy the benefits of feedback from family and wider networks as well. A 360 degree look at their work, may open students' eyes to their achievements and future directions.

In a WordPress site, or a blogfolio, comments can be used for feedback. Here is a simple example of how a private comment can be left on a portfolio hosted with CampusPress.

Understanding what quality feedback and quality comments look like is a skill that most of us would agree is really lacking around the web - just read comments on facebook or any news website. This is just one more example where experiences in a portfolio program transfer beyond traditional academic knowledge and skills.

Rubrics

Many educators find it's useful to use a rubric that ensures everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations. An article by the University of Waterloo reminds us that even though portfolio entries can be personal and subjective, a rubric ensures the ePortfolio is still assessable by objective standards.

This electronic portfolio rubric was created by Joan Vandervelde for the University of Wisconsin-Stout. It includes 7 categories with 4 levels of achievement. The university website has more rubric examples and tools to explore on their professional development page.

Auburn University in Alabama has published two useful rubrics - one is designed for formative assessment and one is summative (to assess "final" portfolios).

If you're looking for an example of technology skills that students can build over time while working on their blogfolio, check out this classic scope and sequence from Kim Cofino and Yokohama International School. The intention was to provide a scaffolded list of skills to help students understand "the kind of skills that a blogger would take for granted, but a non-blogger might not think about". Silvia Tolisano has also adapted this rubric to make a clearly presented framework that grades students from beginner to expert.

One of the great things about having a ePortfolio program is the opportunitiy for students to self-reflect. The use of a rubric such as the examples above provide structure to the self-assessment process. Other educators like Heather Alexander offer students reflective prompts to help guide their thinking.

For some educators, it might seem overwhelming to assess a portfolio at the end of a semester or class. Richard Byrne has used digital portfolios with his computer science students and explained his approach to assessment which breaks down projects throughout the course.

When it comes to my students' digital portfolios, I'm looking at them on the whole and not grading them other than pass/fail. That's because I'll be giving grades on the projects that are featured within the portfolios themselves throughout the year.

Beyond Traditional Assessment

It's exciting to think that ePortfolios can act as a form of sustainable assessment which researcher David Boud (2000) describes as assessment that "encompasses the knowledge, skills and predispositions required to support lifelong learning activities".

Sustainable assessment can meet student needs in real-time while also preparing them to meet future needs as lifelong learners. After all, learning is not a state you "achieve" and tick off, there is always something new to learn and always new challenges ahead. All educators want their students to develop the passion to learn without them.

Whatever approach to assessment and feedback you use, to get the most out of your program, schools should ensure their approach is planned, consistent, and ongoing. You want all educators and students to know what is expected so they can get the most out of the experience.
What's motivating your students?
As a final thought, it's interesting to think about what is truly motivating your students. A high quality and regularly updated portfolio offers a plethora of benefits but can take a lot of work. Some may question why students would put in so much effort. Is the quest for grades the only or best motivation?

In her TED X talk, "the grandmother of electronic portfolios", Dr. Helen Barrett, announced that she is on a campaign to make ePortfolios a more intrinsically motived process, rather than a process motivated by extrinsic grades.

Dr. Barrett suggests that students can become intrinsically motivated when the portfolio program includes choice, voice, sharing, feedback, and immediacy. She also describes these as the motivating characteristics found in social networks.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009)

As we have seen, there are many different ways you can use and create ePortfolios. Regardless of the tools or types of portfolios you implement, an ePortfolio program has the power to transform your learning environment whether you're in the K-12 setting or in higher education.

The most exciting aspect of an ePortfolio program lies not in the technology itself but in the creation of a school culture where all learning is valued, visible, reflected on, improved, and celebrated.

To revise some of the key questions we've covered in this guide, please save or print a copy of this ePortfolio Planning Guide.

📌 Download a PDF copy of the ePortfolio Planning Guide.

What is your next step on your ePortfolio journey?

Want to talk more about WordPress, CampusPress, or school-wide ePortfolio programs?
Please reach out. Our team can help you go through your options in more detail.

Want to learn a bit more about the pedagogy and technology behind ePortfolios?
We recommend George Couros' Digital Portfolio Master Course.

Want to try out digital portfolios yourself or with students before implementing a school-wide program?
Our sister service, Edublogs, is perfect for that. You can get started today for free.

Have a question or something to add?
Let us know in the comments below or contact us directly. We're always happy to chat!

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The Complete Guide To Student Digital Portfolios | CampusPress

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The Complete Guide To Student Digital Portfolios by Ronnie Burt and Kathleen Morris Last updated on September 12, 2020 Digital portfolios can revolutionize the teaching and learning process. This complete guide to student ePortfolios answers many questions you may have, from the academic benefit ...

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You will need to register if you do not have an account.

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The Vision Resource Center (previously the Professional Learning Network), supported by the Institutional Effectiveness Partnership Initiative (IEPI), provides unlimited access to Lynda.com for all California Community College employees at no cost. For access to Lynda.com through the Vision Resource Center, sign in and go to the Learn tab.

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What are some of the key policies you should know as you design and facilitate your courses?

We appreciate that reviewing policies may not be the most exciting part of preparing for your class, but knowing and engaging with these guidelines significantly helps all the systems and people at CSUN support our students. Below are some of the more critical policies to know right now, all authored and brought to you by Dr. Elizabeth Adams, Associate Vice President for Undergraduate Studies.

Policies aren't typically created fast, although this pandemic is teaching us otherwise. We are all going to discover areas where we need more guidance and leadership and things might change this year as we go along. Since we are all here for the students, now more than ever is a time to really listen to their experience, their needs and overall perspective.

Here are some of the questions emerging, some with policy (must do or don't) and some with guidance (should do or not).

Mandating Web Cameras: Can we require students to have their cameras on during zoom sessions?

CSUN does NOT have a policy that will support that requirement. We have learned there are a long list of reasons, good ones, that students would choose not to turn their cameras on (if they have one at all). We know you want to connect with students, see their facial expressions and emulate your face-to-face environment; please understand that learning online is different. Choose flexibility and get to know your students before putting in place rigid policies in your courses this year.

Surveillance & proctoring tools: Can we require students to purchase and use home surveillance/proctoring tools to prevent cheating?

CSU Chancellor's Office (CO) released a memo providing guidance urging all campuses and faculty to take into consideration:

Alternate Assessments

Equity

Privacy

Disability Accommodation

There are growing concerns that the use of surveillance tools, especially in this unique moment, unfairly targets and further marginalizes students. Thus, we recommend not designing your courses to be mostly high-stakes exams (3-5 exams worth most of the final grade) resulting with you spend all your time and energy worried about academic dishonesty. Faculty Development's Teaching Toolkit on promoting academic honestly has resources to help think creatively about exam alternatives.

Recording Live Sessions: Can we record our Zoom sessions & post this in our Canvas course?

In short yes. But this document from the Chancellor's Office of the CSU provides guidance on this exact issue and more.

For instance, w hat happens if a student do not give their permission to be recorded? Choose flexibility. Work with that student to find a creative accommodation to meet their need (e.g., they don't turn on their camera; they aren't penalized for not contributing in the chat).

Copyright & Fair Use: Can I copy my entire book and give it to my students? What about movies/videos, images, and other "stuff" I want students to have access to?

This document from the Chancellor's Office of the CSU Actions provides guidance on these questions and 11 more.

What is the pandemic teaching us?

Faculty Development has been facilitating workshops and programs since the moment this pandemic began. We've been asking faculty to share what they have learned, especially when it comes to the silver lining unexpected positives. We don't have policies for these beautiful reflections, but they are worth mentioning and spreading:

Choose flexibility instead of being so controlling

Be more compassionate and humanistic

Ask students what's going on, and choose to believe them

Maybe it's okay to turn in assignments after the due date

Learning how to teach online is going to improve my face-to-face classes

I actually like teaching online

Students Adding Classes

As soon as the semester begins, students will start asking you if they can "add" your class. The waitlist and online registration process works during the first week of classes. If you give out permission numbers, you may over enroll your class.

Starting in week 2 (through week 4), you may give out permission numbers. This is entirely at your discretion. If students tell you that "need" your class, it may be worth checking with your department chair or associate dean to confirm the request. Students receiving permission numbers must go online to SOLAR in order to "add" their classes. Adding a class is not your responsibility; it is the student's Issuing a Permission Number does not mean the student has been added to your class; the student has to complete the transaction.

You should take roll in some way. You can check Canvas logins to your classes. In smaller classes meeting on zoom, you may want to "call" roll the way you would have in a face to face class. Students should be automatically enrolled in your Canvas site if they are enrolled in the class. If they don't have access, suggest that they check their portal for their enrollment status.

If students do not "attend" the first two meetings of a course that meets more than once a week, or miss the first meeting of a class that meets only once a week, they lose the right to remain in the class unless they have notified you of their absence prior to class. If there has been no notice, you may issue another student a permission number for the space. Students who do not show up are still responsible for dropping classes even if you have given the space away. You do not have to allow students to stay in class if they arrive after the first two meetings and haven't notified you of the reason for their late arrival. You do have discretion here, but if you give a seat away and then don't insist that the absent student drop, you'll be over-enrolled. As with many things for Fall 2020, the distance nature of teaching complicates this issue. Best practice would be to have a standard way (communicated via the syllabus) of marking presence and then follow it.

If students come to you after September 18 and ask you to "add" them because they just learned they are not on your roster, you should not comply unless you believe there is a compelling reason to do so AND you think the student can pass the class. It is the student's responsibility to check the status of their enrollment well before Census Day. Enrollment matters need to be settled by September 18. Do not feel guilty. One thing to know is that allowing students to add or drop after September 18 is, ultimately, the purview of undergraduate and graduate studies (Fall 2020) and the associate deans (Spring 2021). Your decision to sign the form that allows them to add or drop late may be overruled.

Students Dropping Classes

Because the University wants students to drop unwanted classes early so other students can take their places, it is easier to drop classes than to add them. Thus, students can drop one or all of their classes on SOLAR without any approval up to September 18 in Fall 2020. Please urge them to drop early so other students, waiting for class openings, can enroll.

After September 18, students may drop only by filing a Late Change of Schedule requests with undergraduate and graduate studies (Fall 2020) and your associate dean (Spring 2021). Like adds, students must obtain your permission before "dropping," (via email) so you have notice of their intention to change their schedule. You'll also be asked the last date of attendance of the student. Try your best to give this information (Canvas logins can be used as a proxy). You'll also be asked if the student is passing the class. Late drops are granted only for serious and compelling reasons. Please never tell students that your signature will allow them to drop classes after deadlines. Some late withdrawals are medical in nature. You're not being asked to judge the medical circumstances even if the student chooses to disclose the nature of the request to you.

Attendance

Other than students losing the right to remain in class if they are absent without notice from the first two class meetings, (see adding section, above), the Faculty Senate has not enacted official attendance policies. Professors define excess absences in differing ways. Some lower student grades for excess missed classes or assignments and others impose other sanctions. Get some advice from colleagues on setting and enforcing attendance policy. You should include your attendance policy on the syllabus.

If students miss classes while representing the University in official curriculum-related, University-approved activities, (e.g. athletics or drama/music performances), you are expected to provide, within reason, opportunities to make up any work or exams that are missed. Students are expected to supply details and written documentation signed by the supervisor of the activity. You should receive this information from the student either the first week of class or as soon as the information becomes available. Athletes will ask you to sign a form acknowledging receipt of athletic schedule information. Likely, this will not be happening much, if at all, in Fall 2020, but it's good to know for the future.

CSUN policy forbids the imposition of penalties on students who miss examinations as a result of religious holidays. Faculty must administer tests at alternate times that would not violate students' religious creeds. Faculty also are encouraged to make alternate arrangements for the submission or completion of course work that is due on religious holidays.

Office Hours: The Liminality of the State University Office

You need to have office hours. It's a thing. Yes, even in virtual land. The number of office hours you are required to hold will vary with the number of units you teach and your department's policies. Office hours should be listed on syllabi, and submitted to department offices for posting and inclusion on websites.

Students (even those who have been here a while) don't understand what office hours are for. They think you're working and don't want to bother you. They think you're scary. Some faculty are starting to rename this to "Student Hours." Not sure if that's working, so try to make the students feel welcome; share your expectations of the conversations you are up for in office hours; and mostly don't be scary.

If a student requests that a parent, guardian or other party participate in your online office hours, please be aware that you are not allowed to speak with anyone but the student about his or her academic career without first obtaining a signed release from the student. This regulation is part of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974. FERPA rules apply even if the student is younger than 18 (not unusual for freshmen) and even if the parent is paying the student' educational costs.

Advising & Mentoring

CSUN has a terrific team of professional staff advisors throughout the campus. We have a center called the Matador Advising Hub (or just The Hub) for incoming first-time freshmen. New transfer students are advised either in the Student Services Center/EOP offices in the colleges (sometimes called "the satellites"), by department advisors, or in the Advising Resource Center/EOP. All advising for Fall 2020 is done remotely.

These advisors are largely responsible for making sure that students are registered in the right classes to keep them on track to graduation, know the rules around majors, minors, general education, and all the other pieces they need to move forward toward their degrees.

The satellite offices also serve students in our Educational Opportunity Program (EOP). Established in 1969 by legislative mandate, EOP supports highly motivated, low-income, first-generation college students and provides them with modest grants and opportunities to participate in several highly successful high school-to-college transition programs.

Students will, of course, also seek you out for advice and guidance. Unless you're just desperate for new things to learn, you probably don't want to commit our GE plan to memory. It may be helpful, however, to know where the courses you're teaching fit into a student's degree. Are they electives? GE courses (in which case they won't have many if any of your own majors), major courses, graduate classes? Students may also ask you about what they can do with the major or whether graduate school is right for them. Being open and inviting of those conversations is really important to student success.

Mentorship is critically important to student success. Please be there for your students in that way. But, also don't be hesitant to refer them to an advisor if they ask a technical question about GPA calculation, applying for graduation, or the like!

Making (and Keeping) the Grade

The University uses A through F letter grades that adhere to traditional meanings of A for Outstanding, B for Very Good, C for Average, D for Barely Passing and F for Failure. Plus and minus are optional and left to the discretion of the instructor, but you must state which mode (using plus/minus or not) you will use in class on the syllabus. Each faculty member determines his or her own grading criteria.

A maximum of 18 CSUN units may be taken Credit/No Credit, but this grading option is not allowed for courses in General Education, the major or the minor. Announce these grading policies in class and put them on your syllabus.

In general, the University requires faculty members to keep students' academic materials from one semester until the end of the first week of the parallel semester one year later. To be safe, we recommend that you keep final exams and other written and/or electronic materials which you do not return to students and which contribute to students' final grades, until one week into Fall 2021. After that, you should destroy these materials.

All final grades must be submitted online, through the SOLAR grade roster on the faculty portal by the deadline set by the University (e.g., for Fall 2020: December 23, 2020). Failure to meet this deadline impacts the entire University since student records cannot be processed until all grades are entered.

Incomplete "I" Grades: For Exceptional, Late-Occurring Events

Grades of Incomplete or "I" only should be given in the rare instance when the student is passing the class but a small portion of the required coursework has not been completed and evaluated during the regular semester. The remaining assignments should be of such a nature that they can be completed independently. You may give an "I" grade for reasons that you determine are serious and unforeseen. You should not volunteer to give an Incomplete, although a student looking for a late drop might be counseled to consider an Incomplete.

Incomplete forms are available at http://www.csun.edu/anr/forms/ by scrolling down the alphabetical listing to "Incomplete Requests." Upon learning of circumstances that warrant an Incomplete, the instructor and student both should complete and sign a "Request for an Incomplete" form, including the time frame by which the "I" must be completed. This time may be one semester or one year.

When you enter your grades in SOLAR at the end of the semester, you need to include the details of the Incomplete contract you construct with the student. A tutorial on how to do this can be found at: http://www.csun.edu/anr/soc/guides/incomplete.html.

If the outstanding work described on the form is not completed precisely within this time frame and submitted by the instructor, the "I" grade will be replaced by a grade of "IC" (incomplete charged) which is counted as an F and no late Changes in Grade will be approved by Undergraduate Studies.

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We appreciate that reviewing policies may not be the most exciting part of preparing for your class, but knowing and engaging with these guidelines significantly helps all the systems and people at CSUN support our students. Below are some of the more critical policies to know right now, all authored and brought to you by Dr. Elizabeth Adams, Associate Vice President for Undergraduate Studies.

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SBCTC's Library of Accessibility Resources

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FutureMe: Write a Letter to your Future Self

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Write a letter to the future and read the public (but anonymous) letters from others. FutureMe has been delivering letters to the future for millions of people since 2002.

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Before we jump into our list, let's talk about relationships. Remote learning is having a detrimental impact on the mental health of our students and impacting their social and emotional learning learning. Gone are the daily interactions of peers and social activities like lunch or football games. Instead students are stuck at home, often spending hours on their devices, and they are craving meaningful relationships.

As educators, we must make time to check-in with our students. During a live class session, such as through Zoom or Google Meet s, teachers can use the activities provided below to increase engagement and re-connect with students. While some are perfect for enhancing academic learning, many are intended to focus on relationship building and mental health. Only students engaged in learning will find academic success!

But how do we build deeper relationships? The best approach we have found is through using sparks. A spark is what a student is passionate about, what lights them up and gives them well......that "spark". Sparks were developed by the Search Institute, who explains them as follows: "Sparks are the activities and interests that truly engage kids to be their best. Research shows that kids who know and develop their sparks-and who have adults in their lives to help-have higher grades, better school attendance, and a sense of purpose."

In our STEM programs, we use different games and activities to help students find their spark, and then we utilize those sparks throughout the year to personalize activities. Click here to read more about using sparks in the classroom, and click here for a guide on sparks via distance learning. Many of the games below are a perfect way to share and connect with student sparks.

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50 Distance Learning Icebreakers & Games - Vivify STEM

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Are you struggling to engage students during distance learning? Here is a list of 50 icebreakers and games to keep students engaged and motivated during remote learning! Perfect for back to school, these activities also develop important 21st-century skills like communication, creativity, and collab

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Pen-and-paper pop quizzes are no more: thumbs-up/thumbs-down, hand signals, online polls, discussion boards, and chat boxes have become the new mainstays of formative assessments in virtual classrooms.

Teachers don't need to completely reinvent their traditional formative assessments, however, according to Mike Anderson, an educational consultant in Durham, New Hampshire. He recommends that teachers modify familiar practices-like exit tickets and think-pair-shares-so they work virtually. "Formative assessments might feel harder now in virtual classrooms-you can't just walk around class and look over a kid's shoulders-but I'm not sure they have to be harder."

In fact, many of the popular digital apps and sites like Nearpod, Flipgrid, Padlet, and Seesaw, can actually work in tandem with the tried-and-true assessments that teachers honed in their classes pre-pandemic. Nearpod, for example, enables teachers to embed short quizzes, polls, surveys, and games into a lesson so that teachers can check for understanding before moving on to the next concept.

But don't go overboard, says Andrew Miller, director of teaching and learning at the Singapore American School, emphasizing that teachers should be careful not to overwhelm students with too many virtual assessments and too many new tools. Focus on two or three tools at most, he recommends, and be sure you always define a clear and differentiated purpose for using each. It's also important to remember non-tech solutions, like the simple but invaluable one-to-one conversations that can yield information about students' progress-and their well-being.

"In our distance learning environment, we run the risk of being further isolated. By scheduling individual sessions with students, we can assess their learning and provide feedback with a real human connection," Miller says.

Here are some different ways that teachers can use formative assessments in the virtual classroom:

1. Dipsticks

Like using a dipstick to check the oil in a car, teachers can use short, quick checks virtually to make sure that students are on track-both academically and emotionally.

At the start of a live class, pose a general question about the previous day's lesson, like "Does everyone feel comfortable with what we learned about [fill in the blank]?" and have students respond individually by dropping an emoji or a thumbs-up/thumbs-down in their chat box or video window. Students can also hold up a sticky note or piece of paper to the screen with a response. They don't all have to be serious questions; funny questions can help get students engaged at the start of a lesson. In this Twitter thread, teachers share fun question ideas like: "Are Pop-Tarts a kind of ravioli?" and "Would you rather have no elbows or no knees?"

Another option: Ask students a more specific question about content you've recently covered, then have them assess their understanding on a 1-5 rating scale. They can hold up the appropriate number of fingers as signals during a live class online. The popular stoplight approach also works. Ask students to show a color based on how they feel about the topic you're teaching: green-go ahead to the next topic; yellow-proceed slowly as I'm still processing; or red-stop, I don't understand.

2. Digital Journals and One-Pagers

Not all students process information at the same speed or like to raise their hand and be acknowledged publicly during class. After-class reflection exercises that give students a private space to reflect a little more deeply, and signal both what they understood and what they did not, are easy to continue remotely.

Teachers can create a "Journal Jot" online document for each student using Google Docs or a platform like Blackboard to measure how well students are retaining information, recommends Rebecca Alber, an education professor in Los Angeles, California. In their journal, students can respond individually to prompts like K-W-L: what they know, what they want to know, and what they learned; or 3-2-1: three things you found out; two things you found interesting; one thing you didn't understand.

Teachers can also adapt Jill Fletcher's one-pager activity to virtual settings. Fletcher, a curriculum coordinator in Kapolei, Hawaii, asks students to write down key themes, questions, and ideas about a topic or lesson on a single page (kind of like a study guide), and include artwork or imagery if they would like. Have students create their one-pagers in a tool like Canva or Google Slides, or they can draw them by hand and submit as a photograph.

3. Elevator Pitches and Tweets

To help students synthesize important takeaways from a lesson, ask them to take one to two minutes during live class time to summarize everything they learned on a particular unit by typing it into a Google doc, in a chat box, or on a virtual message board like Padlet.

You can also ask for student volunteers to share their elevator pitch, or verbal summary of what they learned, with the class in 60 seconds or less. As a 21st-century spin, Matt Levinson, a principal in Seattle, Washington, suggests having students summarize the lesson in a tweet or Instagram post, staying to character limits.

4. Square, Triangle, Circle

Giving students choice with formative assessments is really important, says Anderson, as not all students show their thinking the same way.

Anderson recommends Square, Triangle, Circle, an activity wherein students choose a shape and its associated question prompt. A square means something that is now "squared away" in their thinking. Choosing a triangle tasks students with extracting three important ideas from what they learned, while a circle asks students to discuss something "circulating"-ideas that are not yet fully formed-in their minds.

For asynchronous learning, students can write their responses independently in an online document as a reflection exercise. Or, in a synchronous lesson, teachers can make the exercise collaborative by asking students to pick a shape and then dividing them into groups based on the shape they chose. Students can briefly discuss their reflections with classmates in breakout rooms and share back to the class to close out the learning.

5. Make Art Your Assessment

While teachers may question if old classroom standbys (and popular classroom wall decorations) like collages, mind maps, and sketches can work virtually, teachers we spoke with say they're still finding ways for students to use art, music, and drama to share their thinking.

Students can create an ad to describe and market a particular concept, draw a comic chronicling a historic event or explaining a scientific principle, write a poem or a song, or act out a chapter from a book or scene from a play. Using a phone, students can record themselves using apps like Voice Memos or photograph/film their work with the phone's camera to upload and share virtually.

6. Peer-to-Peer Evaluations

When learning outside the classroom, it's especially important to foster relationships between students. You can do both at the same time, drawing a bead on what your students have learned while encouraging deeper peer connections.

Assign each student a virtual buddy for the week, or pair off students at random to get them talking across the class-and assessing each other's learning.

In pairs, students can be placed in breakout rooms on Zoom or another videoconference platform to do many of the same activities they once did in the classroom to check for understanding. Give each student a general rubric, or use the TAG feedback process to evaluate their peer's assignment; have them share the feedback with you as well. Or have students teach each other a concept while recording themselves (audio or video) and upload the file for you to review. These activities can also be adapted for asynchronous learning using tools in Google Classroom.

For synchronous classes, organize a talk show panel. Assign three to four students roles to represent different ideas or themes of a unit, such as having students in history class impersonate leaders from different countries during World War II. Have each student discuss their perspective in front of their peers, and allow the rest of the class to ask questions to probe their thinking.

7. Virtual Exit Tickets

Using exit tickets, or students' responses to prompts or questions on a slip of paper at the end of class, is a popular formative assessment practice that easily transfers online.

Teachers can keep a running Google Doc for each student to keep the information private, or broaden it to the whole class by posting questions on a platform like Flipgrid so that students can see and comment on others' responses.

To get a wider view into students' thinking, use open-ended prompts like these:

What I found most interesting today was...

Today was hard because...

What do you understand well?

What's something that's still shaky?

What's something I [teacher] don't realize?

What takeaways will be important three years from now?

How does this relate to [something learned before]?

How would you have done things differently today?

Today was hard because...

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7 Ways to Do Formative Assessments in Your Virtual Classroom

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Pen-and-paper pop quizzes are no more: thumbs-up/thumbs-down, hand signals, online polls, discussion boards, and chat boxes have become the new mainstays of formative assessments in virtual classrooms. Teachers don't need to completely reinvent their traditional formative assessments, however, according to Mike Anderson, an educational consultant in Durham, New Hampshire.

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2. Our Impact

3. About Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.

UDL at a Glance

Find out how the UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessments, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.

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Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

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For purposeful, motivated learners, stimulate interest and motivation for learning.

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For resourceful, knowledgeable learners, present information and content in different ways.

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Home Our Impact About Universal Design for Learning Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Find out how the UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessments, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.

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WCET Webcast: OER Challenges and Opportunities

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Teachers can be a real lifeline for queer or gender nonconforming students who don't feel accepted at home.

Roman Didkivskyi / iStock

When schools closed their doors this spring due to Covid-19, many students felt akin to ships lost at sea. What was next? Would they see their teachers and friends again? What would learning look like during a pandemic?

For some, the shock gave way to a new appreciation for home-many discovered that learning at home felt like a good fit, and spending so much quality time with family was something they previously had been missing. For these students, home is a sanctuary that nurtures their mind and spirit. The solace of not having the stress of changing classes or succumbing to peer pressure allows them to blossom in this new reality.

For others, including many LGBTQ students, school was the one place where they could be themselves and be seen for who they are. Due to the pandemic, this safe space was ripped away in the blink of an eye; the home environment that already caused them fear and anxiety became a cage from which they could no longer escape. But even in a virtual environment, teachers can create safe harbors from the storms of uncertainty, as well as from home learning environments that may feel hostile and isolating.

After many years of working with LGBTQ teens, I have used the following strategies and taught them to teachers and administrators to create LGBTQ safe spaces.

Creating LGBTQ Safe Spaces Online and in Person

Make sure your classroom is open and affirming: Open and affirming spaces are ones that allow students to be open about their identities and affirming in those truths. This means that if a student asks to be called by a different name than is on your roster, you honor that. It also means respecting the pronouns they request you use. Ask everyone to go around and share their name and pronouns, thus normalizing the experience and educating other students about LGBTQ inclusion.

Some students may not want to publicly share their pronouns, as this may out them in ways that are not safe, so make disclosure optional. For example, saying, "Please share your name and any other information you would like us to know; this could include things like your pronouns, where you are from, or some of your personal interests" allows students who do want to share their pronouns to do so but also provides a safe avenue out for students who do not feel comfortable sharing. Tell them that if there's anything they'd rather share one-on-one, they're more than welcome to share this information with you privately after class.

Weave inclusivity into lessons: Just as sharing names and pronouns teaches students that this is a practice we should all do-not one reserved solely for transgender, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary students-we have the responsibility to weave inclusion into all of our classroom practices. No matter the subject you teach, make sure to highlight LGBTQ leaders in that field.

Discussing the contributions of diverse scholars, scientists, and authors can mean the difference between a student feeling erased and seeing that their future is indeed bright and a path well-traveled by those before them. As children's rights activist Marian Wright Edelman said, "You cannot be what you cannot see." If you are a social studies or English teacher, you have even more opportunities to highlight the voices of LGBTQ authors and ancestors. You can also open your students' minds to how culture has taught us the myth that LGBTQ people are a recent and Western invention.

Observe and support: When a student is in our classroom, it is easy to see who is sullen, disengaged, or despondent. We can immediately go up to them and ask if everything is OK or catch them in a quiet moment to check in on their well-being. In a virtual environment, however, this can be slightly more challenging-but doable, nonetheless. Schedule time to check in with your students each week on life outside of academia. If a student is falling behind or seems distracted, don't assume that they are careless or lazy. Instead, ask them if they feel like they can complete the assignments with the resources they have, and if not, brainstorm ideas to remedy that.

Many LGBTQ students may display symptoms of trauma such as falling asleep in class or crying during a lesson due to what they're experiencing at home because of their identity. Connect these students with any school resources you have, and ask the administration if you can form a virtual Gay-Straight Alliance. You can also encourage students to call LGBTQ-help hotlines, such as the Trevor Project, which specialize in support for LGBTQ youth and are available 24/7 at no cost.

Being an affirming adult for LGBTQ young people is not just the right thing to do; it is a matter of life and death. Research conducted in 2019 showed that LGBTQ youth who had at least one affirming adult in their lives were 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide. Calling students by their correct pronouns, showing them that they aren't alone, and reminding them that life is so much larger than anything they are facing in this immediate crisis can be the lifelines for which LGBTQ students are desperately grasping.

As educators, we are beacons in the darkness of the lives of many students who deal with trauma and rejection. Let's make sure that our virtual environments reflect that.

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How to Support LGBTQ Students During Distance Learning

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Teachers can be a real lifeline for queer or gender nonconforming students who don't feel accepted at home. Roman Didkivskyi / iStock When schools closed their doors this spring due to Covid-19, many students felt akin to ships lost at sea. What was next? Would they see their teachers and friends again?

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Given the demands on students' time and the pressure to increase credit accumulation, online education will certainly play a growing role in undergraduate as well as graduate and professional education. Many of those classes will offer a pale imitation of a genuine education, consisting of little more than video clips, digitized PowerPoint slides and discussion boards. These are correspondence courses for the digital age.

But it is possible to offer a robust, engaging, highly interactive online instruction, as long as cost savings don't represent our highest priority.
1. Course Design: Conceive of the class as a journey
Our standard approach to online course design -- backward design -- isn't enough. Sure, it's important to identify one's learning objectives and align one's activities and assessments with those goals. But a cutting-edge course needs something more: a narrative arc, a starting point, a sense of direction and a destination.

Conceiving of a course as a journey requires an instructor to think of the course as a series of stops, tasks, challenges, experiences, engagements, encounters and contests. The journey metaphor encourages the instructor to adopt a student-centered design focus, asking, for example, why students take the class, what the students want out of the course, the students' needs and interests, the pinch points they are likely to experience, how they are likely to move through the course, how to keep the students motivated and engaged, and what constitutes success.
2. Instructional Design: Give the course a problem and inquiry focus
Rather than thinking of the course as a body of content that needs to be transmitted or as a series of skills that need to be taught, instead organize the course around questions, challenges and debates. Such an approach makes clear that college is not about memorization and ingesting and regurgitating facts, but about formulating and testing hypotheses, making and refining arguments, building on prior knowledge, and correcting misconceptions.

This approach is relatively easy to adopt in a humanities class. For example, in a history course, a problem or inquiry approach encourages students to recognize that history isn't simply a body of facts, but rather a series of arguments. The questions an instructor might ask involve perspective (How did actors perceive events or their options?) and interpretation (How should a piece of evidence be understood?). The questions can also be causal (What caused something to happen), corrective (How accurate is a particular historical myth or generalization?), explanatory (Why did something happen?) or evaluative (What were the consequences?).

Such an approach can also work in STEM and quantitative social science courses. The key is to integrate opportunities for students to investigate particular problems, make observations, test various hypotheses and methods, and identify and evaluate possible solutions.
3. Combining the Synchronous and the Asynchronous: An effective asynchronous online class contains synchronous elements
A wholly online asynchronous class eliminates many of the elements that are essential to a robust learning experience: opportunities for collaboration, interchange, improvisation and serendipity. Hangouts, virtual office hours and live interactions offer possibilities for bringing live, first-person interaction into the course.
4. Instructor Presence: Instructor presence in online courses is essential
Instructor presence in online courses can make a big difference in student motivation, engagement and satisfaction. In a face-to-face class, eye contact, humor and simply conveying expectations have a big impact. In online classes, it is also vital that the instructor be visible.

A welcome letter, brief video clips, periodic commentaries, prompts and asides, regular announcements and feedback, connections to current events or items in the news, and outreach to struggling students - these are but a few of the ways to ensure that you are visible to your students.
5. Opportunities for Collaboration, Argument and Conversation: Move beyond discussion boards and chat rooms
Discussion boards rarely promote the kind of engaged interaction that is what we expect in an animated classroom discussion. To replicate that kind of intensity, incorporate debates, brainstorming sessions and role-playing into your online class.
6. Active Learning: Active learning Is as important online as in face-to-face classrooms
Processing information is a key to learning. Simulations, interactives and problem-solving tasks are important to ensure that students meaningfully engage with the course material.
7. Embedded Assessments: Distribute assessments throughout the course
Embedded assessments ensure that students regularly engage with the material. In some cases, these assessments are diagnostic: to help an instructor understand pain points and confusions. In other cases, these are formative learning experiences, helping to hone students' skills and help them accurately monitor their command of course content and concepts
8. Gamification: Consider gamifying your course
What works in video games also can work in the classroom. Points and levels and competitions offer effective ways to help motivate students and prevent them from thinking that a single bad score on a test or essay dooms them to low grade.
9. Multimedia: Appeal to students' senses
Take advantage of the ability of digital environments to support the visual, the audio and the interactive. Rich multimedia can reinforce learning and augment written or spoken explanations. Multimedia sources - ads, film and music clips, fashion, gravestones, hairstyles, and propaganda posters -- can themselves be subject to analysis.
10. Communication: Invite communication
Integrate multiple communication channels into the class. Make it easy for students to communicate with classmates and the instructor.
11. Student Leadership Opportunities: Give students opportunities to lead the class
Transform students into co-instructors. Create opportunities for students to introduce class sessions, lead discussions, make presentations or devise essay questions.
12. Peer Commentary: Share the burden of providing student feedback
Classmates need to learn how to offer constructive feedback. Work with them to create rubrics which they might use to comment constructively on their classmates' written work.
13. Polls and Surveys: Students can provide valuable data for collaborative analysis
Consider surveying your students at the start of a class. What are their anticipated majors? Their career goals? Their motivation for taking the class? Or consider collecting information on their background and attitudes, if this is relevant to the course. Analysis of surveys and polls of students can bring abstract debates to life through the use of authentic, real-world data.
14. Collective Feedback: Share your comments with all students
Providing feedback is time-consuming under all circumstances, but especially in online classes, where many comments are shared one on one. Consider ways to make comments widely available. Discuss problems that occurred in multiple essays or problem-solving exercises. Offer general advice that all students might find helpful.

As long as pioneers in flight tried to mimic birds, their efforts proved futile. Only when the pioneers broke free from slavishly imitating birds did powered, heavier-than-air flight become possible. So, too, designers of next-generation online learning need to rethink every facet of the educational experience.
Steven Mintz is senior adviser to the president of Hunter College for student success and strategic initiatives.

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The Future (Revisited) of Online Education | Higher Ed Gamma

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Given the demands on students' time and the pressure to increase credit accumulation, online education will certainly play a growing role in undergraduate as well as graduate and professional education. Many of those classes will offer a pale imitation of a genuine education, consisting of little more than video clips, digitized PowerPoint slides and discussion boards.

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Having a systematic review process in place can help instructional designers and educational technologists as they consider proposals for the adoption of new teaching and learning tools.

Credit: AdresiaStock / Shutterstock.com © 2020

At various times, instructional designers and educational technologists (IDs/ETs) are put in the position of recommending teaching and learning technologies. While large systems (e.g., an LMS) are assigned a project manager and a team, smaller applications (e.g., assessment development systems, wikis, and most apps) are left to be managed by the IDs/ETs. Surprisingly, although review requests for smaller technology applications are received fairly often, higher education institutions often have no systematic process in place to determine how to conduct the review. As a result, staff members sometimes end up revisiting the same issue multiple times, starting from scratch each time because they have no historic documentation. At one of my institutions, for example, a team investigated the use of Top Hat at least three times, and another had numerous discussions about using Confluence versus our LMS's built-in wiki. To complicate matters, instructors who ask IDs/ETs for help in identifying a technology solution often expect the ID/ETs to support the product even if it is not adopted as an institutional solution.

A systematic procedure for reviewing teaching and learning tools can help IDs/ETs support faculty more quickly and more effectively. Most of these technology reviews will fit into one of three types: (1) ID/ET initiated; (2) specific tool request; (3) solution request. Any final recommendations for a new technology or a change in technology should include the following: a proposed tool review, a business case, a pilot, an implementation plan, and "close the loop." These steps are basically the same for all three types of reviews. However, different actions may be required based on the type of request. For example, when investigating whether to start supporting a new tool (Type 2), the review team will want to consider not only the proposed tool but also how it compares with tools currently being supported. And when looking for a solution to an instructor's problem (Type 3), the review team should conduct an in-depth interview with the instructor (and possibly others) to determine the exact needs, wants, and constraints. For that reason, the full review process is discussed below for Type 1 requests, with the additional steps for Types 2 and 3 noted in the following sections.

Type 1: ID/ET Initiated

As an instructional designer or educational technologist, you may at times find information about a tool that you think is worth considering. This may be a tool that solves an outstanding problem, appears to offer more/better features than a currently supported tool, or provides a new ability for teaching and learning. Sometimes you may also learn about a specific category of technology. This could be based on reading various sources such as EDUCAUSE publications, Gartner research, and PCWorld, all of which provide periodic reviews of trends, comparisons of products, and other research results. Members of groups such as college and university consortiums and EDUCAUSE community groups also often share information on technologies they are using or have reviewed. Keeping an eye on these newly available technologies helps you support faculty as they run into technology problems or have questions on how to handle pedagogical issues.

Proposed Tool Review

By their very nature, the number of technology options in Type 1 reviews is fairly limited: they are new approaches or provide a solution previously unavailable. The first step, therefore, is to identify the goals for adding a technology to your "catalog" of supported tools. To ensure that you are meeting a real need (either current or emerging), try to be clear about the goals and objectives of adopting the tool. Start by asking a few instructors and/or your teaching and learning center (T&LC) staff to brainstorm what goals they could meet using this technology.

You do not need to complete a full investigation at this point, just a high-level determination to make sure the concept of the technology will actually be useful. You may want to refer to Lauren Anstey and Gavan Watson's evaluation rubric for topics to consider.

Appropriateness

Is the new technology appropriate for your institution? Key questions:

1. What will it solve/improve?

2. What are the pedagogical values and implications?

3. Does this provide additional capabilities?

Features

Considering the intended audience (i.e., students and/or instructors), you should determine what features will be needed (e.g., ease of use, interaction with other technologies). Key question: Based on the identified goals, what features are needed?

Uniqueness

If your team supports a limited set of technology tools, adding every new type of technology would be counterproductive. Also, although a new technology may offer somewhat better features than a current supported technology, don't be too eager to make a change. Key questions:

1. What about this technology makes it different from others? (This answer does not need to be in-depth at this point, just a sentence or two.)

2. How important is this technology pedagogically?

Support Systems

Many technologies require supports including installation, security, user guides (for both students and instructors), troubleshooting, and/or "hand-holding" for users who need extra help. In addition, a centrally supported technology will need to be "marketed"-via newsletters, websites, and perhaps department meetings. Key questions:

1. What group of people and approximately how many people could use this technology?

2. How complex will the support need to be? (The answer will be a guestimate based on whether you will need an additional full-time equivalent person to support the tool and whether it will require support from other teams such as security.)

Barriers to Adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and other models offer details on the rate of adoption of new technologies. Key questions:

1. What will limit an instructor and students from accessing this technology?

2. How reliable is the technology?

3. How complex is the technology?

4. How difficult will it be for an instructor and students to use this technology?

5. How difficult will it be for an instructor and students to improve teaching and learning with this technology?

Accessibility

Many sites have information about tool accessibility requirements. If you are not aware of your institution's standards for tool procurement, contact your accessibility office or refer to NASCIO or National Federation of the Blind, which offer other institutions' guidelines. At this point, a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) may be sufficient, since you will conduct a more thorough review later. But do not assume that any VPAT is thorough and correct. Sometimes a vendor is overly optimistic about the abilities of a tool. Key questions:

1. How accessible is the tool for instructors?

2. How accessible is the tool for students?

3. How accessible are the results of using the tool? (For example, does the student or instructor produce something that is accessible?)

Comparison

For new technologies where only one tool is available, a simple overview can be appropriate. However, for reviews where several tools meet the same goals, a decision-making matrix may be appropriate (see figures 1 and 2). At this point, keep this matrix high-level, since the goal is to determine if this category of technology would be beneficial to your institution. Key questions:

1. If there are multiple tools providing the same solution, what are the very basic differences-or are there no discernable differences at first glance? (For example, one may offer a per-user fee, and another may offer an enterprise fee.) If this is a new version of a supported tool, what are the general advantages and disadvantages?

2. How is this technology different from the others you currently support?

Figure 1. Decision-making matrix sample (overview)

Figure 2. Decision-making matrix sample (detail)

Recommendation

Finally, you need to document all of this as a proposed tool review and create a project plan for how you would build a business case (not how you would implement the technology tool but how you would conduct further research to fully determine a recommendation). In some cases, at this point you may realize that continued research would not be valuable. If so, you can skip directly to the "Close the Loop" step. If you decide to conduct further research, this recommendation (indicated in the chart in yellow) is sent to your management review team.

Management Review: Business Case

I propose frequent management reviews. Each step in the review process requires time. The management reviews will ensure that the technology tool is worth the time and any other costs. Depending on your institution, you may need to get approval from a governance board or your boss-or you may not need any approval. In some institutions, a consensus from a small team of co-workers is required. Ideally, each Management Review step would involve the same group, with the final go/no-go perhaps decided one level above the person or team completing the other review steps.

The first management review-the business case-is a high-level decision on whether the technology review should progress, based on the proposal and on knowledge of the campus culture and needs.

Full Business Case

The business case is the result of following the project plan laid out in the proposal. The research you do to complete the business case will be detailed and time-consuming. The purpose of the business case is to lay out the goals and then analyze the technology to determine how closely the goals can be met. A business case should look at both the tool features and the organizational side. Googling "business case" will produce a variety of outlines.

Detailed Review/Comparison

For new technologies, you may find that only one tool is currently available. To identify similar tools, you may need to conduct deeper research. If several tools meet the same goals, you may want to check ERIC, OLC, and additional databases to see if others have completed research on the tools. A more detailed decision-making matrix might also be appropriate, to compare both the tool features and the impact on the institution (e.g, predicted number of adopters, financial and human resource costs).

Barriers Management

In addition to the barriers outlined by TAM and similar models, you'll need to consider administrative and environmental barriers. For each barrier, identify the significance of the impact and the likelihood that it will occur. You may want to complete a detailed risk-management plan. Identify how you will eliminate, minimize, or mitigate any risk that is highly likely and has high impact.

Dissemination Plan

An issue somewhat unique to higher education is that the target audience for a technology may refuse to adopt it. Instructors are notoriously difficult to reach through standard communications and usually are not required to use a new technology. Therefore, a dissemination plan is needed to ensure that you get the word out to the appropriate groups at the appropriate times. If done well, a dissemination plan can be used for multiple new and upgraded technologies.

I use the term dissemination instead of communication because to me, the former term has broader connotations. According to Everett M. Rogers, you can build awareness through mass media, but getting people to adopt an innovation generally requires a different level of messaging. In addition, various instructors need various messages, and as time passes, more detailed messages might be appropriate.

A good first step is to hold a team brainstorming meeting to identify both the desired messages and the new communication methods. These ideas can start off wild (e.g., sky writing), but they will trigger other, more practical ideas (e.g., scoreboard announcements at sports games or doorknob tags for instructors' offices). At one university, we identified 57 viable ways to get faculty members' attention. As a result of the brainstorming, a full plan can be developed (see figures 3 and 4). Evaluating the effectiveness of each item on the plan and of the overall plan should be done once a year to see (a) if it is working and (b) if there are new opportunities.

Figure 3. Dissemination Plan, Sample 1

Figure 4. Dissemination Plan, Sample 2

Support Systems Details

The group or person making the final decision on the adoption of a new technology will want to know the costs-not only for the technology but for the ongoing support. To develop a full cost identification, you may need to contact a variety of institutional areas, including central IT security, IT support, server administrators, web administrators, and anyone responsible for providing help desk or training support.

Common levels of support:

Light: basic knowledge, webpage presence, no promotion

Regular: same as above, with offer of consultations

Heavy: same as above, with offer of training

Common categories of support:

Financial

Training, documentation, consultation

Administration, maintenance

Technical troubleshooting

Installation, security

Depending on the technology, different categories may require different levels of support. For example, Turnitin might need heavy training, documentation, and consultation support for instructors, regular support for students, and light support for helpdesk staff. Building a chart of audiences and categories of support could help ensure that you have captured all audiences at the appropriate level. This will assist in determining any additional staffing costs (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Levels of support for different audiences (sample)

Recommendation

Once the business case has been completed, you'll want to develop a recommendation (indicated in the chart in yellow) for management. This recommendation should include a summary, followed by the details of the investigation.

Management Review: Pilot

The purpose of this second management review is to determine-based on the proposal and knowledge of the campus culture and needs-if the technology should progress to a pilot. If a pilot is required/recommended before final approval, then a plan for managing the pilot would include who should be involved, how to gain their involvement, and timeframes for the pilot.

Assessment and Evaluation of the Technology

As the pilot is being completed, an evaluation of the technology should be conducted. This should be based on the key questions noted in the proposed tool review. Each pilot participant should be asked to complete an in-depth evaluation. You may want to use a chart based on Anstey and Watson's rubric or use that chart to build a decision-making matrix similar to Kepner Tregoe.

Final Recommendation

The pilot results are added to the business case to produce a final recommendation (indicated in the chart in yellow) of go/no-go. The summary and other sections of the report should be revised to include a brief review of the assessment. If the report is long, include a list of changes and additions, including page numbers to help management quickly grasp the new information.

Management Review: Implementation Plan

This last management review is a final decision on whether the technology should be adopted. Based on the proposal, knowledge of the campus culture and needs, and the pilot results, management can determine if the technology should be adopted.

Project Plan

Once you receive the final go-ahead, a very detailed project plan is needed. The project plan should include specifics for both dissemination and all support systems (e.g., developing and implementing support and training, updating webpages). If you have limited experience creating a project plan, you may want support from a project manager in your organization.

Close the Loop

Evaluate/Assess the Project

When you enter the implementation phase of the project, you will need to contact all the people connected with the review and ask them to evaluate how the project went from their point of view. This evaluation can be extremely helpful when the next technology review comes along. Key questions:

1. What went well?

2. What could have been handled better (and how)?

3. What may have been missing?

Inform All Involved

If the review was initiated by instructors who were not involved in the review process, contact them with a final outcome.

Complete Your Documentation

1. Set a review date for when this technology should be next evaluated against the marketplace to ensure that you continue to offer the best solutions.

2. File all documentation, including copies of pertinent emails, in a single folder within a central location, using a naming convention that will be easy to understand by all team members.

3. Update your list of reviewed technologies-both those supported and those reviewed but not supported. Indicate the file location for the documentation.

Mini-Celebrate

Even if the project resulted in a "No-Go" decision, a mini-celebration is important to bring closure. Thank everyone who was involved in any phase of the project. (Donuts are often appreciated.)

Type 2: Specific Tool Request

Most requests for reviews of new teaching and learning technologies come from faculty. Some instructors research extensively and find "the" tool they want to use. Others will select the first tool they see that appears to meet their needs. Some instructors hear recommendations from others. In addition, institutional administrators-a dean, the provost, or even the CIO-may request a review of a specific tool. Finally, vendors make many requests, of course. In a few circumstances, you may want or need to check out the specific tool the vendor is recommending.

If you have received a request to start supporting a specific tool, you can follow the basic process for Type 1 reviews, with a few additional actions. As a first step, you will need to identify the instructor's role.

Identify the Instructor's Role

When requesters provide a specific technology tool they want, they may be reluctant to consider other, similar tools. Keeping them involved in the project at each step is a primary way to help them understand the results of your research. You will need to determine the instructor's role to ensure the end-result will support as many faculty as possible.

Current and Proposed Tool Review

Most technologies have a main purpose, and some have additional features. When you are asked to review a specific tool, you will want to consider the main purpose of the proposed technology as well as the main purpose of the current tools being supported. Key questions:

1. What is the requester's goal?

2. How closely does this tool meet the instructor's goal?

3. Do you currently have a supported tool that accomplishes most of this goal?

4. What issue is the instructor facing that this tool solves?

5. What is the instructor looking for as far as the kind of solution (e.g., app versus server versus cloud, student use or instructor use only)?

6. How difficult is the instructor's job without this specific technology?

7. How frequently would this technology be used?

8. What group of people and approximately how many people could use this technology?

Business Case

For the Type 2 business case, you will need to present a comparison of current and proposed tools. To conduct a thorough review, you will probably want to complete a decision-making matrix (see figures 1 and 2). Key questions:

1. Does this technology offer a new solution?

2. Is this new technology significantly better than the currently supported product?

3. Is this the right time to introduce a change?

4. What are the pedagogical values and implications?

5. Does this tool provide additional capabilities?

6. How might this negatively impact students?

7. How many other instructors could benefit from this new tool?

8. Is there funding available from the instructor's department or another area?

9. Is there another solution, possibly among the currently supported tools?

The Pilot, Implementation Plan, and Close-the-Loop steps for a Type 2 review are the same as in a Type 1 review.

TYPE 3: Solution Request

Many instructors want simple solutions to common problems such as a way to allow for backchannel discussion in a classroom, quickly provide formative feedback to each student on an assignment, or share introductions electronically. While many tools are available as solutions, instructors often feel frustrated trying to find, evaluate, and compare them. Instructors therefore turn to the people (i.e., IDs/ETs) who have a better technical background to compare the solutions and build a recommendation.

If you have received a request for a solution to an issue, you can follow the basic process for Type 1 reviews, with a few additional actions. First, you will need to conduct an in-depth interview with the requester to identify the instructor's issue, assumptions, and objectives. Additionally, talking with other instructors, IDs/ETs, and your T&LC staff can help you identify the likelihood that other instructors are looking at a similar issue.

Identify Significant Contributors

A new tool for a specific application may support only a small number of instructors. A careful and complete interview with the requester will help determine the underlying issue or objective. Following this with discussions with a wide range of people before beginning your research may help you identify the overall value of providing a solution.

The TAM and similar models will be invaluable in determining if this instructor and others will actually implement the solution you identify. The initial interview is critical to ensuring that the solution actually resolves the problem within the parameters the instructor has set.

The primary difference between a Type 3 review and the other two types of review is that here you do not have a specific technology to consider. You will therefore need to interview the instructor in-depth to be sure that you completely understand what is needed. Key questions:

1. What issue is the instructor facing?

2. What is the instructor looking for as far as the kind of solution (e.g., app versus server versus cloud, student use or instructor use only)?

3. What is the instructor assuming about costs, support/training, ease of use, etc.?

4. Are the instructor's technical skills and attitude in line with the tool's level of complexity?

5. Is there another solution, possibly among the currently supported tools?

6. What are the pedagogical values and implications?

7. Does this tool provide additional capabilities?

8. How might this negatively impact students?

9. How difficult is the instructor's job without this specific technology?

10. How frequently would this technology be used?

11. How many other instructors could benefit from this tool?

12. Is there funding available from the instructor's department or another area?

To ensure that the issue is widely applicable to instructors, you should consider asking the twelve questions above in interviews with others as well: instructors, IDs/ETs, and T&LC staff. Additional key questions:

1. Have other instructors indicated that this is an issue for them? If so, what are their names and departments?

2. Is this an emerging issue for others?

3. Would the proposed solution provide a valuable service to the general community?

The Proposed Tool Review, Business Case, Pilot, Implementation Plan, and Close-the-Loop steps for a Type 3 review are the same as in a Type 1 review.

Conclusion

Reviewing new teaching and learning technologies can be exciting. Too often, however, higher education institutions do not have the staffing and the money to continually review and replace technologies. Having a systematic review process in place can help. Careful analysis will go far to ensure that requesters know their requests have been taken seriously. Although these processes may seem complicated and burdensome, they can be adapted for an individual institution, giving the review team a common approach that will save time, address similar requests in the future, and also meet the changing needs of instructors.

Notes

1. Lauren Anstey and Gavan Watson, "A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education," EDUCAUSE Review, September 10, 2018. ↩

2. See Lorin W. Anderson et al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, abridged edition (Pearson, 2000), and H.L., "SAMR Model: A Practical Guide for EdTech Integration," Schoology Exchange, October 30, 2017. ↩

3. Andrina Granić and Nikola Marangunić, "Technology Acceptance Model in Educational Context: A Systematic Literature Review," British Journal of Educational Technology 50, no. 5 (September 2019). See also Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 222. ↩

4. See "Accessibility in IT Procurement, Part 1," NASCIO, July 28, 2015, and "Higher Education Accessibility Online Resource Center," National Federation of the Blind (website), accessed August 18, 2020. ↩

5. See also "Kepner Tregoe Decision Making: The Steps, the Pros, and the Cons," Decision Making Confidence (website), accessed August 18, 2020. ↩

6. For a good list of tool feature considerations, see Anstey and Watson, "A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education." ↩

7. Pat Reid, "Categories for Barriers to Adoption of Instructional Technologies," Education and Information Technologies 19 (June 2014). ↩

8. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. ↩

9. Anstey and Watson, "A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education"; "Kepner Tregoe Decision Making: The Steps, the Pros, and the Cons," ↩

10. If you have access to Franklin-Covey training, I recommend its project-management essentials course. In addition, literally hundreds of books on project management are available, and online courses can be found through LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, and many other sources. ↩

11. Anderson et al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing; H.L., "SAMR Model." ↩

12. Anderson et al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing; H.L., "SAMR Model." ↩

Pat Reid is Founding Partner, Curriculum Design Group (CDG), and was formerly Director, Instructional Innovation, at the University of Cincinnati.

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and adopting new teaching and learning technologies

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Identifying, Evaluating, and Adopting New Teaching and Learning Technologies

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Having a systematic review process in place can help instructional designers and educational technologists as they consider proposals for the adoption of new teaching and learning tools. At various times, instructional designers and educational technologists (IDs/ETs) are put in the position of recommending teaching and learning technologies.

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High flex resources

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning outcomes: cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes, emotions, and values), and psychomotor (skills). For each outcome, instructors should also consider the level of outcome they are trying to achieve. So, if you are teaching cognitive skills, such as mathematics or language, you should determine if you need your students to remember (level 1), understand (level 2), apply (level 3), analyze (level 4), evaluate (level 5), or create (level 6) (Krathwohl, 2002). Once you have determined the level(s) of outcome, you should align your assignments to those levels. A multiple-choice exam can assess level 1 and possibly level 2 outcomes, but it will not assess students' abilities to apply, analyze, evaluate, or create. Consequently, you will need to devise more challenging assignments to elicit higher levels of performance from students, using essays, problem-based learning assignments, and case studies, for example.

Events of instruction

Another approach that can apply to online instruction is to employ Gagne's nine events of instruction (Gagne et al., 2004) Depending on the learning outcomes you are trying to achieve and your target audience, you will need to arrange the events accordingly:

1. Gaining attention

2. Informing learners of the objectives

3. Stimulating recall of prior learning

4. Presenting the stimulus material

5. Providing learning guidance

6. Eliciting performance

7. Providing feedback

8. Assessing performance

9. Enhancing retention and transfer

Gaining attention

The first event typically involves gaining the attention of the audience-achieving this in an online course can be difficult as you don't have a physical presence in the room, but appropriate use of technology can help. Once you gain your students' attention, you also have to maintain their attention and motivate them for the duration of the course-this is where engaging activities become essential. Keller's ARCS model of motivation (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) offers practical suggestions of strategies you can employ to design motivation into your course (Pappas, 2015).

Informing learners of the objectives

For every lesson and assignment, you should also state the objectives (event 2), indicating what learners will be expected to do, how, when, and where. Depending on the level of outcome you are trying to achieve, you should use appropriate action verbs to elicit the desired level from your students. Thinking back to your own experience as a learner, did you ever lose marks for not comparing and contrasting, because the instructor asked you to "describe" in the assignment brief? Fortunately, Bloom devised a taxonomy for each level, suggesting suitable action verbs for each level. If you need your students to analyze a historical event (level 4), you should use a verb like "analyze" in the assignment brief, rather than "describe" or "explain." You should also avoid using verbs like "know" and "understand," unless you're going to tell learners how they will demonstrate that knowledge or understanding. In other words, by carefully considering the action verbs in your assignment briefs, you are more likely to elicit the desired performance from your students.

When writing objectives, Mager's (1990) three characteristics of useful objectives can also prove helpful. As mentioned earlier, every objective should comprise an action verb, but you might also want to add a condition such as, "Given a list of...", "Without the aid of a calculator...," or "Using primary sources..." to elicit a particular performance. You might also need to specify certain criteria, such as speed (...in five seconds), accuracy (...accurate to the nearest whole number), or quality (...speak fluent French). It is worth noting that the conditions and criteria you specify should be essential to the performance (e.g. don't incorporate a speed criterion if it is not necessary).

Stimulating recall of prior learning

The third event encourages instructors to stimulate recall of prerequisites. Unfortunately, this event is often neglected in higher education, especially when classes comprise students with varied prerequisite knowledge. But even within a course, instructors can help their students by pointing them back to content covered earlier in the course. Using hyperlinks or even a simple, "Recall the week 4 lecture on topic X" can suffice.

Presenting the stimulus material

The fourth event, present the stimulus material, is where instructors officially start teaching. It is essential that the content uses the right tone for the target audience, is accessible, and caters to universal design. The content should also adhere to good practices of information design, in terms of typography (sans serif tends to be easier to read online), color (consider the subject matter and the cultural implications of your color choices), and formatting (e.g. use white space and chunking to separate paragraphs).

Providing learning guidance

The fifth event-provide learning guidance-is even more critical in online instruction, as students don't have the luxury of problem-solving sessions with classmates over coffee. Using technology consistently, providing designated forums where students can ask questions, and setting clear guidelines about expectations (of students and instructors), are other forms of guidance.

Eliciting learner performance, providing feedback, and assessing performance

The remaining events occur after information acquisition. Instructors need to elicit learner performance (event 6), by providing students with regular opportunities to engage with the course material and with one another. The Sheffield Hallam University teaching approaches menu suggests technologies and assignments for different kinds of teaching approaches. Instructors also need to provide feedback on the learners' performance (event 7) and formally assess the performance (event 8). As outlined earlier, instructors should use appropriate action verbs in their assignments and assessments to ensure students understand what is expected of them. Ideally, instructors should employ a mix of independent as well as collaborative assignments. One way to do this is to ask students to maintain personal reflective blogs describing their experiences of collaborative projects.

Enhancing retention and transfer

The final event-enhance retention and transfer- is sometimes neglected by instructors who are only focused on helping students meet course outcomes. Instructors need to find ways to link course content to real-world scenarios, as well as to other courses in the program.

Careful consideration of learning outcomes and the nine events can help instructors design courses that are pedagogically sound. Aligning assessments and activities with learning outcomes, and clearly communicating those outcomes to students in the form of objectives, will ensure students understand why they are being asked to undertake certain tasks and the standard of performance expected from them.
Darina M. Slattery, PhD, is a tenured faculty member and head of Technical Communication and Instructional Design at the University of Limerick (UL) in Ireland, where she teaches courses on e-learning, instructional design, and learning and collaboration technologies. She is an alumna of the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL) and Vice President of the IEEE Professional Communication Society. References
Abel, Scott (2007). Plain English is Good but Simplified English is Better: One Writer's View. The Content Wrangler. https://thecontentwrangler.com/2007/05/07/plain_english_is_good_but_simplified_english_is_better_one_writers_view/

Ahead (2020). The UDL Framework Explained https://www.ahead.ie/udl-framework

Bloom, Benjamin S. (1956, 1964). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Book 1 (Cognitive Domain) & 2 (Affective Domain). Longman.

Gagné, Robert M., Wager, Walter W., Golas, Katherine C., and Keller, John M. (2004). Principles of Instructional Design. 5th edition. Wadsworth.

Krathwohl, David R. (2002). 'A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy: An Overview', Theory into Practice, 41(4), pp. 212-218. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2

Mager, Robert F. (1990). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Revised 2nd Edition. Fearon Publishers, Inc.

Pappas, Christopher (2015). Instructional Design Models and Theories: Keller's ARCS Model of Motivation https://elearningindustry.com/arcs-model-of-motivation

Sheffield Hallam University (2014). Teaching Approaches Menu. https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/shutel/files/2014/10/TeachingApproachesMenu_full_version07external.pdf

The Visual Communication Guy (2020). Information Design Rules https://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/information-design-basic-rules/

World Wide Web Consortium (2020). How to Meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (Quick Reference) https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

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Implementing Instructional Design Approaches to Inform Your Online Teaching Strategies | Faculty Focus

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The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning outcomes: cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes, emotions, and values), and psychomotor (skills). For each outcome, instructors should also consider the level of outcome they are trying to achieve.

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Self-motivation. Ownership. Engagement. We have always wanted students to feel passion for learning and to be intrinsically motivated-to be driven from within. With much learning moving to an at-home environment, these student characteristics are more important than ever, and the way that we, as educators, frame at-home learning experiences can have a profound impact on how students feel about them.

This will be especially important for some students. Consider the barriers that may impact student learning at home: lack of internet, devices, and support. Add to the mix competing priorities like supporting siblings, having essential jobs, and coping with stress and trauma, and it's clear that motivation, resourcefulness, and self-regulation are critical.

This isn't to say that student engagement is everything. Districts and schools have to consider barriers through an equity lens and ensure that all students have the essential supplies to access learning, but access alone will not equate to equal opportunities to learn if we don't also help students become engaged, innovative, and empowered.

Yet if we learned anything last spring when schools shut down and kids stayed home, it was that many students struggled to stay engaged. What if part of the problem has been how we have framed the work? What if, without meaning to, we have taken engaging, inspiring, and awesome work and made doing it acts of compliance instead of engagement, simply by the way we framed it?

For example, let's say a teacher has incorporated elements of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as students build an understanding about how geography affects human settlement and resource use. Students are offered multiple means of representation to learn (attend a live Zoom or watch the recording, read or listen to an online article, view a documentary, read the textbook, etc.) and several choices of assessments to express their understanding (journaling or writing a paper, producing a video reflection, recording a podcast, etc.). Sounds awesome, right? Kids should be excited, shouldn't they?

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let's consider how teacher messaging might impact students' enthusiasm.

Teacher 1: "OK, everyone. I've got several choices for you to learn about how geography affects where people decide to live and the way they live. I expect you to choose at least two different resources to explore for me, and I want you to also pick one activity to try. To get full credit on the assessment, you will need to cite the resources you used."

Teacher 2: "OK, everyone. You have several choices for how you get to learn about how geography affects where people decide to live and the way they live. Don't forget to use at least two different resources, and then pick an activity to try. You can do more than one if you want! Remember to cite resources to give credit to other authors and organizations and boost the credibility of your work."

Notice that the first teacher emphasizes compliance through the use of teacher-centric language ("I want," "I expect," "I've got") and extrinsic motivation by emphasizing getting "full credit." The belief behind this message is, "Kids probably won't want to do the work, so I need to tell them what to do and motivate them to do it." The second teacher uses more student-centric language, offering invitations and suggestions, while speaking primarily in the second person instead of the first. Their assumption and expectation is that students are motivated to learn, and their role is to guide and support students' learning.

The suggestions below may help you to reflect on the power of language as you design and deliver learning that embraces variability; eliminates barriers; and helps students to build intrinsic motivation, sustain effort and persistence, and self-regulate during Covid-19 and beyond.
Moving From Compliance to Engagement

Instead of "I expect you all to...," try "Your next challenge is..."

Instead of "I want you to...," try "What's a goal you have..."

Move From Teacher Ownership to Student Ownership

Instead of "Here are three things you need to do...," try "Here are three things to try as you..."

Instead of "I've created some choices for you...," try "You have several choices to consider..."

Shifting From Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation

Rather than tell students what they need to do to get a good grade, consider explaining what they should keep in mind as they aim for high-quality work. When it comes to things like the importance of citing sources, don't frame it as something that's necessary for a good grade. Instead, show how this improves the work. Suggest to students that it boosts the credibility of their work and gives credit to other authors. Offering rewards for completed assignments also can backfire. Instead, you can ask students about their goals for the work.

Changing language habits is really hard. So here's something to try. As you're teaching and talking with students, record yourself using the voice-memo app on your phone; or, if you're teaching remotely, record the session. You may also want to review directions within your learning management system, rubrics, and letters home. Which phrases do you use that emphasize student ownership, engagement, and intrinsic motivation, and which ones may unintentionally indicate the reverse? Pick one phrase or habit to work on so that you don't feel overwhelmed.

There is so much to adapt to support students' at-home learning that it can feel overwhelming, and there's so much that feels out of our control. Language is a simple and powerful thing we can control.

This work isn't about us. We don't have power over our students, but we provide them with the support so they can find the power within themselves. And when we talk about learning as though it is the reward, and provide students with the scaffolds and support to pave their journey, we will be closer to our intent: students finding the resources they need and using their voices to share what they know in ways that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful to them.

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How to Choose Words That Motivate Students During Online Learning

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Self-motivation. Ownership. Engagement. We have always wanted students to feel passion for learning and to be intrinsically motivated-to be driven from within. With much learning moving to an at-home environment, these student characteristics are more important than ever, and the way that we, as educators, frame at-home learning experiences can have a profound impact on how students feel about them.

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Implementing Instructional Design Approaches to Inform Your Online Teaching Strategies

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In my last article, I wrote about ways that we can get to know our students in virtual and hybrid courses. I also did a webinar on building a community online. You can watch it on replay here. One of the best ways to build relationships is through frequent one-on-one check-ins. In this article, we explore ideas for how to make the most out of these quick check-ins so that students feel known and understood, even when they are working at a distance.

Listen to the Podcast

If you enjoy this blog but you'd like to listen to it on the go, just click on the audio below or subscribe via Apple Podcasts (ideal for iOS users) on Stitcher (ideal for Android users), on Amazon Podcasts, or on Spotify.

http://www.spencerauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Power-of-Checkins-2.mp3

The Power of a Check-In

During the pandemic, many students described feeling lonely and isolated as they shifted into online environments. So much of the classroom experience is designed around face-to-face experiences. However, without the in-person interaction, students often felt like they were no longer connected. In some cases, students began to check out.

This isn't surprising.

Over two decades ago, researchers Anderson and Garrison demonstrated that success in an online course depended on the relationship between the student and the content, the student and the instructor, and the student and classmates. When students fail to connect with their instructor or with their classmates, they disengage. This disengagement results in lower attendance, lower assignment completion, and lower achievement. In other words, by every metric imaginable, students learn less and perform worse when they aren't connecting with others. On a more human level, students need to connect relationally to their classmates and their teacher.

When schools shift to remote learning courses, certain students who would normally do well in person end up struggling to manage their time and get started on their learning. They get distracted and fail to develop deep work habits that can lead to success. Here, students might even fail to show up to class video conferences or respond to emails. They turn in work significantly late and at a lower quality than they would if they were in a physical classroom. Without the teacher present and the reminder of accountability, these students disengage. In other words, they fail to connect with the content, with their classmates, and with the teacher. However, distance learning doesn't mean we have to be distant on a relational or social level. As teachers, we can be intentional about creating a sense of presence with our students through short check-ins.

These check-ins might focus on social-emotional elements, such as wellness, emotional status, and social connected-ness. This type of check-in can be as simple as a "How are you doing right now?" or "How are you doing with distance learning?" It might even begin with a short conversation about a student's life, such as, "How is dance going for you?" or "What video games are you into?" These little questions can send the message that you care about your students and you want to know how they are doing. Other times, it might be a more in-depth check-in with a student, a caretaker, and the school counselor or psychologist.

Other times, the check-in might have a more academic focus. You might ask students questions about their hybrid learning experiences, including how they are navigating their courses, how they are managing their time, and how they are handling the workload. This is often when you address issues of late work or a lack of engagement. In these moments, it's important to listen first and then help students develop a plan of action. In some cases, you might ask students about the social elements of school, including how they are getting along with their group members or how well connected they feel to the classroom community.

In some cases, these academic check-ins might relate more closely to the class assignments and projects. You might provide some targeted help for students who are struggling. You might need to clarify misconceptions and provide students with additional resources or scaffolds. You might also help students set and track specific academic goals.

We can conceptualize these check-ins on a continuum with the social-emotional check-ins on the more personal side and the targeted tutoring on the more academic side.

In general, teachers tend to focus on the personal elements first and move toward the more academic approach later. However, some students are doing well emotionally and really want a check-in to be academically focused. It's why there's no single right way to approach this. In some cases, a conversation begins on an academic level and then shifts toward a more social-emotional side as students share how they're actually doing. Ultimately, this is where you are the expert as a teacher. You know how to connect with students and parents or guardians in a way that is approachable but also professional.

Nine Types of Virtual Check-Ins

Here are a few ideas that I've found helpful:

1. Social-emotional pulse check: You can do this as a warm-up activity in your video conference / class meeting. You might begin with an open-ended question like, "How are you handling hybrid learning?" Students might meet with small breakout rooms or share their answers in the chat. Other times, you might create a more structured pulse check with something like, "Tell me two wins for the week and one disappointment." It can even be creative, where you have students create a superhero name or a band name. Some teachers have done emoji check-ins where students share an emoji to represent how they are doing. Others have created emotions chart with pop cultural references. Still others have had students sketch what's on their mind or what's on their heart by drawing inside of a mind shape or a heart shape. This really depends on the age, the class culture, and the subject you teach.

2. Video updates: This starts with a teacher-created video. In the first week, you can do an on boarding video of the course and explain how it will work. But after that, you can create a weekly short video with a preview of what students will do. Although prerecorded, these short, unstructured videos create a sense of presence for you as a teacher. You can then ask a specific check-in question and have students send an email or fill out a survey.

3. Video check-ins: While it helps to create videos for students, we can also encourage students to create their own video reflections and either post them to Flipgrid or email them directly to the teacher. You might give students a specific prompt or provide options of multiple prompts and encourage each student to select their own prompt. Video check-ins allow students to share how their doing with body language and voice. However, the fact that they can re-record a video allows them to have a sense of control over the process.

4. Small group check-ins: Here, you can schedule small group meeting and use video conferencing to meet with groups and look at their progress. You might have students engage in the mastermind group format as a way to share their academic goals or project progress. Other times, you might create small groups that function as a peer advisory / check-in.

5. Email check-ups: You can send out a whole class email with expectations, deadlines, etc. You might also send a short email to each student asking how they're doing. If you have 180 students in a class, rotate with 18 per day and make sure each student gets an individual email every other week. While this can feel overwhelming, you can create a template and personalize it.

6. Short text check-ins: With this option, you can ask students to use the chat function to send questions or comments as they work on various projects. Some classes might even use an option like Slack or Voxer so that the check-ins remain largely asynchronous.

7. Surveys: Ask students to fill out a course survey each week where they share what their experiences have been in a distance learning or hybrid course. These surveys tend to center on student course experience but you can also include a few questions that deal with social-emotional learning. It's important to avoid survey fatigue, so you might want to limit the surveys to 3-5 questions.

8. Scheduled conferences: You can schedule one-on-one video conferences with students where you guide reflection and do quick social-emotional learning check-ins. I love doing short five-minute conferences and allowing students to select between feedback conferences (where I provide help), reflection conferences (where I ask reflective questions), or assessment conferences (where I give feedback on mastery).

9. Phone calls: This is my least favorite option because I'm an introvert and generally dislike talking on the phone. However, given the challenges students sometimes experience with internet connectivity, sometimes the best option is a simple phone call to see how a student is doing.

At this point, these options might feel overwhelming. This is why it helps to experiment with the process until you find your groove. It also helps to ask students about their preferences for check-ins.

Poll Students for Ideal Check-in Processes

As an educator, you can honor student agency by asking them their preferences for check-ins. Students can submit their answers in an online form or in a short interview that you do a the beginning of the year. After students have submitted it, you can look at the spreadsheet and divide up your primary way of communicating with each student. This process sends the message that you value each student's input in their preferred approach to communication. As a result, they have a greater sense of control over frequency and method of communication. This can also free up your time to be more efficient with your communication. Not every student wants daily or weekly personalized check-ins. Some students prefer a short 3-question survey in a weekly email. Other students might need a phone call every other week.

The following questions can help guide the process:

How can I help you? What are some areas where you might need support? What are some challenges you might have in remote learning?

When is the best time to reach you?

How often do you want me to communicate with you?

What is your preferred method of communication? Do you prefer email? Chat? Phone call? Video conference?

What type of feedback do you prefer on your work? Video feedback? Audio feedback? Comments that are typed?

What is something former teachers have done that helped you feel known and appreciated?

What is something former teachers have done that helped you stay on track in your course?

However, this is also a two-way process and you might need to help students clarify expectations. You might send an email to a student affirming their desire for frequent communication but also explaining that daily one-on-one communication might be unrealistic.

Communicating Your Availability

Although it's important to take the initiative as the educator, it can also help to encourage students to take the initiative as well. We want to empower students to be self-advocates. As the instructor, you might provide the ideal process for asking questions, giving feedback, and reaching out to you with questions. When crafting a course syllabus, you can create a category for communicating with the teacher or professor. This category can include reasonable methods (an email, online form, office phone number), reasonable times, and expectations for when you will get back to students.

For example, as a professor, you might have the following:
Please feel free to reach out if you have questions. I am glad to help. Office hours are by appointment only. Please schedule video conference office hour meetings using the online Google form in our LMS. Please feel free to email me at any time. I will be sending email updates to check in on you and I want you to feel free to let me know if you have any questions. You can also use the chat feature in Slack or the Voxer walkie-talkie app. You can generally expect a response to an email, chat, or message within twenty-four hours. I generally end my day at 5 pm, so I will likely respond to a late-night email the next morning or afternoon.
However, if you are a fifth grade teacher, you might include a communication explanation in a newsletter you send to students and families:
Please feel free to reach out if you have questions. I am glad to help. Please schedule video conference office hour meetings using the scheduling link in our LMS (Canvas platform). If your parents or guardians would like to schedule a meeting, they can use the same form or they can send me an email or message me directly through Remind. You can generally expect a response to an email or message within twenty-four hours. If you have questions on an assignment and it's due the next day, please remember that you can always resubmit assignments after I have given feedback. Also, we will have virtual study hall sessions available to the entire class. I will be sending you a weekly check-in and it will be really important that you read and respond each time.

Notice how both paragraphs communicate availability but also boundaries. They make it clear that you are present but they also ask students to initiate conversations. It also sets the tone for future communication. Students can expect check-ins.

It's About Empowerment

Ultimately, the issue of student engagement is an issue of self-direction. When students fail to show up or turn in their work, they are often failing to be self-directed in their learning. As teachers, we can empower students to own the learning process. However, this begins with building relationships and checking in on students. When students feel known and respected, they are more likely to engage in meaningful projects that build on voice and choice. These check-ins can help build student agency and a sense of belonging in the larger community. In my last article, I wrote about how we can get to know students in virtual and hybrid environments. However, I also have a virtual learning hub with resources, articles, and webinars. I'm also working on the finishing touches on a book about empowering students in distance and hybrid learning. I can't wait to share it with you!

If you want to take a deeper dive into empowering students in distance learning, please check out my course. It's fully self-paced and on-demand, which means you can work on it at your own pace. It's packed with videos and practical resources. The course is designed to take 15 hours and I offer district and school bulk license discounts. My friend A.J. Juliani also has a great course about online and hybrid learning. As an affiliate, I get a portion of his course sales and I also have access to the 20% off coupon code. Simply type Spencer at checkout and the 20% off will be applied automatically.

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The Power of Student Check-Ins During Distant Learning and Hybrid Courses

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In my last article, I wrote about ways that we can get to know our students in virtual and hybrid courses. I also did a webinar on building a community online. You can watch it on replay here. One of the best ways to build relationships is through frequent one-on-one check-ins.

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In education, we often use a metaphor of content delivery. We use terms like "deliver a lesson." We ask, "did the students get it?" But the last week and a half has proven that teachers are not merely content delivery machines. In my last post, I mentioned that teachers have often put relationships first and gone out of the way to make sure that their students are doing okay.

At the same time, there is often a pressure in distance learning to make sure that students are meeting their "seat time" requirements. I've heard stories from teachers who are asked to teach 45 minute lessons to 30 students at a time via Zoom. Part of this comes from the myth that we can convert physical classes to online classes.

The problem with conversion is that we tend to view things with a deficit mindset. In other words, we ask, "Can I still do this even when we're not physically there?" Then, we reduce the amount of activities we can do as a result. It's a bit like file conversions that get smaller or more compressed over time.

A better option is transformation. With transformation, we can ask, "What does it mean to do things differently? What are the new options that were previously unavailable?"

When it comes to distance learning, this often means going beyond the content delivery method and encouraging things like voice, choice, creativity, and even play.

If you enjoy this blog but you'd like to listen to it on the go, just click on the audio below or subscribe via iTunes/Apple Podcasts (ideal for iOS users) or Google Play and Stitcher (ideal for Android users).

https://spencerauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Super-Pizza-Podcast.mp3

Intentional Design

Last week, a friend of ours created a choice-based daily schedule for her children at home. As a high school teacher, she needed to develop online lessons during the early Spring Break so that her students could continue learning. After she texted her example to my wife, we, as a family, decided to create our own daily schedule. Here's what it looks like:

Notice that our kids can wake up whenever they want. Our teenage boys are happy to get up at nine or ten while my daughter still gets up around six or seven. Also notice that this schedule isn't based on school subjects. When they read, they are moving between novels (English), articles from Smithsonian, Time, The Economist (social studies), Popular Science, and Modern Mechanics (STEM). Their maker projects shift from art to STEM and their Genius Hour projects have involved learning new math concepts to learning a new song on the piano.

A quick disclaimer here. My kids are lucky. There is a good amount of privilege to having four bookshelves full of books and a mountain of magazines. We have instruments and craft supplies. But in many cases, they are working within constraints, using low budget materials on maker projects and reading books they checked out from the school library. As educators, we need to find ways that we can provide certain materials to students during a time of social distancing. I've already seen schools do supply drives and offer maker materials to students who are picking up free lunch. I've seen teachers do read alouds and have students listen to the books from a distance. I've watched schools connect with libraries to help get books into the hands of kids at home. Again, schools have proven amazingly adaptive and innovative amid a crisis.

A Vintage Innovation Approach

Notice that our schedule is neither tech-driven nor anti-technology. Learning at home doesn't have to mean eight hours in front of a screen. At the same time, many of these activities have screen time built into them. In other words, we are taking a vintage innovation approach. It's an idea I explored in my recent book.
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Vintage innovation happens when we use old ideas and tools to transform the present. Think of it as a mash-up. It's not a rejection of new tools or new ideas. Instead, it's a reminder that sometimes the best way to move forward is to look backward. Like all innovation, vintage innovation is disruptive. But it's disruptive by pulling us out of present tense and into something more timeless.

Vintage Innovation is a both/and mindset. It's the overlap of the "tried and true" and the "never tried." It's a mash-up of cutting edge tech and old school tools. It's the overlap of timeless skills in new contexts. Vintage innovation is what happens when engineers use origami to design new spacecraft and robotics engineers are studying nature for innovative designs.

As a teacher, it's what happens when you do sketch-note videos mashing up hand-drawn sketches with digital tools or blend Socratic discussions with podcasting. It's that service-learning project that you do creatively from home in the midst of social distancing. It's the old idea of shared commonplace books to explore new ideas and research. It's a design project that includes duct tape and cardboard and sticky notes and markers but also digital modeling. It's the idea of doing these projects in a very tangible way at home but then documenting this process through a video that you share online with your classmates.

I mention this because I keep hearing folks ask, "How do I get my class online?" But a different, perhaps more relevant question, might be, "How do we help students learn from home? What should learning look like in these times? And how do we continue to create a culture of creativity despite the physical distance between us?"

Empowering Students in Distance Learning

At home, our daily schedule is focused on the idea of empowering our kids to be self-directed learners. Instead of creating tech-driven lessons, we are focused on the following:

Inquiry and Curiosity

Critical thinking

Creativity

Voice and Choice

Empathy and Service

Collaboration Across Ages

Note that these are the lifelong skills that our children need to develop. We are living in uncertain times and we can't predict the future. However, we can prepare our students for the future by empowering them in the present. So, I encourage you to craft home-based learning experiences that will allow students to develop curiosity, creativity, and empathy.

Keep Experimenting

Vintage Innovation is a reminder that innovation isn't about creating something new so much as relevant - and that relevance is often something disruptive. Sometimes relevance doesn't mean a deep dive into augmented reality or artificial intelligence. Sometimes it's a deep dive into a novel or a meandering philosophical discussion on what it means to be human. It's often in the analog that we find a different perspective. T.S. Eliot put it this way, "A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

With vintage innovation, teachers ask:

How do I innovate when I don't have the best technology?

How can I use vintage tools, ideas, and approaches in new ways?

How can I use constraints to spark creativity?

How do I blend together the "tried and true" with the "never tried?"

These are the questions we are asking as we move into distant learning. It might mean having students work long distance with a fellow student and craft a podcast. Instead of a noisy classroom, they might actually have the time and the space to craft a podcast together. It might mean doing a Wonder Day project that is both online and off-line. It might mean they do a hands-on maker project and create a 2-minute video explanation of it. Or maybe they craft a very hands-on comic book but also blog about their process. In other words, it's going to be both/and:

If you are a teacher, you are an innovator. You are the experimenter trying new strategies. This means there will be mistakes. Zoom sessions will freeze up. Assignments won't post properly on Google Classroom or Canvas. You might look silly the first time you record a video.

But that's okay. It's an experiment.

You are the architect designing new learning opportunities. Right now, you are designing something on the fly and you are doing a phenomenal job given the challenges you face. This is why the teachers will always be at the heart of innovation. Apps change. Gadgets break. Technology grows obsolete. But one thing remains: teachers change the world.

Get Your Vintage Innovation Toolkit

You can access it by filling out the form at the bottom of this page. This toolkit includes the eBook The Epic Guide to Vintage Innovation. There are also eleven resources that correspond to different chapters in my new book Vintage Innovation. This toolkit includes protocols and structures that you can use to empower your students to own their learning. I've also included several mini-projects and lessons that you can customize for your own classroom environment. It's all free, regardless of whether or not you buy the book.

Here's a preview of what's inside:

Divergent thinking mini-project

Sketchnote video activity

Socratic Seminar structure

Ideas and structures for building empathy

Student journalism resources

Community inventory

An exploration of biomimicry in each subject

A guide for hands-on simulations

Writing prompts

Design thinking project

Maker project

Genius Hour resource

Wonder Day and Wonder Week resource

A guide for content curation

This is absolutely free. Simply fill out the form below.

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Taking Distance Learning Away from the Screen

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In education, we often use a metaphor of content delivery. We use terms like "deliver a lesson." We ask, "did the students get it?" But the last week and a half has proven that teachers are not merely content delivery machines.

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Intentionally setting up a learning management system where everything students need is easy to access can help them all be successful.

When remote learning hit, I was ready. My daughter had been in online school for three years. I teach technology integration. But during this time, our family struggled. I found that my son, a straight-A student in a traditional school setting, got distracted, lost track of assignments, and struggled academically.

So what happened? And what would help students like him? It seems to me that we teachers can use our learning management system (LMS)-Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom, etc.-to build a digital home base for our learners. Grounding design in a delicate combination of empathy and simplicity, we can use our LMS to build community, increase usability, and keep everyone on track and on task.

Start With Empathy

Empathy in design is crucial. Put yourself in the shoes of your learners and you will put them first in your design. They are the end users. They are the ones for whom we should be designing learning experiences.

When I've asked teachers why they made the choices they did, such as tool selection or ways to submit assignments, many have said, "Because it is easiest for me." No matter what we prefer, we must consider empathic, student-centered choices that we can make. In the end, student-centered design will make it easier for the teacher, too.

First, create a place that houses everything learners and families need. A checklist with links or a week at a glance on your home page or via email is a solid start but shouldn't be all you offer. This spring, many learners and families had to visit multiple learning platforms, emails, websites, and tools to find, complete, and submit online activities. This proved exceedingly difficult for most, and a lack of consistency from week to week and class to class challenged everyone.

Look at the online learning experiences you offer from the perspective of your learners. Are they simple, and do they make navigation easy? Do they support learning and build community? If you ask these key questions as you design, the experiences will be better for everyone.

Build Community

A common concern is feeling disconnected in online learning. We don't want learners to feel like they are engaging with a computer. They are engaging with each other. With you. With content.

Use empathy in design to choose tools that build connection and integrate seamlessly into your LMS. For example, Edpuzzle, Pear Deck, and Seesaw allow you to link to or embed your voice and interactive content into your LMS. Flipgrid goes a step further and allows learners to reflect together and hear each other's voices asynchronously. Use discussion boards to field questions, allow peer review, and convert class discussion strategies to an asynchronous platform to deepen reflection.

Create an entry point in your online course that shows your personality and organizes resources for learners. Rosemary Jane, technology coordinator for Cincinnati Public Schools, encourages teachers to use a Bitmoji classroom, clickable PDF, or interactive week-at-a-glance at the entry point for an online course to direct learners to what is important and organize necessary links and resources. "We need to think of where we live," said Jane. "Our neighborhood. Our homes. They should be safe and comfortable. So should your online home base. Learners should go there expecting support and familiarity that will lead them to success."

If your district or building offers a template for your landing page, use it and personalize it for you and your learners. Add in regular communication about how to be successful and celebrate student wins here. And most important, be empathetic in your communication. Understand that this is new for most, and flexibility is needed.

Practice Good Design

Keeping your home base simple decreases cognitive load and increases working memory. Learners shouldn't have to use extra mental energy searching for what they need to be successful. Design your online classroom to provide a single place for daily or weekly updates, learning materials, assignments, activities, meeting links, grades, feedback, and everything else they need.

Use bullets and lists; avoid paragraphs.

Pay attention to font legibility; avoid fun or fancy fonts (many are not readable).

Limit the number of fonts; avoid using more than one font for headings and one for paragraphs.

Use color for emphasis, but avoid having more than two text colors.

Use contrasting colors; avoid light on light or dark on dark text.

Use clean, simple page layouts consistently; avoid mixing up your structure day-to-day.

Use images that reinforce key concepts; avoid images that aren't meaningful.

Use icons to reinforce key tasks; avoid clip art and patterns or backgrounds that distract.

Limit navigation to a couple of clicks; avoid folders inside folders.

Organize everything in clean, simple chunks with limited clicks so that everyone can quickly and easily see what's expected. Apply these design best practices to avoid distraction and barriers to learning:

Commit to Consistency

In a traditional face-to-face classroom, everything is centralized and consistent. Bins and areas of the room are clearly labeled. Routines are created. Key information is prominently posted. Classrooms don't change location, and learners don't have to guess where they're going or where to find things. The same should be true online, and your digital home base helps learners work more independently face-to-face or online.

If your school offers templates for your LMS, embrace them. Talk with colleagues to build consistency across your team, building, or district. Fewer questions and better demonstrations of learning will be the result, improving everyone's experience. Here are some guidelines for consistency: Repeat icons for learners to quickly see what they should do, create naming conventions for online folders (e.g., topic and date), and employ a small set of effective digital tools that are familiar to everyone.

Support Learners

Science and parenting journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer points out, "The more certain kids are that someone's got their back, the more confident and autonomous they can be." We can encourage confidence and autonomy by designing our home base assuming that learners and parents or caregivers need support and guidance. If everything they need is in one place, they will be able to find the help and support they need. This will also improve effort and help them stick with and complete tasks in the online and blended environment.

Include school and district resources for families and students.

Include supports benefiting all students, especially learners on IEPs and English language learners.

Prominently display goals and objectives.

Provide alternatives to support individual differences.

Assume the best of your learners.

In order to provide your students with more support, do the following:

Being tech support for your learners-empower them to seek help and find resources;

Making students ask for supports that can be easily preloaded to your online home base;

Adding assignments or materials that don't align with objectives;

Using one-size-fits-all instruction, assessment, or communication; and

Being inflexible.

There are also things you can do that will make this process more difficult. You'll want to avoid the following:
Special thanks to Kathryn Hicks (University of Cincinnati), Rosemary Jane (Cincinnati Public Schools), and Krista Heidenreich (Lakota Local Schools) for sharing their brilliance.
Going into an uncertain fall, we can alleviate a lot of stress for parents, caregivers, and students if we prioritize student-centered design. Leveraging your LMS as a home base is a simple first step to making sure that all learners can be successful and that learning and community take front and center in our classrooms, no matter the learning environment.

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Designing Your LMS to Make Distance Learning Better

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Intentionally setting up a learning management system where everything students need is easy to access can help them all be successful.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, we believe that any productive conversation on race must start with honesty, respect for others, and an openness to ideas and information that provide new perspectives.
We hope that this portal will be an ever-evolving place that will continue to grow, develop, and ensure that we listen to one another in a spirit of civility and common cause.

Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America's history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.

This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized.

Thinking about race is very different for nonwhite persons living in America. People of color must always consider their racial identity, whatever the situation, due to the systemic and interpersonal racism that still exists.

Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color. Acts of microaggressions include verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites. Whether intentional or not, these attitudes communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages.

In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate. Toni Morrison

White Privilege
Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept - but it is true. If you are white in America, you have benefited from the color of your skin.

White people can possess other marginalized parts of their identity, but their race is not one of these. To learn more about how race intersects with our other identities, check out the section titled systems of oppression.

Being white does not mean you haven't experienced hardships or oppression. Being white does mean you have not faced hardships or oppression based on the color of your skin. We need to be honest about the ways white people have benefited from racism so we can work toward an equitable, fair and just society.

In "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," scholar Peggy McIntosh writes, "White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks." Here are some examples she gives on what white privilege looks like in day to day living:

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed

I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race

WATCH: White privilege and constructing white racial identity

White nationalism is a concept born out of white supremacy. A key difference is a focus on nationhood. White nationalists in the United States advocate for a country that is only for the white race due to feelings of entitlement and racial superiority. They also believe that the diversity of people in the United States will lead to the destruction of whiteness and white culture - hence, the correlation to white supremacist ideology.

White Dominant Culture
White dominant culture describes how white people and their practices, beliefs, and culture have been normalized over time and are now considered standard in the United States. As a result, all Americans have all adopted various aspects of white culture, including people of color.

White supremacy is an ideology where white people are believed to be superior to nonwhite people. This fallacy is rooted in the same scientific racism and pseudo-science used to justify slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide at various times in throughout history. White supremacist ideologies and their followers continue to perpetuate the myth of white racial superiority.

The belief of white superiority has been part of the United States since its inception. The white European imperialists who settled here believed they were inherently superior to nonwhite groups. These beliefs justified atrocities like the genocide of Native Americans and nearly 250 years of African slavery. After slavery, white supremacist ideologies manifested into a series of laws that would limit the freedom of African Americans, known as Black Codes and Jim Crow. White supremacy and its legacy can still be found in our legal system and other institutions through coded language and targeted practices.

Direct and violent forms of racism that promote white supremacy have been on the rise in recent years. These acts are more directly linked to white nationalism. White nationalism is a concept born out of white supremacy. A key difference is a focus on nationhood. White nationalists in the United States advocate for a country that is only for the white race due to feelings of entitlement and racial superiority. They also believe that the diversity of people in the United States will lead to the destruction of whiteness and white culture - hence, the correlation to white supremacist ideology.

Internalization of Whiteness and White Dominant Culture

Racism is perpetuated by deeming whiteness as superior and other racial and ethnic groups as inferior. The prevalence of white dominant culture and racism leads to an internalized racial superiority for those who adhere to it. This [as defined by internalized dominance "describes the experience and attitudes of those who are members of the dominant, privileged, or powerful identity groups. Members of the [dominant] group accept their group's socially superior status as normal and deserved." CARED: Calgary Anti-Racism Education]

When people of a nondominant group (people of color) are discriminated against, targeted or oppressed over time, they often believe the myths and misinformation about their group. Known as internalized racism, it happens when an oppressed group believes the racial views that society communicates are true, and they act as if they were true.

Confronting Whiteness

If you identify as white, acknowledging your white racial identity and its privileges is a crucial step to help end racism. Facing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear. Dr. Robin DiAngelo coined the term white fragility to describe these feelings as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves." Since white people "live in a social environment that insulates them from race-based stress," whites are rarely challenged and have less of a tolerance to race-based stress.

For those of us who work to raise the racial consciousness of whites, simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort. The defensiveness, denial, and resistance are deep. Robin DiAngelo "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism"

The feelings associated with white fragility often derail conversations about race and serve to support white supremacy. While these feelings are natural human reactions, staying stuck in any of them hurts the process of creating a more equitable society. The defensiveness, guilt, or denial gets in the way of addressing the racism experienced by people of color.

For white people doing anti-racist and social justice work, the first meaningful step should be to recognize their fragility around racial issues and build their emotional stamina. "White Fragility" author Robin DiAngelo breaks it down.

Besides your own internal reflection, processing, and daily commitment to anti-racist work, try participating in affinity groups, or caucuses. These groups are people sharing common interests, backgrounds, or experiences, coming together to support each other.

Let's Talk

For Concerned Citizens: Whiteness operates in covert and overt ways that affect all of us. It can appear as practices within an institution or accepted social norms. Since whiteness works almost invisibly, we may not always be aware of how it manifests in our daily lives. Thinking critically about your social conditioning and the values you have adopted as fact, ask yourself:

What are some aspects of whiteness you've internalized?

How can these be hurtful to you and others?

What are some ways you plan on combating them?

Let's Act

For Parents: How often do you talk to your child(ren) about the noticeable racial differences in society as well as your own race? To learn more on how to teach your child about the ways whiteness is prevalent in society, watch this video with concrete examples and suggestions:

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Socially and politically constructed, whiteness is not simply referring to skin color but is an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others and strengthens systems of oppression. Let's dig deeper.

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5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Instructional Design

Campus Technology | July 10, 2019 - Moving a course from brick-and-mortar to online requires rethinking how you deliver content, replicate in-class interactions and pinpoint areas for improvement.

When you're converting a traditional face-to-face course to online, while a lot of the content may remain the same, the way it's delivered and learned will, understandably, undergo change. A " mastery series" from the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), focused on instructional design, teaches the fundamentals of course design for effective online learning. Recently, longtime instructional designer Elisabeth Stucklen, one of the facilitators for the course, shared five areas to pay attention to as classes are being shifted to an online mode.
1) Start with Outcomes in Mind
Don't underestimate the value of pre-planning, said Stucklen. It begins by developing a course outcomes matrix, a list of "well-written" learning objectives that express what you want students to achieve by the end of the course, the strategies you're going to use to address them and how you're going to measure whether they've been learned or not.

Sample course learning outcomes matrix (Image courtesy of OLC)

A course outcomes matrix applies to both online courses and those delivered in person. The difference, said Stucklen, is the modality: "There might be different ways to go about achieving those outcomes." As an example, she noted, "In a face-to-face course there's obviously room for discussions. You're there with everyone, you can present content, you can do group activities. But if you go online, you have to do activities in different ways to implement those interactions."
2) Get Personable with Discussion Forums
While Stucklen uses the phrase "death by discussion," the discussion forum has been a standby for online courses for years. Forums still do "have their place," she acknowledged, "but you have to design them well."

The problem that surfaces too often, she said, is that online instructors feel compelled to use the forums with "factual, straightforward information" that doesn't lend itself well to discussion. "What are you going to add when somebody has already come up with the right answer?"

Her advice is to use multimedia tools such as VoiceThreador Flipgrid to shift away from text-based responses and give students formats for mimicking "that face-to-face aspect" and making the experience "more personable."

VoiceThread

VoiceThread allows the instructor to post slides and for students to respond with their own commentary done via webcam, audio or text, which can also be commented on.

Flipgrid is similar "but a little more simplistic," in that it's video-based. Stucklen has primarily seen that tool used for course introductions, where students record themselves with a webcam or smartphone, telling a little about themselves and what they hope to get out of the course.

Either one, she said, "helps to put a face with the name and make it feel like you're not there by yourself talking to a computer."

For her own instruction, she's also considering the use of Kaizena, an add-in for Google Docs. This tool allows users to highlight text, add video feedback, and include links to saved lessons or "explainer" videos that need to be referenced over and over again. Students get access to the same commenting tools as instructors and can reply to comments with their own responses.
3) Reconfigure Your Instructional Strategies
Learning strategies come in two primary flavors: instructor-centered (a demonstration students need to watch or a tutorial they're working through) and student-centered (such as simulations they're performing). Both have their places in online courses, but what's important is to make sure whatever you use is tightly linked to specific objectives in that course matrix you've developed. Otherwise, your coverage will generate "superfluous information," Stucklen said. (And even the superfluous is acceptable, as long as you've signaled to students that it's "additional content," something that's worth studying "later on" but that "isn't really going to help you achieve what we're trying to do in this particular course.")

Case studies fall into the student-centered category as a strategy that helps learners gain and apply real-world understanding. For example, in the master class itself, participants are asked how they'd respond to a situation in which they're acting as instructional designers working with faculty members to develop courses, and as part of that, they need to help the instructors define the course objectives. "Well, how do I work with the faculty on developing these objectives? Is there any information I can give them?" Stucklen suggested. "There is no right or wrong answer. There are just different approaches on how to do it."

In the face-to-face version of the course, that could be a report that's written or an in-class discussion. In an online version, instructors might post the scenario at the beginning of the week and give students time to consider their responses and post videos discussing their answers. By having students weigh in on the various solutions offered, the strategy incorporates "cooperative" or collaborative learning too, allowing "everyone to have the opportunity to learn from everyone else and become both the student and the instructor."
4) Formalize Quality Assurance
When a new online course is created, every aspect of the mechanics needs to be tested - it's important to verify that the links work and go to web pages that still exist and that the content uses file formats, colors and fonts that are accessible.

The use of a quality assurance tool specifically for online classes, such as the OLC Quality Scorecardor the Quality Matters rubrics, will lay out specific and comprehensive criteria to help you evaluate how well you've addressed the fundamentals.

The key point about using these tools, however, is to make sure you get people "from the outside" to rate your course. That includes somebody "who can concentrate on the instructional design aspects" and then two additional people: one "who knows the content" and the other who doesn't. That third person will act as a proxy for the student. After all, Stucklen pointed out, "Students are going to be coming in not really knowing this information. Will what you have in the course make sense for them and will they get what they need in order to achieve the end goal?"
5) Recognize that the Work is Never Done
Continuous improvement is a watchword for online courses. Stucklen recommended two sources for knowing how to prioritize improvements: end-of-course surveys and data.

While end-of-course surveys should include questions on how students would rate their experience with the instructor and the various activities undertaken during class, they also need to include this "basic" question: Do you have any suggestions for improving the course? "We have had people write complete novels inside those surveys," Stucklen said. What they tell you about their experiences can provide a parade of ideas "for improving course components."

The beauty of an online class too is that it generates reams of data that can be useful in figuring out what needs to be reconsidered. But that's also a burden, since it's hard to figure out where to start the analysis. Stucklen uses the student feedback to hone in on the data that will be most useful. As an example, the learning management system will, no doubt, have analytics tools that provide details about "how long students spent in a particular area, whether or not they completed parts of the core service, if they skipped over certain readings and how they performed on exams, projects [or] discussions." The use of an LMS add-in such as IntelliBoard, she added, can be useful "to make it easier to create custom reports."

Stucklen also makes a point of encouraging post-class conversations with the course instructors or facilitators themselves. "They have the unique perspective of being in there and working with the students, and they get to see firsthand where people are struggling" and where the course might need more work.

As a newbie approaching the job of teaching an online course, it's never enough, Stucklen said, to "put information online and figure we're good to go." As you move to the online realm, your job is to shift from "teaching to facilitating." If that concept doesn't make sense, then it's time to find someone to work with "who has the knowledge to help transform that content into an online format that will be effective for the learner and for the facilitator as well."

OLC's online " Instructional Design Mastery Series" is intended for people in higher education, K-12 and even corporate settings who want to better understand how to design more effective online courses. The class consists of three week-long modules with two-week breaks in between for "reflection and application." Participants will walk away with a redesigned learning unit or module for their own courses.

The cost is $600 for OLC institutional members and $750 for non-members. Learn more.

SOURCE: Campus Technology

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5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Instructional Design - OLC

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Campus Technology | July 10, 2019 - Moving a course from brick-and-mortar to online requires rethinking how you deliver content, replicate in-class interactions and pinpoint areas for improvement. When you're converting a traditional face-to-face course to online, while a lot of Read More >

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Key Facilitator Roles

In Facilitating Online Learning, William Draves offered 6 different roles for you as an online facilitator.

Generative guide, where you "lay out a spectrum of current or possible positions taken to indicate avenues of questioning that have remained overlooked or unexplored."

Conceptual facilitar, where "key concepts in activities or readings may have been omitted, misconstrued or overemphasized.

Reflexive guid e, who "restates or redrafts, canaries a sense of non-directive integration as though the dialogue itself is goal oriented.

Personal muse, where you hold your own beliefs up to question.  Rather than argumentative dialogue, there is no winner or right answer.

Mediator, when "you redirect discussion away from defense of hardened positions and toward goals that are central to the interests of all parties."

Role play, when you assume a role so you can highlight or introduce, through characters or tales, key points that were omitted or need reinforcing.  Or you set up a "pretend" situation in which students take on a role to discuss.

And as stated before, keep discussion forums light.  Prompts should not have more than 3 questions to discuss.  Keep one question fun yet relevant.  Most important, ask the right questions.

Asking The Right Questions

Trisha Bender's helpful book, Discussion-Based Online Teaching To Enhance Student Learning: Theory, Practice and Assessment provide guiding principles in designing the right discussion forum question.  I f you have more suggestions, please feel free to share your ideas in the Thinks Lounge.

Design High-Level Questions:  Stimulate online discussions by designing questions that are thought provoking, hypothetical, evaluative, involve a case study, role-play or a synthesis of elements already learned.

Types of questions to avoid:  Avoid questions that require a yes or no answer or that ask for one specific fact.

Encourage an Informal Conversational Style:  Warn against long posing that sound more like essays.  This might discourage other students to read or interact with the initial post.

Encourage Full Participation:  Instructor can step back and let the conversation happen.  But if the conversation starts to wane and there are still students not responding to the original question, the instructor can either weave together different student remarks to summarize what was stated or nudge silent students to weave into the discussion thread and identify re-occuring themes.

Ask Students to Become Discussion Leaders:  Another option to try later in the semester is instead of the instructor asking the questions, ask students to develop discussion questionsAssist them in asking pertinent question that will contribute to the building of knowledge of the discussion topic.

Ask Students to Complete the Sentence:  Completing a sentence can stimulate discussions.  Studnetrs  cand respond to one another if their interest has been captured

Magic Wand:  Let's pretend.  Provide a question that provide students the opportunity to think big, fearless and courageous. There are no wrong answers.  It is just to promote a vision.

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Am I right or am I right? We are always on the lookout for systems or processes, which make our jobs easier. I know I am.

And, because I believe you are too, I am going to break down each phase of ADDIE for you. In my ADDIE Simplified infographic, I provide an overview of the 5 phases. The phases of ADDIE are not always clear on what should be done under each phase. My goal today is to clarify the key tasks for each phase using my 5 Step Instructional Design Blueprint Using ADDIE. The Blueprint breaks ADDIE down into simple, repeatable and actionable instructional design tasks.
GRAB MY 5 STEP INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BLUEPRINT USING ADDIE
Whether you are building an eLearning course, a face-to-face training, a blended training, or a webinar, your process doesn't have to be difficult. A fuzzy Instructional System Design process can make it complicated, however. It can also blur the lines of task ownership, which can lead to disastrous results.

The examples I have seen of ADDIE never fully describe all the activities that need to be completed in each phase. Speaking of phases, I don't really think of ADDIE in phases.

I think of ADDIE as chapters. Those chapters are Analysis, Design, Development, Implement, and Evaluate. And, each chapter comes with its own set of tasks to be completed.

W-AGILE Training Project Management

When managing training projects, I typically use a combination of Waterfall and Agile project management methodologies. We'll call this project management style, W-AGILE. If you don't know what Waterfall or Agile are, don't worry about it. It's not important to understanding ADDIE or Instructional SystemDesign. We will talk more about these project management methodologies in the future.

Why don't I think of ADDIE as a phased instructional system design process? Phase implies doing something first, second, third, and etc. While this is somewhat true, there are many activities and tasks which can be completed together.

I prefer to organize all of my tasks in a list, without attention to the phase, and then work my list.
GRAB MY 5 STEP INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BLUEPRINT
Why ADDIE?

For the past decade or so, I have continually refined my use of ADDIE to develop the system I use today. I have tried and evaluated other models, but I always come back to ADDIE because of its simplicity. Over the years, I have created too many trainings to count. I have personally trained hundreds of people to effectively and successfully use ADDIE to build training courses, too. I don't know if this makes me an expert or not, but I feel pretty confident about what I am going to share.

My hope is with the information I have learned over the years and will share with you today, you will have the clarity you need to build awesome, quality content, too.

Are you ready to get started? Let's do it!

Step 1: Collect Information and lot's of it! (AKA: ANALYSIS)

This is the most important step in any instructional system design process, in my opinion. This is where you probe, learn, and probe some more to ensure you fully understand the project.

What's funny, or not so funny, is that so many people open a PowerPoint or an eLearning tool/program and begin developing the course. They start with the core activity of Development and totally skip Analysis and Design.

If you look at the acronym for Development, Implement and Evaluate, you see DIE. Yep, DIE, which is a very likely result for any training course which starts with Development.

Don't be a developer of death!

Instead, be a developer who gets results by effectively using ADDIE to design and build your courses.
GRAB MY 5 STEP INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BLUEPRINT
What do you do in the Analysis phase?

Yes, I used the word phase because everyone else does, and I don't want to muddy the waters with non-value adding nuances.

Host a Scoping Meeting to ask questions and get answers and complete your Training Needs Analysis template (TNA)

Conduct Subject Matter Expert (SME) Interviews to learn more about the training as needed

Review supplemental resources

Ask more clarifying questions

Step 2: Organize the Information You Collected (AKA: DESIGN)

To me, this is where the fuzziness really starts with ADDIE. It started a bit with Analysis by not clearly articulating what to analyze but it gets worse here. When, I think of design, I think of making something pretty or building something but that is not the case with the Design phase. Design is where you organize all the information you collected. You will lay it out in an organized format with your instructional and engagement strategies. Then, you will get the SME and/or Business Owner to review and sign off on it.

What do you do in the Design phase?

Organize the collected information (Focus on Need to Know content, which you identified in your scoping meeting and in the completed Training Needs Analysis template)

Create the design (i.e. an outline, a mindmap, a storyboard, a prototype, or a PowerPoint draft) to layout your training

Add in your recommended instructional, engagement, and retention activities

Add suggested graphics and images

Draft exam questions, if you have an assessment

Draft supplemental resources (identified in the completed Training Needs Analysis template)

Schedule review meeting or send for review and sign off from SME/Business Owner

Helpful hint: If you know about when your design will be complete and ready for a review, go ahead and schedule the review meeting. This way, your reviewers have the review calendared, which can speed up the review process.

By now, you can tell how important the Scoping Meeting and the Training Needs Analysis template are. It is in the Scoping Meeting that you complete the Training Needs Analysis template. The Training Needs Analysis template is the tool you use to collect the information you need to build your training.
GRAB MY 5 STEP INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BLUEPRINT USING ADDIE
Step 3: Build Your Course and Supplemental Resources (AKA: DEVELOP)

Once you reach the Develop phase, the bulk of your work is done. All the foundational work you did to understand the needs of the audience, the desired outcomes of the training, and design the training will come together in the Develop phase.

What do you do in the Develop phase?

Complete the script and build your training in your tool

Check the content to ensure it achieves the goals of the training (i.e. the learning objectives)

Check the content to ensure it fully and clearly covers the assessment questions

Record video/audio

Purchase/obtain graphics

Edit video/audio/ images

Complete team Q/A

Schedule review meeting or send for review and sign off from SME/Business Owner

Oftentimes, I encounter designers who write the learning objectives at the front of the training and again at the end of the training. This sounds like a good practice, right? Well, it's only a good practice if we check to ensure the content full addresses the learning objectives.

The same is true for assessment questions. How can we expect someone to know the answers to assessment questions? We have to make sure we taught them the content.

Help your audience get the most of your trainings. You can help them by ensuring that the learning objectives and assessment questions are thoroughly covered in your content.

Step 4: Launch Your Training Course (AKA: IMPLEMENT)

It's now time to implement or LAUNCH your training as I like to say. This means you are ready to execute the handoff to a trainer and/or execute your implementation strategy.

Your implementation strategy doesn't have to be a major implementation strategy. What's important is that you have an implementation strategy in place. If you don't have one for every training, the training is at risk of sitting on a shelf collecting dust. You have to proudly let people know the training is available!

What do you do in the Implement phase?

Promote training to your target audience

Send out notification regarding training to leadership

Launch training (e.g. facilitate, handoff to trainer, or upload to LMS)

Distribute surveys post course

GRAB MY 5 STEP INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BLUEPRINT
Step 5: Inspect What You Expect (AKA: EVALUATE)

There are many ways to evaluate training. You can observe learning in a face-to-face training and/or collect survey feedback. Survey feedback can help you determine your learner's level of readiness to take action on the content learned in the course. You can give participants an assessment or look for changes in performance. And, you can look at how a training influenced a key performance metric for the company. This one is a little harder to accomplish because it requires analysis of a group of people who completed a specific training, but it is doable, if it is important to the company.

What do you do in the Evaluate phase?

Review data

Survey responses

Capture completion metrics (i.e. number of participants)

Measure performance of learners who completed the training

Evaluate assessment performance

Provide feedback to SME, Business Owner/Department

Use results to improve content

Now, before I wrap up, please remember you don't have to wait for one phase to complete before you start the next one! You CAN and SHOULD be working on tasks from more than one phase at the same time.

Also, before you go, don't forget to download the 5 Step Instructional Design Blueprint Using ADDIE to use as a cheat sheet. It just might help you design better trainings and help you get the results you want!

See ya next week!

Your friend,

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Breaking Down ADDIE Using My 5 Step Instructional Design Blueprint

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Am I right or am I right? We are always on the lookout for systems or processes, which make our jobs easier. I know I am. And, because I believe you are too, I am going to break down each phase of ADDIE for you.

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For many college students, tackling original research can feel a bit like climbing the insurmountable. For a variety of reasons, ranging from teacher time constraints to increased focus on testing, many students arrive at college never having written a research paper (Wood 2010; Carter and Harper 2013). And as a report from Primary Research Group in 2018 noted, colleges are requiring fewer long-form writing assignments and students are OK with that (Whitford 2018).During fall 2018 (and again this fall), I taught Religion in Native North America, a 200-level undergraduate Religious Studies course. Taking it as a truth that research and writing remain integral skills, but recognizing my students' concerns and probable lack of experience, I designed building block assignments throughout the semester to increase research literacy and build analytical confidence. One such assignment, was a collaborative encyclopedia entry created using the free online platform Padlet, a digital bulletin board that enables teachers and students to share images, links, videos, and text in an easily created and manipulated format.

An encyclopedia entry assignment offered students an opportunity to combine multiple sources in a single project, but remained a step away from requiring the development of an original research question or argument. I also explicitly introduced the project as a building block toward their final research papers, helping to alleviate some of the anxieties about performing research. Padlet's easy drag and drop format enabled students to visualize and manipulate the data in ways akin to laying out flash cards. Content could be easily moved around the screen, color coded, and connected by arrows. The easy inclusion of videos and images made for richer storytelling and broadened students' perspectives on the types of sources available for research. Students also enjoyed playing with the aesthetics of their projects, which helped students move beyond seeing each source as its own island and physically create and visualize connections. The digital format was highly accessible and easy to learn, and simply, more fun than a traditional annotated bibliography.

The Assignment

Students were asked to work in groups of two or three to research a Native American community through the lens of religion. A month before the assignment was due, we met in the library with our Research & Instruction Librarian to explore available research databases, discuss academic sources, and begin to learn how to use the digital platform. Using a minimum of five sources, they had to find information on the Tribe, including language, geographic movement, arts, history, interaction with other Tribes, Anglo settlers, missionaries, and soldiers, as well as details about religious, political, and social organization and practices. Throughout, students highlighted the connections between religious beliefs and practices and other aspects of life. For example, a creation story often directly ties the Tribe to a specific location, helps to explain social patterns and gender relations, and is represented in Tribal art and storytelling.

The Platform

In an earlier version of this course, I used Moodle's in-house wiki platform to create a similar assignment. Ultimately, I found the wiki format was too static and students struggled with the intricacies of Wikitext. Thus, in the second iteration I turned to Padlet.

I set up the homepage or base bulletin board using the canvas feature, which enables posts to be scattered across the page. Students created their own free accounts (just an email is required) and began their entries, to which they could easily add members and link to the homepage. This format brought all of the students' work to one space, which allowed me to check in on progress, troubleshoot issues outside of office hours, and provided students with the opportunity to see the types of things their peers had uncovered.

Content could be easily dragged and dropped into place, moved around the screen, and color coded. Students did not need to wait to add information until the end of the project, but could post and edit in real time. In addition, Padlet can be easily produced and manipulated on a smartphone. Students at my institution come from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds and many do not own personal computers, but the vast majority do own smartphones. Programs such as Padlet, that can be accessed successfully in a variety of formats, help breach the digital divide created by access to and use of technology (Dolan 2015).

In addition to the encyclopedia entry, students were individually responsible for turning in a 250-word reflection on the research process. What was difficult or surprising about finding sources? How did you determine which sources to use? What research skills or strategies have you learned? What did you learn about your own research process and style? What do you still need to learn?

Challenges

As with all new tools, a degree of failure is expected. In two cases, students accidently deleted posts. The platform does not have a history feature or a way to retrieve deleted information, so if it's gone, it's gone. In addition, some students worked directly within the entry, rather than taking a middle step to analyze and gather research. This meant some of the posts on their bulletin boards were the result of a single paraphrased source, rather than achieving the greater goal of the assignment to compile information from multiple sources. As a means to help students not lose material if posts are deleted and encourage better note taking and personal analysis, in future iterations of the assignment I will recommend students keep all of their research and transcripts in Google Drive and Docs as backups.

Outcomes

On due day, students brought their devices to class and we spent the hour looking through each other's work. Students reflected on the act of research itself, as well as the content of the entries.

For my non-Indigenous, predominately Christian students the content of this assignment helped make non-Abrahamic traditions more legible. With 573 federally recognized Tribes in the US, a focus on one community enabled students to see the more nuanced and Tribally specific frames of religious life. Significantly, Native history and religions cannot be studied without attention to settler colonialism, which has inescapably altered and harmed the communities under study (Avalos 2018). By focusing on one community, students were able to not only see the historical realities of colonialism, but the contemporary ramifications in a smaller, easier to digest case study of their own making.

As a form, the assignment gave students the opportunity to find and compile academic sources using campus databases in a lower stakes project. The collaborative bulletin board format enabled students to play with how the information was presented and helped students visualize how different sources and ideas could be connected. In addition to enjoying the project, students' reflections noted that the following two assignments, an annotated bibliography and final research paper, felt more achievable after completing their encyclopedia entries.

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For many college students, tackling original research can feel a bit like climbing the insurmountable. For a variety of reasons, ranging from teacher time constraints to increased focus on testing, many students arrive at college never having written a research paper (Wood 2010; Carter and Harper 2013).

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Last March, as teachers mashed their course content into an online format, they could at least count on the community they had been building in person for months. This fall teachers will be facing a new challenge: how to build a community among students who may never have been in the same place at the same time.

The two of us have spent years teaching classics online - everything from the nuts and bolts of Latin grammar to critical theory - and we're happy to report that it can be done: students can get to know each other and become a cohesive community. They can get eager to hear each others' ideas and can feel safe offering their own. They can start to share stresses, share successes, and build a real sense of camaraderie. But it doesn't happen fast, and it doesn't happen automatically.

In fact, creating horizontal bonds between students is one of the hardest parts of online teaching, but as the best way to foster real student engagement, it's also one of the most crucial. Ultimately, an engaged community means the difference between a spirited seminar where students try out ideas and learn from each other, and one where every student is just secretly scrolling through a BirdsWithArms subreddit.

We both teach now at an online high school, but we both originally taught in higher ed, and our main points will be applicable to classes at all levels - even college classes (particularly smaller ones). In what follows, we draw on our experience teaching small, synchronous classes to offer suggestions for building community. Although our advice will be most useful for those types of classrooms, many of these tools and principles scale up.

Each learning community has its own needs, goals, and constraints, especially in relation to tech availability, internet connection quality, and amount of time with students. Even so, our hope is that we'll still have useful material here, or at least material that you can make useful by adapting it to your own teaching and technological circumstances.

Embrace multitasking

While the prospect of education in cyberspace may feel like a cold, barren endeavor, our experience has been that the online classroom can be thrilling and the setting for a surprising degree of intimacy with (and among) our students. One session might include: verbal explanation of a topic at the same time as the pre-prepared Powerpoint visual narrative at the same time as spontaneous annotations on the slides at the same time as a flowing text chat filled with student questions and asides at the same time as the use of shorthand icons for hand raising, agreement, laughter, disagreement, at the same time as students trying out sample exercises on screen, and so on. Pundits might bemoan our and subsequent generations' lack of attention span or need for constant stimuli (and certainly as classicists we value the ability to focus fully on one text in minute detail), but facing that thirst for multitasking and using it to our advantage can help to create an immersive classroom experience that will strengthen student and faculty presence, engagement, and academic communal bonds.

Choose community over content

Community building will take conscious effort on your part, and it'll take time. It's not enough to assign students long-term group projects outside of classroom time and sit back and wait for spontaneous friendships to blossom. Interpersonal interaction should be at the forefront of your course design and a deliberate goal of each synchronous session. Let's be clear: you will cover less content. It's worth the trade-off, since an engaged class will learn more material better in the end, but you have to accept the fact that you're going to get through less in a day than you're used to.

Integrate community building in your activities

You can mitigate this loss of time by working some community building into all of your activities. For instance, when I send students out into breakout rooms, I usually have them start by answering a quick introductory question about themselves, whether related to course content ("Which character from the Odyssey would you be?") or not ("What did you eat for breakfast?"). It gives students a moment to share a bit of their personality and learn something about each other as humans.

In Latin classes, to give another example, I like to start with a quick check-in ( Ut valētis?). Students respond in chat, choosing an adverb from a list on a slide, and you'll mostly see bene or satis bene. Sometimes a student will write optimē/ pessimē, and I stop to ask "Is it anything in particular, or just a good (or bad) day?" The students have an out if they don't want to be specific ("Just a good day"), but they can share if they want, something like "I just built the world's largest lego trebuchet" (this actually happened). It can feel like a waste of time, but this kind of sharing builds the relationships that form a foundation for when your class requires more intellectual risk-taking.

Change your scheduling habits

In addition to making the best use of your precious minutes through careful preparation and structured activities, allow less formal breathing room time in your course schedule, even if you feel like you don't have it. Students have lost those snippets of time, those stolen moments that surround and weave through and enhance in-person academic interactions: the wave in the hallway as they come to class, the quick chat about some dumb pop cultural event, the gesundheit when someone sneezes, the invitation to coffee after class ends. These interactions build community not just because they pertain to non-academic, non-essential, non-productive material, but also because they're often not under immediate authoritative supervision.

Change your mindset

A significant critique of educational technology ( plagiarism detection software, remote proctoring, etc.) is that it presupposes an antagonistic relationship between instructor and student. Accepting that educational technology exists and that we are not escaping it, how do we as educators, as thinkers, as humanists, as classicists reinvent our interaction with tech and harness this virtual space to create collaboration and community instead of punitive measurement?

Embrace Failure

Your tech and your ideas on how to use it will sometimes fail. Lean into the limitations of the medium. Early on in adapting my introductory Latin teaching to our online system, I blithely assumed I could do the same activities as ever. In particular, for the grammar-translation method I have always been a fan of old-fashioned group recitation of charts, vocabulary, passages: a collective of live voices revivifying ancient sounds. When I had my students turn on all of their mics for that first momentous - a -ae -ae -am -ā, I was horrified at the off-tempo reverberating disaster as different students with different degrees of lag and mic volumes and ambient noises clashed.

My first instinct was to apologize for the software and hardware problems, and to treat the tech as a nuisance getting in the way of the hallowed tradition of community building through forced rote memorization. But! My students, particularly younger ones, thought this was the absolute height of classroom hilarity: "We broke the platform!" I have kept that activity ever since, and the inevitable (and gleefully anticipated) breakdown of the tech becomes, itself, an additional bonding moment beyond mind-numbing chants.

So that you don't have to start from scratch in devising ways to use the features of an online classroom to your advantage, we've put together some suggestions based on our own classroom practices. Our own experience is in teaching on the platforms from Zoom, Adobe Connect, Saba, Blue Jeans, and even Skype in a pinch, but you'll probably find similar features in most video conferencing programs.

Example of a "choose your own adventure" breakout room. Photo by Anna Pisarello, copyright Stanford University

Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms allow for students to work in pairs or small groups, just like they would in your brick and mortar classroom. You might fear that breakout rooms online will waste time. Students might not stay on task, chatting about irrelevant things or simply using the absence of a teacher to slyly spend their time having their data mined on TikTok. Fear not. Students do sometimes drift off-task or, more often, finish their task early and then chat. That's fine. That's organic community building right there, and you don't need to squeeze content into every second of class. As for TikTok and the like, we have seen that students are more accountable, rather than less, when they're in a small group.

Breakouts are also a great way to enhance full-class discussions, especially for discussions that require students to grapple with complex questions and to explore challenging ideas. When you pose a discussion question, don't just cold-call, but do the old think/pair/share: give the students a few minutes to think and write independently, then a few minutes in pairs or small groups in breakouts to gain confidence in articulating their ideas, and then finally reconvene as a full group for discussion. This also works well with Latin homework, particularly when it involves questions with more than one possible answer.

Group work with a stated goal (a translation, an explicatio, an argument, a paradigm) is certainly great team-building pedagogy; but group work with a set of open-ended suggestions and no immediate obligation or measure of productivity can be as well. Every class of mine gets a periodic "choose your own adventure" breakout room day, normally at the start or at the end of a week when student attention and energies may be wavering: I provide material and frameworks for a potential academic shape (see figure), and the protective confines of the classroom space, but hand over completely their own agency in how to spend that time. It's just the students, interacting horizontally, and the material, without the mediation and interference of the instructor or performative expectations.

Will this spark a spontaneous joy of learning and community? Not necessarily, or at least not immediately, but you are signaling to the students that you are investing time into that set of relationships.

Text Chat Box

Unlike breakout rooms, the text chat box is like nothing from the world of in-person classroom teaching, and new online teachers sometimes find it awkward. But once you get used to it, the idea of teaching without a chat box is like the thought of ice-skating with a blindfold on. Managing a chat box isn't a hard skill, although it does take some practice. Just make sure to glance over at it occasionally to make sure you're not missing questions or ideas. If a student types a long message, don't be afraid to stop what you're saying for a moment and let the class know you need a moment to read and (if necessary) respond to the message.

I used to tell students to keep comments to a minimum and keep them strictly relevant, until I realized it's better to just let it flow: a voluble chat box will build an engaged community. It can be a bit dicey (though fun) to let the chat box become a second discussion parallel to what the instructor or students are saying on mic; when it does get too unwieldy, I make use of the visual aspect of text chat to announce and type out a "line of Latinity," under which students are instructed to bring comments back to the subject matter. But more often you'll find students using it to chime in and respond to each other.

The chat box is especially good at drawing out students who are reluctant participators, or who are hesitant to put themselves forward. Even the most reticent students can't seem to resist sharing their thoughts in the chat box, and from time to time you can ask them to expand on mic about a comment they made in chat. It can give a real shot of confidence to a reluctant student if you offer their idea some positive framing ("X just offered an interesting idea in chat, could you come on mic and expand on that a little?").

Polls

Like the chat box, it's hard for us to imagine going back to a physical classroom where you don't have polls. Sure, you could ask a question and just have students raise their hands, but then they'll be swayed by seeing what other students are voting for. Some teaching platforms have a polling option built in (like Zoom and Adobe Connect), but you can also use an external program. Polls can be great for a quick check on how well students understand what you've just gone over, and it can also be fun to do polls if you have several possible activities and want to give students a choice. In a physical classroom, the loudest voices tend to win out, but a poll actually lets you see what most students would prefer.

Mic

The chat box is great because it sets a low bar for engagement, but you'll want to try to get every student on mic at least once per class. If students are reluctant to put themselves forward, use the chat box to draw them out or use breakout rooms to give them space to develop their ideas.

If students are eager and you see a crowd of raised hands, try taking your discussion to the next level by staying out of it yourself. Online teaching can sometimes get into a ping-pong pattern: teacher asks question and student A answers, teacher responds and asks another question, student B answers, teacher responds and asks another question. It's hard to avoid this pattern, but it keeps students from actually engaging with each other. If you have lots of raised hands, tell your students to "baton the mic" ( as one of our colleagues puts it): when one person is done speaking, the next in line responds without the teacher intervening.

As a teacher, it's hard to let go, step back, and not give your own commentary on every student utterance, but it builds a richer discussion and more sophisticated speaking skills among your students to let them learn to respond directly to each other and have the responsibility for moving the conversation forward.

Camera

It's great if you can have all students on camera, but for most teachers that won't be possible. Having everyone on camera can help keep them accountable, and it's also just hard to have a discussion when no one can see each others' faces.

But keeping everyone on camera can't always happen. If you're teaching on Zoom, participants can only see a few faces unless they happen to have an external monitor, which gives an unfair advantage to wealthier students. If you're teaching on Adobe Connect, the multiple videos can cause lag because they eat up so much bandwidth. And even if your connection can handle all the video feeds, there probably won't be room on the screen for more than 15 or so students, so it would require a very small class size.

If you aren't able to have everyone on camera all the time, you should look for opportunities to let students go on camera. When you do so, stay up on camera yourself: it can be scary to be up there alone, and students will appreciate your kind nods as they speak. (And for students who don't know when to stop speaking, you can wave a hand or get their attention with a gesture.)

Dead Space

The types of activities that will bring students on mic and camera - answering question prompts; giving presentations; translating sentences or passages; acting as instructors for a particular unit - are not in themselves cutting edge pedagogy. In a virtual classroom, however, you do have to be mindful of those moments of dead space while students turn on their camera, inevitably have to reset their mics, forget to plug in their headphones - as well as the natural inclination to zone out when someone else is doing work. Those precious seconds can intensify the siren call of Youtube or Reddit just a browser tab away.

So to keep students from drifting in those moments, it's useful to have an additional layer of activity and interaction happening at the same time: if one student is tackling a sentence or passage, ask other students to private text chat you their interpretation or to answer grammatical and interpretive questions you've already included on the slide in preparation for this classroom activity (see figure), or set the expectation of a certain number of comments in text chat in response to their classmate's presentation. And as juvenile as it may seem, encourage them to use the "applause" or "laughter" buttons of your videoconferencing software, for that little endorphin kick at seeing robotic icons of appreciation.

Example of a slide with multiple tasks. Photo by Anna Pisarello, copyright Stanford University

Slides

Taking the time outside of class to design your slides with a watchful eye towards community building will give solid visual scaffolding for student interaction and engagement to flow organically during the synchronous portion. If you do have slides with (e.g.) Latin exercises, make sure every student in the class has something to do. So if a slide has ten exercises and you have twelve students, make sure each student has a task. For example, having ten students do one exercise apiece, one student write the Latin numbers for each exercise (ūnum, duo, tria, etc.), and one student write the Roman numerals for each (I, II, III, etc.). For practicing paradigms, I create slides with multiple iterations of the charts so that multiple students can work simultaneously on the board, which would be chaotic in a brick and mortar classroom (see figure).

Example of a whiteboard. Photo by Anna Pisarello, copyright Stanford University

Whiteboard

However, you don't need to wear yourself out designing a long and elaborate deck of slides for every single class period. Alternating between pre-prepared slides and spontaneous scribbling on the whiteboard functionality of your teaching platform ( or an external one if it's not built in) will keep the class rhythm active and engaging. That practiced confidence in jumping between formats smoothly will allow for a quicker response to student needs or interests and for greater control over the direction of the class session. One of our colleagues almost entirely eschews Powerpoints and usually just puts up a blank slide or whiteboard, then models note-taking as the discussion takes shape. It looks like lazy-teacher mode (and it certainly does save time on prep!), but it also makes sure that you don't out-pace your students by moving faster than they can write in their own notes.

Learning Management System (LMS)

Your LMS (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, e.g.) is not necessarily a locus of community interaction, but it will mitigate the loss of time that community-building necessitates in the synchronous classroom if you move course material to asynchronous formats whenever possible, to something approaching a flipped classroom model.

A clearly designed course website on your LMS will head off questions and confusions that may take over that valuable synchronous class time. For instance, any time you know you'll be talking for more than five minutes, consider making a recording and have the students watch it outside of class. In fact, class time should be almost entirely dedicated to interactive learning: it's the best way to build community and the best use of your time. (But be kind to your students, and take account of that time in how you assign homework; and be kind to yourself, just bang that lecture out, don't do multiple takes and try to get it perfect.) When introducing a major project, assignment, or upcoming exam information, spend only a few minutes on the basics and direct students to a designated information page on your course site to browse after class time.

Discussion boards

Most LMSs include a discussion board functionality, but you can also use other educational discussion forum sites if yours does not. Discussion boards are not exclusive to online classes: I certainly used them in brick and mortar college courses to ask students to post about the course material, but my pedagogical goal was primarily to ensure that students had done the reading, rather than to foster cross-communication among students (after all, we had the in-person classroom for that).

There are myriad ways to use discussion boards, but for fully online teaching it's a great idea to build in student interaction here as well as in the synchronous sessions; a set of frequent low-stakes discussion board activities with a horizontal component will keep up student engagement with each other outside of the "live" classes. When I teach Cicero or Caesar, I ask students to decipher each other's attempts at stylistic imitation (anyone who has taught prose comp would likely recognize the value in this, in the name of educational enrichment of course); for literary topics, I might ask them to expand or refute each other's posts on secondary literature.

As humanists, as classicists, it will hopefully be a rewarding project to explore online education with a view to creating a culture of exchange, growth, and careful development of thought. The fact that classrooms are now in a virtual space should not take away from the joys and complexities of an academic community.

This is a stressful time for faculty and students, and we are all operating within a larger educational, professional, and market culture that values and expects immediate results and measurable quantitative progress. As a teacher, you may have an instinctive drive to use every minute of in-person class time productively in goal-oriented activity, in particular if you only have a small synchronous component. But we have found that it makes for a richer classroom experience to take the time to bring those pedagogical relationships back to their roots of interpersonal exchange - both instructor-student and horizontally between students.

After all, a class is more than its content; it's a place to build an intellectual community, and in these times of social distance and isolation, we need that shared community more than ever.

Anna Pisarello and Tom Hendrickson teach Latin and English at Stanford Online High School. Our own pedagogical practices owe more than we can adequately express to our many outstanding colleagues, both past and present, especially Katie Balsley, Caedmon Haas, Anne Hruska, John Lanier, and Kristina Zarlengo. For more on the nuts and bolts of building an effective online classroom, see our school's resource page.

Eidolon is a publication of Palimpsest Media LLC. Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr | Patreon | Store

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How to Build Community in Your Online Classroom

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Last March, as teachers mashed their course content into an online format, they could at least count on the community they had been building in person for months. This fall teachers will be facing a new challenge: how to build a community among students who may never have been in the same place at the same time.

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We like to be productive. So we create keyboard shortcuts. We make lists. We stick Post-it notes and set up reminders.

We don't want to overlook details or stray away from standards. So we stick to rules, create guidelines, and follow templates.

Worksheets, templates, cheat sheets, checklists, and the like are nifty productivity tools. These help us keep our wits about us and our energies from being scattered in the midst of a flurry of activity and create flawless products without working long hours, plodding through multiple rounds of rework, and overshooting deadlines.

The following eLearning templates, cheat sheets, and checklists will ensure that you dot the i's and cross the t's and don't miss the fine print while scrambling to make the deadline:

From the stories you weave and the games you design to the words, colors, and images you use, sundry elements come together to create a seamless eLearning course. It is just like baking a cake. You have to use the right ingredients and in the right amount. You cannot throw just about anything into the mix and hope that the cake will turn out tasty.

Here's a screenshot of the table. Click on this link to interact with the table.

Perhaps you've been here: Amidst pressure from colleagues or employees, or after reading an online article about training trends, you took the plunge. You started an eLearning program at your organization - and then watched with dismay as it fell short of your goals.

You have to stop doing this! Don't accept "not-so-good" eLearning courses as a solution to resolve a training need. This will only keep perpetuating a negative stereotype of eLearning programs within our company.

To combat this, Steve Yacovelli has created this helpful checklist to help us evaluate our online learning courses.

Check it out: How to Effectively Evaluate E-Learning

3) Storyboard Templates

The storyboard is the roadmap that keeps eLearning designers on the same page and guides them through the plot of a scenario, the logic running through a game, and the visual theme of the course. An eLearning storyboard is like a lesson plan but more expansive in scope. A storyboard doesn't only lay out the content overheads; it also describes the graphics, videos, and how the scenarios and the games will evolve.

Storyboards make the design and development processes efficient by removing ambiguity and letting designers visualize how their ideas will play out. These advantages translate into rich, engaging, and memorable learning experiences.

Check this repository of storyboard templates. You can tinker with the features and create templates of your own.

Also download this template we've created.

This infographic on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy of verbs progresses from lower-order (LOTS) to higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) and covers all stages of the taxonomy. You can refer to this resource while planning lessons, creating assessments, and designing rubrics.

Download the complete full version here.

Don't settle for anything less than excellence. Also keep in mind that not every professional developer delivers excellence or flawless products. It 's hard to make out authentic genius and professionalism from the mere tall claims. So here's a checklist to help you evaluate a course for quality, relevance, and value based on the following typical parameters (or the pitfalls, sinkholes, and minefields that many eLearning developers are unable to avoid):

Ambiguous navigational structure

Poorly chunked and improperly sequenced content

Text heaviness that is overwhelming

Visual design that increases the cognitive load

Inadequate scenarios that fail to create relevance

Insufficient activities and problem-solving activities

Download this 3 pageChecklist to Assess the Quality of an E-Learning Course.

6) Training Needs Analysis Questionnaire Template

The first step of bringing about positive and lasting change is to carry out needs analysis. In the context of corporate training, you have to determine the gap between the current level of skill and knowledge and the desired level of performance the organization strives to attain.
A thorough needs analysis also identifies the relevant training areas. This ensures your efforts are not wasted, and learners perceive the training as being relevant and are motivated.
Below are the links to some questionnaires and surveys that will help you carry out a training needs analysis for your course:
Now here's a disclaimer. Not all pre-made questionnaires will fit the bill. Organizational requirements are too diverse. Target audiences differ based on demographics and the roles they have to play in the workplace.

Before using a pre-made sample survey, make sure it is relevant to your target audience and the organizational requirements. You may also want to create your own survey based on an existing one. Be sure about the purpose of the survey and what you wish to analyze. Do you want to find out what the audience already knows? Do you want to know what skills they have to acquire to move to the next rung of the corporate ladder? You need this clarity to create new questions or customize existing ones.

Having this clarity of purpose will also help you find the best solution to bridge the knowledge and skill gap of employees. And, the best option might not always be an eLearning course. For instance, the reason for workers not being productive at work might be a lack of sophisticated machinery and not their lack of competency.

7) eLearning Style Guide

Font, font size, and typeface

Image placement

Choice and preferred spelling of words

Usage of abbreviations and acronyms

Course and module lists

File naming conventions

A style guide not only helps designers create courses with harmonious look-and-feel but also speeds up the production and delivery process by reducing rework. Additionally, having a style guide in place helps new team members get into the groove quickly.

Here is another template for an eLearning style guide. And here's another.

8) eLearning Audience Analysis Template

You create courses to help your audience acquire knowledge, learn new skills, and adopt healthier and productive work practices. However, you just cannot dump content on them. To ensure your course resonates with them, you have to deliver your message taking into account their education level, prior knowledge, beliefs, and learning preferences.

So there you are. We have listed the eLearning worksheets, templates, checklists, and cheat sheets that will help you be more productive at work. Download them, print them, and post them where you can refer to them frequently. They will help you remained ordered in the midst of chaos and deliver flawless products without slips and misses.

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8 Templates and Cheat Sheets Every eLearning Professional Needs [Updated 2018]

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We like to be productive. So we create keyboard shortcuts. We make lists. We stick Post-it notes and set up reminders. We don't want to overlook details or stray away from standards. So we stick to rules, create guidelines, and follow templates. Worksheets, templates, cheat sheets, checklists, and the like are nifty productivity tools.

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Key Takeaways

Faculty face a variety of barriers to adoption of academic technologies, which instructional designers can help them overcome or minimize.

These barriers can be divided into issues of concern over which instructional designers have no control, issues over which they can exert control, and issues over which they can influence others who do have control.

The tools and advice provided in this article can help instructional designers categorize barriers and develop best practices for dealing with them to foster faculty adoption of academic technologies.

Nearly every week sees the release of new academic technologies, ranging from full learning management systems to $5 apps. Deciding on the technologies to adopt for enterprise-wide use often goes to the academic technologies team, which usually includes educational technologists or instructional designers. Repeatedly, however, institutions mention low faculty adoption of technology as an issue. ¹ For instructional designers to support faculty adoption of technology might require new techniques and approaches.

Faculty face a series of barriers that range in complexity from relatively simple to quite difficult ("thorny" issues). A basic awareness of the types of barriers and consideration of circles of control and influence can support academic technology areas in overcoming and/or minimizing barriers. By combining them, we can group barriers into

1. Issues we can eliminate

2. Issues we can minimize

3. Issues we can support others in minimizing or removing

4. Issues out of our area of influence

This article presents a framework for barriers, reviews the theory of circles of concern, and provides ideas for increasing the influence of instructional designers.

Barriers

University educational technologists/instructional designers hear about barriers to academic technology adoption from faculty, help desks and other IT areas, and academic and administrative departments - from people at all levels of the organization - often voiced as complaints about the wasted or misspent money and effort. As the "face" of IT, instructional designers who hear about these barriers need to determine what actions they can and should take. Without more knowledge about the barriers, however, their action can end up wasted.

Barriers to instructional technology adoption can be categorized as (1) technology-based, (2) process issues, (3) administration controlled, (4) environmental, and (5) faculty controlled. These categories are further broken down into the areas shown in figure 1.

Figure 1. Ishikawa diagram of categorized barriers to faculty adoption of edtech²

Review of the Categories

Clarifying which barrier(s) an instructor faces is the first step in determining how to best support that instructor. The five categories shown in the fish diagram can help with this. Technology barriers surround the technology itself. Access, reliability, and complexity are features of the technology and how it is provided within the university's infrastructure. Process barriers relate to the university's implementation and ongoing support such as through a help desk or via self-help materials and pedagogical and technological professional development. During implementation, barriers might arise in the project management process, including communications. Administrative barriers involve academic department expectations such as control of underlying technology availability (for example, a new technology might require a webcam, but the department budget does not provide for new equipment), the compensation and reward structure (teaching vs. research), and appreciation of the effort required to effectively implement the new technology in a course. Environmental barriers encompass the university culture, acceptance of change, etc. And the faculty barriers range from self-efficacy and perception of the technology to effective adoption of the technology.

Often the Academic Technology group hears that the technology is not stable or is too time consuming. However, these complaints often come through as vague and cannot be managed. For example, if an instructor says he "does not have the time" to use a technology, does he mean time to learn or obtain it, time to revise his course appropriately or teach his students how to use it, time because it isn't a priority for him, or something else? When a technology is accused of not being stable, does that mean it works in some rooms and not others, it doesn't always work in the same room, it works differently in different locations, it isn't always available, or something else?

The type of support needed in these situations differs, so by clarifying the issue, we can better identify how to address the barrier. Instructional designers can help clarify these issues by asking questions around what is meant by these statements.

Circles of Control and Influence

Once identified, the actual barriers can be analyzed to determine who can influence or change each one. Sean Covey wrote about two circles: the circle of control and the circle of no control (although various authors have labeled these circles differently). ³

Picture two circles, as in figure 2:

The inner circle is our circle of control. It includes things we have control over, such as ourselves, our attitudes, our choices, our response to whatever happens to us. Surrounding the circle of control is the circle of no control. It includes the thousands of things we can't do anything about. ⁴

When considering barriers to technology adoption, the circle of concern contains all barriers that might keep faculty from adopting a new technology. Individual instructors may have some control over some barriers, mainly those within the faculty category: effective use, resistance to change, self-efficacy and background, perception of quality and effectiveness, and participation in professional development. However, most of the barriers in the technology, process, administration, and environment categories will affect faculty, and they will have little to no control over those. In addition, individual instructors might not be able to overcome their resistance to change or to self-efficacy and background concerns. Figure 3 shows barriers somewhat within the faculty member's control, with orange indicating that this is not always the case.

The Ishakawa diagram of figure 4 shows in green barriers which are usually within an instructor's control. Some instructors will know and understand how they can control some of these barriers. For example, one instructor might know she has a self-efficacy issue such as basic anxiety when using new technology. She may decide to go out of her way to learn a specific tool by attending training and consulting with an instructional designer. However, she has no control over many aspects of technology, such as reliability, compensation, or availability.

With so many issues outside of the instructors' control, we should not be surprised at the low rate of adoption!

The Role of the Educational Technologist/Instructional Designer

In the institutions where I have worked, the instructional designers are considered the "front line" responsible for moving faculty toward effective adoption of educational technology. Instructional designers in some colleges within the university can control the actual course design and development (project management). The instructional design team often can choose the faculty members with whom they work and might be able to control most of the process barriers, such as the types of support and professional development provided to instructors and the approach to each project. While this provides methods for overcoming some barriers, many other barriers might lie outside the instructional designers' circle of control. Figure 5 shows barriers that are somewhat within control, orange indicating that this is not always the case.

According to many writers, ⁵ the circle of concern can be further divided by adding a circle between the circles of control and concern, representing things we can influence (see figure 6). By concentrating on the circle of control and on the circle of influence, we can identify actions to take that might influence others and, therefore, affect barriers.

When considering barriers to technology adoption, things we can influence might include an instructor's use of a technology, the pedagogical approach an instructor takes, or administrative understanding of the time involved in effectively adopting a technology. Exactly what each instructional designer can control and influence will depend on the faculty member, the institution, and, in some instances, the department within the institution. An institution's instructional designers can have a greater impact on appropriate academic technology use by considering the barriers to use and identifying who controls them and who influences them.

The most direct influence that most instructional designers have is on faculty barriers. When working with an instructor one-on-one, instructional designers can usually quickly identify faculty barriers such as resistance to change, self-efficacy, and the instructor's perception of the quality and effectiveness of a technology or pedagogical approach. The designers can usually build trust with the instructor, which leads the instructor to try suggestions and discuss in depth how to improve. In my current institution, these instructors often ask the instructional designers to help with additional courses and recommend the person providing the service to other instructors. This expands the circle of influence exponentially (see figure 7). To quote an old ad: "They tell one friend and they tell one friend and so on and so on and so on."

Instructional designers can also influence removal or minimization of other barriers. According to EDUCAUSE Vice President Susan Grajek, "Challenges with non-IT capabilities such as governance, leadership, and community engagement are more likely to be impeding progress in e-learning initiatives than problems with IT's operational effectiveness." ⁶ For example, in one institution where I was an instructional designer, my team and I worked with the faculty development team to build an instructional design model specifically for faculty. Presented in many faculty development sessions since then, this model has increased both the use of project management during course design and the respect accorded the instructional design team. In addition, conversations in meetings that included a vice provost led instructional designers to mention research we had done on instructors' concerns with online materials and their intellectual property (IP) as a barrier to faculty use of technologies. This influenced the vice provost to consider other approaches to IP.

In another institution the instructional design team worked with the help desk support team to develop a process for using knowledge base articles as a primary source for faculty training. This gave faculty more confidence in the knowledge base and taught them where they could find detailed materials at any time. It also improved our relationship with the help desk team and influenced their approach to writing knowledge base articles.

The instructional designers also worked with deans and associate deans to identify approaches to program redevelopment. In these meetings, they discussed barriers such as access to technology (webcams and microphones in this case), which affected faculty adoption of a flipped classroom.

In all of these situations, instructional designers influenced adoption of academic technology, directly or indirectly. By focusing on the areas of control and influence, the instructional designers could increase their influence, which in turn increased their visibility in the institution and influenced the organizational environment.

How to Increase Your Circle of Influence

Instructional designers occupy a unique position in the university. They often have close contact with instructors and with administrators at various levels of the organization. Special projects such as the Purdue University Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT) project and the University of Cincinnati Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility project put instructional designers in meetings where they can voice concerns about issues that will negatively affect program success. Following are some suggestions on how instructional design teams can control, influence, and minimize barriers to faculty adoption of instructional technologies:

Be clear: "The ECAR study on faculty found that most faculty (59%) - especially those without recent online teaching experience (73%) - do not view their institution as having a clear strategy for online learning... It's good to continually connect actions and requests for actions to the bigger plan. It's much easier to move toward a goal if everyone is seeing the same thing. If you're not, it's time to get your glasses checked."⁷

Identify the low-hanging fruit: Review the categories for barriers you can remove or minimize. For example, instructor professional development is often an issue. If you offer workshops but have low attendance, consider other options such as (1) "taking the show on the road" by asking college assistant deans to host local workshops; (2) asking a local early adopter to sponsor a department meeting for you; (3) creating self-paced training by developing a sequential list of tasks to accomplish a procedure (such as "Use WebEx for offering synchronous classes"), then link each task with a knowledge base article and publish the linked procedure on your training pages; or (4) teaming up with another university to provide offerings.

Use data: "To strengthen existing e-learning initiatives, optimize analytics for evaluating e-learning efficacy and initiative progress."⁸ Use the analytics to inform not just the instructional designers but also administrative areas and faculty about current use.

Find the pain: Hold faculty focus groups to identify their biggest issues. Focus groups, structured brainstorming, and other methods can help in gaining insight from the faculty to identify underlying issues. "Find the source of the resistance, and address it. Resistance is usually less about the technical changes coming and more about the '...social change - the change in their human relationships that generally accompanies technical change.' It's always the third answer to the question, 'What's really bothering you about this idea?' So dig deeper."⁹ Check what instructors think. In these types of exercises, it is important to:

Identify the underlying issues. For example, instead of accepting "time" as a barrier, ask them to drill down to the type of time. Perhaps using the Ishikawa Diagram will help with this, although this diagram would first require definitions for each of the barriers to ensure common identification.

Ensure that you are actually getting to root causes and common issues. Ask the focus group members to each indicate their top three barriers, for example.

Clearly identify what you can control: Brainstorm with the instructional design group to see if you all have the same concept of the areas of your circles of control and influence. While there may be disagreement, this might help the individual instructional designers recognize additional tools and methods. A possible approach to this would be to use the de Bono Group's Thinking Hats.¹⁰

Research solutions: Check with other universities to determine how they manage the barrier(s). To stretch your thinking, check with universities unlike yours - if your university is large, check small ones; if your university is research-based, check with teaching universities; if yours is public, check with privates.

Look for close fits: Identify barriers you and one other department/group can control or influence and meet with them to discuss joint strategies.

Push the circle #1: For those issues you cannot control, brainstorm what you can do to influence those who can influence or control them. For example, when talking with an associate dean about developing online courses, mention an issue and potential methods for minimizing, eliminating, or mitigating it. Offer to take further action if appropriate, or ask how you can help.

Push the circle #2: "IT leaders can invite other institutional constituents, such as academic leadership and institutional technologists, to collaboratively complete the maturity and deployment assessments using the EDUCAUSE Benchmarking Service. The results can help institutional teams

identify their institution's strengths and development needs relative to those of peers and to their own aspirations,

inform strategic planning for e-learning, and

provide metrics to track ongoing progress against the plan and relative to peers."¹¹

Take advantage of disruptions: Use other change initiatives to both minimize barriers and introduce best practices. For example, if the university expects your team to support an accessibility effort, can you introduce other best practices to faculty at the same time? In discussions with the university-wide accessibility project team, can you discuss availability and reliability of software? While discussing instructor time and compensation for the project, can you show research on the costs to instructors to build and manage a course?

Periodically revisit the thorny issues: Revisiting the more difficult barriers, you might find that you can influence these as well. As your circle of influence grows, you may come in contact with different types of people who do have control or influence. Brainstorming could help you identify new approaches to issues, and continued research on other universities and their approaches could give you new tools.

Conclusion

Because instructional designers work throughout the university in close contact with faculty, they often see the issues that faculty members face more clearly than other areas of IT. However, because the instructional designers are responsible for supporting the adoption of instructional technologies without the authority to back it up, they can become frustrated. By understanding the types of barriers that instructors face and delving into the actual issues, instructional designers can review their circles of control and influence. Through creative thinking and team work, they can then work on issues that impede their faculty from adopting academic technologies. Proactive instructional design teams can greatly enhance instructors' effective use of technologies using some of the tools provided in this article.

Notes

1. D. Christopher Brooks, ECAR Study of Faculty and Information Technology, 2015 (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2015); D. Christopher Brooks, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2016 (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2016); Susan Grajek, Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2015: E-Learning, research report (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2016); and Nicholas Yates, Julius Su, Michael Truong, and Georges Detiveaux, "Putting Technology Models to Work for Faculty - Featuring SAMR," presented at the POD Conference 2016, Louisville, KY, November 12, 2016.

2. Pat Reid, "Categories for barriers to adoption of instructional technologies," Education and Information Technologies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 2014): 383-407.

3. Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 54.

4. Ibid.

5. This list includes Chris Chittenden, "3. The Circles of Control, Influence and Concern," Talking about, 2016; Vlad Dolezal, "Circle of Concern, Circle of Influence, Circle of Control," [http://vladdolezal.com/blog/2011/circle-of-concern-circle-of-influence-circle-of-control/] Alive with Passion blog [http://vladdolezal.com/blog/], October 14, 2011; Caleb Jones, "Your Zone of Control," Sublime Your Time, November 9, 2014; MG Rush, "Scope Creep Kills: Facilitate Concern, Influence, and Control," MG Rush FAST Facilitation Leadership Weekly blog, August 11, 2016; and Andi Roberts, "Circle of Concern and Influence," Andi Roberts website, March 29, 2014.

6. Susan Grajek, Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2015: E-Learning, research report (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2016).

7. Holly E. Morris, "Technology & Change: Perspectives on the Role of Faculty," Transforming Higher Ed blog, January 27, 2015.

8. Grajek, Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2015: E-Learning.

9. Morris, "Technology & Change."

10. "What Is Six Thinking Hats?" Learning Heroes, December 9, 2014; and Six Thinking Hats," the de Bono Group, 2016.

11. Grajek, Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2015: E-Learning.

Pat Reid, EdD, is director of Instructional Innovation and assistant director of Integrated Instruction at the University of Cincinnati.

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supporting faculty adoption of technology: what can we do?

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Supporting Faculty Adoption of Technology: What Can We Do?

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Faculty face a variety of barriers to adoption of academic technologies, which instructional designers can help them overcome or minimize. These barriers can be divided into issues of concern over which instructional designers have no control, issues over which they can exert control, and issues over which they can influence others who do have control.

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EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Key Issues results all years

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Because a large part of elearning involves the learner viewing the screen, it's critical that the visual elements you choose enhance the learning experience.

Today, I'll touch on three graphic design principles for instructional designers. They will help you build visuals that support your design and help you build more effective courses.

Use layouts to convey meaning and relationships.

When you place text and graphics on a screen, you can't assume that the learner automatically understands what it means. Your job is to create relationships and guide the learner's understanding.

Look at the image below. Without explanation, you're left to wonder what the relationship is between the characters.

Now, look at the next image. Same characters, only they're organized better. Because of proximity and spacing, you're able to imply relationships without even presenting other information. This helps guide the learners with less explanation.

However, the reverse can also be true. Through poor design, you can imply relationships between information on the screen that doesn't exist.

Use patterns and repetition to organize your content.

Since you're introducing new ideas, you can assist the learning process by using repetitive elements and patterns. They help organize the content and bring a sense of unity to the course.

For example, there's a lot of information in the image below. However, it's not easy to understand it because it's all chunked together. I get tired just looking at all of that text and I have no inclination to explore more. In addition, because of the way it's presented, I don't know what the information is and what it means to me.

Give the learner visual cues so that they're able to follow the course content and understand how it all fits together. This is especially true for online courses because people have developed web surfing habits, where they quickly scan the screen for information.

If you look at the image below, you'll notice that by using some repetitive elements the information is easier to process. In this example, bold headline means title and underlined text represents sections. As you can see, the learner can quickly scan the information and determine where it fits into the scheme of things. By repeating something like the underlined text, the learner intuitively knows that those things are related.

You're not limited to text. You can also do the same thing with the graphic elements. Whatever you design should help the learner sort the information and create a sense of comfort with knowing how the content on the screen is related to each other and the overall objective of the course.

Use just the right images. No more.

Whether you use text or graphics, all of it needs to support the objectives of the course. If it's on the screen, then it should contribute and not detract from your course. This includes the visual style, fonts, colors, and symbols. They all contribute to the communication process. Make sure that they're contributing to your message in the right way.

Suppose you're watching an elearning course on public parks and you see the image below on the screen. What does that image tell you? If you're like me, you're expecting something about the environment or litter in the park.

Without communicating anything else, the image is already starting to tell you something. That's how you want to use images, symbols, or any other graphics on your screen. You want them to contribute to the course.

On the flip side, there's a tendency to put decorative images on the screen to fill in blank spots. Or sometimes, the client wants to "jazz things up a bit." Avoid that. Don't litter the screen with useless elements. Some studies show that decorative graphics can negatively impact how learners process the information. So you run the risk that you are actually impeding the learning process. Not only that, but like the image above, if the image communicates information and it is not related to the course content, you end up confusing the learner.

You don't need to be a Photoshop pro or a professional graphic designer. However, to craft an effective elearning course it's important to understand the principles of graphic design. I touched on a few in this post, but there's a lot more to learn.

If you're looking for a good book to get started, I highly recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book. The book covers the basics of visual design. It has great examples and is easy to get through.

An important part of instructional design is the use and layout of your visual elements. How you design your screen tells your learners where to look and what's most important. And you want the information on the screen to support the learning objectives of the course.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share them by clicking on the comments link.

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3 Graphic Design Principles for Instructional Design Success | The Rapid E-Learning Blog

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Because a large part of elearning involves the learner viewing the screen, it's critical that the visual elements you choose enhance the learning experience. Today, I'll touch on three graphic design principles for instructional designers. They will help you build visuals that support your design and help you build more effective courses.

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Almost anyone in the field of educational technology, but instructional designers in particular, can benefit from having at least a basic working knowledge of HTML. "HTML" stands for "Hypertext Markup Language," and it is the backbone of almost every website or webpage on the internet (along with CSS and JavaScript, which are outside the scope of this post, except for some additional resources provided below). HTML is not a true programming language; it is a markup language, which means (roughly) that it is used to dictate what content will appear on a webpage and how that content will be displayed.

So why is it important that instructional designers in particular have a basic working knowledge of HTML? After all, most Learning Management Systems (such as Blackboard or Canvas) have their own built-in WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") text editors or page editors, the intention of which is to enable rich text formatting and page-layout control without the need to author or edit the HTML for a page directly. While sticking to a WYSIWYG editor sounds great in principle, in practice there are at least two good reasons for supplementing your WYSIWYG editor skills with at least some basic HTML knowledge:

Unbeknown to many users, the WYSIWYG editor in a typical Learning Management System produces HTML for the formatted content behind the scenes. Most WYSIWYG editors give users the power to view and edit this HTML directly, which can be useful for adding formatting beyond the scope of what the WYSIWYG editor can create on its own (such as adding hanging indents in APA references) or for fixing any formatting quirks introduced by the WYSIWYG editor itself.

Copying content from another source, such as a Microsoft Word or Google Docs document, and pasting that content directly into the WYSIWYG editor can be problematic because this pasted text may carry rich formatting or other HTML artifacts that must be cleared or reformatted by hand. While most WYSIWYG editors have some form of a "Clear Formatting" button for this purpose, in practice it may still be necessary to manually remove HTML artifacts or embedded formatting from the HTML for the pasted text directly.

As a markup language, HTML uses a system of embedded and nested "tags" to indicate how content should be displayed in a web browser. Most HTML tags come in pairs, with a beginning tag and an end tag, and the rules for that tag are applied to everything contained between them.

One of the simplest HTML tags is the paragraph tag, which tells the browser to display a piece of content as a paragraph. The beginning paragraph tag looks like this: <p>. And the end paragraph tag looks like this: </p>. (Notice the front slash, which distinguishes this tag as an end tag.) If you wanted the browser to display something as a paragraph, you would add the beginning tag <p> to the front of the paragraph and add the end tag </p> to the end of the paragraph:

<p>Here is a sample paragraph. Because these sentences are contained within the paragraph tags, a browser will display them on the screen as a paragraph.</p>

A fundamental concept of HTML is that tags can be nested within each other. For example, suppose you wanted to make the word "paragraph" appear in bold in the first sentence of the previous example. You could accomplish this by adding the beginning and end tag for bold text (<b></b>) around that word:

<p>Here is a sample <b>paragraph</b>. Because these sentences are contained within the paragraph tags, a browser will display them on the screen as a paragraph.</p>

Here is a sample paragraph. Because these sentences are contained within the paragraph tags, a browser will display them on the screen as a paragraph.

Notice that the word "paragraph," with its surrounding bold tags, is still completely contained within the beginning and end paragraph tags (which makes sense, as that word, bolded or otherwise, is still a part of the overall paragraph).

Let's look at a slightly more complex example and introduce another new HTML tag into the mix. Suppose that you wanted to add a header (something like "Sample Heading") immediately above the paragraph from the last example. To accomplish this, you could use a header tag like <h1></h1>, which is the Heading 1 tag. (Note that there are various levels of headers, such as Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, and so on, but let's stick to the Heading 1 tag for simplicity.) To add the text "Sample Heading" as a heading, put the heading text before the beginning paragraph tag (since the heading will come before the paragraph), and enclose the heading text in the beginning and end Header 1 tags:

<h1>Sample Heading</h1>

<p>Here is a sample <b>paragraph</b>. Because these sentences are contained within the paragraph tags, a browser will display them on the screen as a paragraph.</p>

Here is a sample paragraph. Because these sentences are contained within the paragraph tags, a browser will display them on the screen as a paragraph.

Although there are many, many more HTML tags, the following are some of the basic HTML tags that a typical instructional designer may need to know (broken down by purpose):

Headings:

Text and Formatting:

Images:

Adding images with HTML is a bit more complicated, as it requires specifying additional information inside the HTML image tag <img>, such as the file name of the image and the image's width and height. For example:

<img src="latte_art.jpg" alt="Latte Art" width="240" height="160">

In this case, you can see that the image tag <img> itself contains additional information, known as attributes, required to properly display the image:

src = "file name or url"

alt = "alternative text displayed if the image can't load and for screen readers for accessibility purposes"

width = "image width in pixels"

height = "image height in pixels"

Links:

Adding links (sometimes known as "hyperlinks") in HTML is likewise a bit more complicated. Like the images tag, you must provide additional information, such as the destination URL, as attributes inside the <a> tag used to add a link:

Inside the beginning <a> tag, the "href" attribute is used to specify the destination URL for the link, while the text enclosed between the beginning <a> tag the the end </a> tag is the clickable text displayed in the browser.

Tables:

Being complex structures, tables can be fairly complicated to create and format in HTML, but let's look at a very simple 2 x 2 table in HTML and see how it's constructed. Larger tables, or tables with different dimensions can be constructed by adding additional rows and table cells as needed.

Here are the basic HTML tags needed to create a simple table:

As you might anticipate, these HTML tags must be nested in each other in the correct way in order to properly form a table in HTML. For example, table rows are parts of tables, so the various table row tags <tr></tr> will go inside a <table></table> tag. Similarly, table cells are parts of a table row, and so the header cell tags <th></th> and the data cell tags <td></td> will go inside the table row <tr></tr> tag. Here is the HTML for a simple 2 x 2 table with a header row, including some placeholder text to make it easier for you to see how the whole table fits together:

In this example, the outer <table></table> tags contain two different pairs of beginning/end table row tags <tr></tr>. Inside the first table row tag there are two pairs of beginning/end table header tags <th></th>; this says that the first row has two header cells, which means the overall table will have two columns. Inside the second table row tag there are two pairs of data cell tags <td></td> that define the data cells for the second table row.

Here is how the browser renders the complete table using the HTML table code example from above:

Lists:

In HTML there are two types of lists, ordered lists and unordered lists. Ordered lists are created with the <ol></ol> tag, and unordered lists are created with the <ul></ul> tag. Of course, any list, by definition, is made up of some number of listed items. These listed items are specified in HTML using the list item tag <li></li>. Because the list items are part of the list, the various pairs of list items tags <li></li> must appear between the beginning and end tags for an ordered list <ol></ol> or an unordered list <ul></ul>, as shown in the following examples:

There are various style options for the list item markers in ordered lists, which are accessed using the "type" attribute of the ordered list <ol> tag, as shown in this example:

The various options for the "type" attribute of ordered lists are:

type="1" (Numbers)

type="A" (Uppercase letters)

type="a" (Lowercase letters)

type="I" (Uppercase Roman numerals)

type="i" (Lowercase Roman numerals)

To create sub-bulleted or nested lists, simply place an another ordered list <ol></or> or unordered list </ul> inside a list item <li></li> tag of the outer list.

Additional Resources:

This brief overview of some HTML basics for instructional designers only scratches the surface. There are many additional HTML tags and features that make up the latest version of HTML, known as "HTML5." Plus you can combine HTML with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to add more sophisticated styling to your content. And you can combine HTML with the JavaScript programming language to add interactivity and functionality to otherwise static HTML pages.

The following resources from W3Schools provide a complete reference guide and tutorial for HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript:

As an instructional designer, you certainly don't need to be a master of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. But a working knowledge of the basics of HTML can be an asset to your work in designing, building, or maintaining online courses and a valuable skill set to have from an employment standpoint across the entire educational technology industry.

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HTML Basics for Instructional Designers | Resilient Educator

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Why Should Instructional Designers Have a Working Knowledge of HTML? Almost anyone in the field of educational technology, but instructional designers in particular, can benefit from having at least a basic working knowledge of HTML.

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Mayer’s principles for multimedia learning | instructional design

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Unlock the full potential of multimedia learning with Mayer’s Principles, a set of research-based guidelines designed to enhance comprehension and retention.

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Questions, Reflective Writing, and Small-Group Work

This sampling of strategies provide ideas for helping students prepare for discussions and for collaborating with others to develop those ideas.

Instructor-Designed Questions

(Help instructor to guide pre-discussion reading and preparation)

Distribute questions on the course schedule or on a Learning Management System such as Canvas.

Include a mix of "closed" comprehension questions, which have a limited number of correct answers, and open-ended questions, which can generate multiple strong responses.

Begin class by asking for responses to at least one of the questions (or by asking students to discuss their responses in pairs or groups of three).
Record resulting ideas on the chalkboard; integrate these ideas throughout rest of the class.

Student-Designed Questions

(Help students to help determine direction of a discussion)

Ask students to bring to class (or post online) 2 discussion questions.

Give students instructions and examples to clarify what types of questions are most effective for generating discussion and how they can use the questions to deepen their own learning (e.g. by making connections among topics or readings, or by identifying assumptions or counter-arguments).

Grade the questions and give students feedback to help them improve their question-writing skills over time.

To reduce the number of submitted questions to a manageable amount (i.e. a number that is realistic for you to grade and to use during class discussions), divide the class into two-four groups and assign the responsibility for writing questions to only one group per class session.

5-Minute Informal Writing in Response to a Question

(Helps students develop thoughtful responses and helps quieter students to participate)

When used at the start of class, the exercise might ask students to recall or explain factual information or major ideas from the assigned readings.

When used in the middle or end of a class, this exercise can ask students to synthesize, complicate, or counter ideas that have already been discussed or presented, or to identify the "most important point" or the "muddiest point" in a discussion (Angelo and Cross).

Include time to ask for volunteers to read what they have written.

Record responses on the board and use these responses to shape the direction of the discussion.

Add any points that students did not address, but that are essential.

"Stand Where I Stand" Debate

(Adapted from Brookfield and Preskill)

Assign readings before class that will allow students to familiarize themselves with a controversial topic, including facts that may be used as evidence for specific positions.

To begin the activity, write a debatable statement on the board, ask students to stand in a specific location in the room to indicate whether they strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree (for example).

After students have "positioned" themselves, call on individual students to explain their respective positions vis-a-via the debatable statement.

Once you have heard from a few students, tell everyone that they can move to a different position, to reflect any changes in their thinking.

Repeat steps above once or twice more, then ask students to discuss the process: What arguments were most compelling? Why? How did hearing different perspectives affect their thinking? What new questions were generated?

Small-Group Discussions: Facilitation Strategies and Selected Models

Strategies for Facilitating Small-Group Discussions

Give specific time limits and instructions.

Limit groups to 2-3 students each. With larger groups, some students will not participate.

Allow time after the group discussions for groups to report the results of group work and for students in other groups to ask questions and comment on their peers' ideas.

Integrate the results of group work into the closing discussion or lecture, and refer back to these ideas, when relevant, in subsequent class sessions.

Informal Collaborative-Learning Groups

Ask each group to analyze and annotate a figure, image, or short passage of text, or to solve a problem, then explain it to the class.

Assign roles (e.g. scribe, taskmaster, and spokesperson), so that each student has a clear and essential responsibility within the group. Explain each role so that the responsibilities of each are clear and understood as essential to the group's success.

Each time you assign such roles in groups, ask students to take on a different role than that which they fulfilled the last time. The idea is that students should fulfill each role roughly the same number of times, so that each student learns new skills and does not always take on the role the student is most comfortable in.

Think, Pair, Share

Ask students a question, then direct them to first think and write notes on their own for 30 seconds to a minute, then discuss their answers with a neighbor for 3-5 minutes, then present their ideas to class.

Record these ideas on the board, asking for other students to build on their peers' ideas as you go.

Think-Aloud Pair (Triad) Problem Solving (TAPPS)

(Adapted from Felder and Brent)

Divide students into groups of 3.

Give each pair a problem to solve, a text (or image) to interpret, or a case history to discuss.

Ask students to designate an explainer, a questioner, and a recorder.

The explainer explains how to solve the problem, interpret the text (or image), or analyze the case.

The questioner asks questions when the explanation is not clear or is incomplete. The questioner can also ask questions to give hints that might generate new or different explanations.

The recorder records the explanation via writing notes and/or drawing diagrams.

After 10 minutes, ask each explainer to present the explanation, using the recorder's notes. As a follow up, you might discuss what types of questions were most helpful in refining the explanation, and why.

Group Dialogues (appropriate for classes up to ~25 students)

(Adapted from Brookfield and Preskill)

Write a question on each of 4-5 large flip-chart sheets of paper (or areas of the chalkboard).

Divide students into 4-5 groups (one group per question).

Each group talks with one another for five minutes to develop an answer to the question, then writes their answer on the paper or chalkboard.

When you say "move," each group moves to the next question in succession, reads the answer already recorded, talks with one another, then adds a written response to the first group's written answer.

Continue until all four groups have written a response to each question.

As a class, review the responses to each question, discussing how the answers evolved via dialogue.

References

Angelo, T. A., and K. P. Cross. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S. D. and S. Preskill. (2005). Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and techniques for democratic classrooms. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Felder, R.M. and R. Brent (2005). Active learning: An introduction. ASQ Higher Education Brief 2(4). http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/ALpaper(ASQ).pdf

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This sampling of strategies provide ideas for helping students prepare for discussions and for collaborating with others to develop those ideas. Instructor-Designed Questions (Help instructor to guide pre-discussion reading and preparation) Distribute questions on the course schedule or on a

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Well-crafted discussion questions can carve out spaces for disagreement. They can even encourage it. But cultivating the type of respectful disagreement that helps students grow academically and personally is tricky, especially when students feel strongly about particular issues. In this video, Tim McCarthy models the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that help his students learn how to "disagree without being disagreeable."

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Inviting students to take a stand and disagree

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Well-crafted discussion questions can carve out spaces for disagreement. They can even encourage it. But cultivating the type of respectful disagreement that helps students grow academically and personally is tricky, especially when students feel strongly about particular issues. In this video, Tim McCarthy models the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that help his students learn how to "disagree without being disagreeable."

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Creating this philosophy, I came across some quotes that I found intriguing as well as inspirational. One by Jennifer Fleming states, "Teaching in the Internet age means we must teach tomorrow's skills today." (Nunez, 2015) Fleming's statement is intuitive as well as correct.

The other, I believe, is the most prevalent today is by Cammy Bean, "People expect to be bored by e-Learning-let's show them it doesn't have to be like that!" (Nunez, 2015) This quote made me think about the online course I have seen. Just a series of links to publisher content and publisher PowerPoint slides. Nothing at all like I believe an online course should be.

I feel an online teaching philosophy encompasses several factors but no limited to; engagement, community, collaboration, student orientated, facilitation and more. I believe that the days of teachers standing up and lecturing are coming to an end. I strongly feel it is more import to create an environment where the focus is no the student. This encourages critical thinking and self-sufficiency.

Using various types of social media works to create community and collaboration. Students cannot meet in an online class as they would in a podium class to interconnect. Therefore it is critical to create an atmosphere where everyone is comfortable and willing to contribute without fear or feeling left out. Use of social media in the classroom can also help students gain a social network that can lead them to professional connections for the future. Especially in their specific field.

Communications is vital in online learning. The facilitators must outline what they expect of students but what students can expect from them. Communication student to student is important as well. Twitter, Facebook and other social media programs can be an effective tool in encouraging this element. Bard has it right!

"To utilize social media tools effectively and properly, you must absolutely generate spontaneous communications in direct response to what others are saying or to what is happening in that moment. Be yourself. Be conversational. Be engaged." (Bard, 2016)

Privacy, security, and technical ease of use, and support are another critical area that I believe is paramount. With the prevalence for viruses, malware, and social engineering the need to be keenly aware of these elements. Keeping as much as feasible in an LMS is one of the best solution. Students can then use the blog, discussion, and chat tool in confidence for privacy and security. This also protects the facilitator and university in the event a student posts items that are unacceptable.

I find that making sure students know where to find technical support is fundamental for online learning. Facilitators need to be free to concentrate on the content. The break fix or technical questions should be directed to a university support team. I put contact information in my syllabus and introductory module overview so our student technical know where to find the support area.

I am careful choose the types of media tools for my courses as these tools are becoming indispensable in online education. "Teaching with technology isn't just about staying current on the latest tools, it's about knowing how to successfully incorporate the best tools into your teaching when and where it makes sense." (Faculty Focus: Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications, 2016)

There is definitive criteria for selecting education tools for a course. Get to know your students and their learning styles. Technology must benefit and enhance the learning environment. If most students in the class are non-traditional then the students may have technical phobia. The tools must be easily accessible to the students, easy to use, and know what support materials are needed. Are the tools cross platform? An instructor cannot expect students to use and Apple based tool if most of the students use Androids.

I work to avoid the social media mistakes that can be made. Mistakes are similar to ignoring the community. Instructors must give regular feedback to the students so they feel a part of the online community. Another poor use of social media involves properly broadcasting information to students. Not all communication media is the same as the others. "Essentially, the rules to good, creative content applies across social networks, while still taking into account each platform's audience." (Giuliano, 2015)

Using social media for e-Learning is here to stay. The Babson Survey Research Group reports, "90% of all faculty are using social media in courses." (Moran, Jeff, & Tinti-Kane, 2011) Educational trends can change rapidly. I am sure I will be updating my online teaching philosophy over time.

Works Cited
Bard, M. (2016, ). 99 Favorite Social Media Quotes and Tips. Retrieved June 22, 2016, from www.mirnabard.com: http://www.mirnabard.com/2010/04/99-favorite-social-media-quotes-and-tips/

Faculty Focus: Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications. (2016). (Magna Publications) Retrieved June 22, 2016, from Teaching with Technology: http://www.facultyfocus.com/topic/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/

Giuliano, K. (2015, July 2). CNBC Social Media. Retrieved June 22, 2016, from The 5 biggest social media mistakes to avoid: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/02/the-5-biggest-social-media-mistakes-to-avoid.html

Moran, M., Jeff, S., & Tinti-Kane, H. (2011, April). Teaching, Learning, and Sharing: How Today's Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media. Retrieved June 22, 2016, from ERIC: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED535130

Nunez, M. (2015, March 31). Famous Quotations (#My Fav.#). Retrieved June 18, 2016, from http://margsjemkristelnunez.blogspot.com/

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Creating this philosophy, I came across some quotes that I found intriguing as well as inspirational. One by Jennifer Fleming states, "Teaching in the Internet age means we must teach tomorrow's skills today." (Nunez, 2015) Fleming's statement is intuitive as well as correct.

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Introducing the ASU Instructional Designers [Infographic] - Teach Online

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About 40 staff members at Arizona State University have the words Instructional Design or Instructional Designer in their job title. Even though there are a lot of them about (and some have been at ASU for quite a long time), for many of us, the full range of what Instructional Designers do may be unknown. We asked a large group of ASU Instructional Designers and Technologists to tell us about the work they do and here is what we discovered.
Communicators
The first skill we master in Instructional Designer (ID) 101. Listening, speaking, writing and presenting are all important parts of our day-to-day. Our work is collaborative by nature. We are skilled at building consensus.
Thinkers
We think about things. We brainstorm. We experiment. We look for new and better all the time. We think about human psychology. We think about aesthetics, design, user experience, flow, look/feel. We think about the different senses and how they come into play.
Designers
We design instruction/teaching and learning experiences. At the heart of the matter is often the alignment of objectives, activities and assessments.
Relationships
We are skilled at building relationships and rapport with faculty, staff, and clients. There is the potential for a lot of emotion around what we do.
Data Analysts
Data-based decision making is part of what we do.
Superheroes
Look! Up in the sky! It's a media producer! It's a collaboration expert! It's an ID!
Guides
Instructional Designers are consultants, technologists, trainers, and evaluators. Whatever instructional issues you may face, we can be right by your side to help.
Builders
We bring a systematic approach to constructing learning experiences that includes analysis of the audience, environment, objectives, content, technologies, etc. Planning maps, guides, templates, process docs, outlines, storyboards, are all part of the way we approach projects.
Explorer
It's important that we stay on top of the latest processes and skills related to ID work. We communicate "best practices" in teaching and learning (particularly related to using technology).
Project Managers
We talk about projects and project management constantly. It frames how we think about work.
Fixers
When a course link breaks, when a weighted grade column doesn't add up, we can be there to help. We fix things that are broken. We solve problems.
Evaluators
We design, develop and evaluate content/instructional materials. Review and revision are essential.

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Introducing the ASU Instructional Designers [Infographic] - Teach Online

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About 40 staff members at Arizona State University have the words Instructional Design or Instructional Designer in their job title. Even though there are a lot of them about (and some have been at ASU for quite a long time), for many of us, the full range of what Instructional Designers do may be unknown.

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I received a question from a teacher asking about how they could incorporate audio files into classroom assignments that would be easy to access for a student with low vision. Since the student was going to be answering questions in a separate document regardless of how the assignment was presented, my first thought was how easy it would be to convert the assignment into a web-based multimedia page with the free Microsoft Office Sway tool. Here are my tips for how to create accessible assignments with Microsoft Office Sway, aimed at students with visual impairments.

What is Microsoft Office Sway?

Microsoft Office Sway is a free web app that allows users to create their own simple webpages and presentations with text, images, widgets, file attachments, and more. It's a great substitute for PowerPoint or handouts, and it's by far my favorite Microsoft Office application. I have been able to use it for lots of interesting projects over the years, including a cookbook, a formula sheet, and several different class presentations- all of which have earned a 100%.

RELATED LINKS

Why I chose to use Sway

Here are some of the many reasons I love Sway, and why I chose to use it to create accessible assignments:

IT CAN BE USED ON ANY DEVICE

Sway can be accessed on any internet-enabled device, which includes tablets, phones, computers, and similar. There are many users who prefer to read information off of tablets or phones over their computer, which can all have varying display sizes. Sway scales to all display sizes, so we don't have to worry about information running off the page.

IT'S ACCESSIBLE WITH SCREEN READERS

Sway has this awesome feature called accessibility view which simplifies the display of the page so it can be used with screen reading and screen magnification technology. Some students may feel more comfortable using a mobile screen reader such as TalkBack or VoiceOver instead of using their computer, and I wanted to use a program that would be compatible across various devices and accessibility settings.

IT'S REALLY EASY TO CREATE

If someone can click three buttons, they can create a Sway, and it doesn't take a lot of time to turn a traditional worksheet into a digital Sway document. While some tasks may require more time than others, Microsoft Office Sway makes it easy to add information and create beautifully organized documents.

It has more options than traditional word processors

Users can add a variety of different types of content to their Sway that they would not be able to add to a traditional document, such as audio files. These additional content types can help to bring documents to life and incorporate other accessibility features that can benefit learners.

No need to log-in or download software

While users will need to have a free Microsoft account to create a Sway, they can share the finished link with anyone regardless of if they have a Microsoft account or not. They also will not need to download any special software- a Sway can be accessed directly from the web browser just like any other website.

RELATED LINKS

Converting an assignment to a Microsoft Sway document

When converting an assignment to a Microsoft Sway document, the first step is to examine the assignment and determine what content type best matches each item on the page, and if any modifications will need to be made such as recording audio or linking to audio description for videos. This can be done by color-coding, adding tags/comments, or circling items on a page.

I divide content into the following categories:

Important text/questions on assignments

Additional text

Images, including graphs and charts

If a piece of content will need to be converted into another format, I add an additional tag or note with the type of format I need.

Related links

Structuring assignments with headings

One of the foundations of an accessible assignment is proper heading structure, and Microsoft Office Sway makes this easy for users. Users can insert a heading by clicking the plus icon underneath a Sway card (section) and selecting the "Text" tab. Before inserting any additional headings, I recommend typing the assignment title in the "Title" box.

Here is how I recommend using each of the headings:

Heading 1

Different from the Title heading, I use Heading 1 to label assignment sections, such as formula sheets, word banks, short stories, and similar items. If the assignment does not have any of these sections, users can type question numbers as headings so that users can easily jump between sections. I don't recommend typing out full questions as it can be difficult for screen reader users to jump between questions.

Heading 2

I typically type out question numbers in the Heading 2 format if I am working with a large amount of questions. In this context, I would use Heading 1 to label the Questions section, and then use Heading 2 to show the question number. For less detailed assignments/questions, it is acceptable to type out questions in the Heading 2 format.

Heading 3

For questions with multiple parts, I recommend typing the question number in the Heading 2 format, and then typing out each part of the question as Heading 3. For example, if problem 8 has three parts, I would type "Problem 8" as Heading 2, and then "8.1", "8.2", and "8.3" as Heading 3.

Regular text

Underneath Heading 2 or Heading 3, I will add additional text that is otherwise not included in a heading. This can be in the form of questions, further instructions, or other information.

Adding audio recordings for questions

While screen readers can read information out loud, some users may prefer to use audio files to read information out loud. Instead of displaying text, users can instead choose to insert audio files into their Sway by following these instructions:

1. Click on the plus icon at the bottom of a Sway card

2. Select the "Media" tab

3. Select the "Audio" option

From there, users can either record audio directly within the Sway by selecting the "Record" button on the card, or selecting the option to add an existing audio file. I typically record audio within Sway because it's fairly quick to do and I can do it from a mobile device with no issues.

Related links

Creating hyperlinks to other websites

I love including other links within my Sway so that I can access information from outside sources such as tutorials or other helpful websites. Users can select the "Link" option within any of their cards, which will prompt them to type out a label for their link and paste the URL. Make sure to use meaningful link labels that can easily be deciphered- "link here" is not a meaningful label!

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Inserting images and writing alt text

Microsoft Office Sway makes it easy to insert images and add alt text/image descriptions that can be read out loud by screen readers. While some alt text can be automatically generated, I prefer to write out my own alt text as it takes less than a minute.

To insert an image into Sway:

1. Click on the plus icon at the bottom of a Sway card

2. Select the "Media" tab

3. Select the "Image" option

4. Select the source for an image from the drop-down menu- users can search the web, upload from OneDrive, or upload from their device

To add alt text to an image in Sway:

1. On the image card, select the "Details" button

2. Scroll to the section for Alt Text

3. Type in a description of the image that could be understood by someone who isn't able to see the image

4. Tap outside of the card to close the menu

For items such as charts or graphs, make sure that all relevant information is included in the alt text, not just the chart type. This can include axis labels, data points, and how data is displayed.

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Finalizing details and sharing the Sway

Before sharing a Sway, I recommend going through the "Design" tab and changing the display to "Vertical" so that users will be able to scroll through information naturally, like a website. Visual settings such as background color, font type/size, and other settings can also be configured within this menu. I also recommend using the Accessibility Checker, which can be found under the "More Options" section and can alert users to important information such as missing alt text.

After finalizing the design of a Sway, users can click the "Share" button and copy/paste a link to their Sway that can be shared just like any other web link. It can be emailed, posted to a class website, or posted on social media. While Sway documents do not show up in search engine results, they are visible to anyone who has the link.

Completing assignments with Sway

While Sway itself does not give users the option to edit or add in their own text for a Sway they did not create, many users will read the information for an assignment in a Sway and then type out their answers in an outside program such as Microsoft Word. After finishing the assignment, users can upload or send their documents with the completed answers to their teacher.

Final thoughts

I love finding new and creative ways to use my favorite software programs, and had a lot of fun developing this post on how to create accessible assignments with Microsoft Office Sway. I hope this post is helpful for teachers and professors looking to create accessible assignments that can incorporate multimedia content!

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How To Create Accessible Assignments With Microsoft Office Sway

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I received a question from a teacher asking about how they could incorporate audio files into classroom assignments that would be easy to access for a student with low vision.

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Looking at all the things that are involved in creating an eLearning course could make you feel like your first step should be to "Give Up." However, with these 12 steps, we break down the process into manageable chunks, which is a big part of what makes for good eLearning course design. Not so bad, right?

Read through these steps, and soon you'll have a good handle on what is needed and where to start to create your first eLearning courses.

Contrary to popular belief, deciding "we need eLearning because everyone else is doing it" is not really the first step to start. Managers add to this problem by expecting things to just get done, or to "just do it." Many times, they see assessing needs before implementing as a waste of time and value speed in development over all else. Starting an eLearning course based on assumptions is a sure way to fail though.

The first step to creating an eLearning course is, in fact, defining why does your audience need this training? And what it is you want to achieve with this eLearning because otherwise, how will you know if you've reached your goal? A need analysis make sure you aren't doing training just for training's sake.

Conducting a needs analysis: This analysis can range from a simple interview to broader, more in-depth data collection methods that include looking at past training, desired results and the current state of your workforce.

The results of this analysis become your plan for design and what you hope to get your learners to achieve because now you know what they actually need, versus just guessing or assuming. It will also show gaps in current training and how you can close the breach and get results.

This also prevents you from throwing eLearning at a problem it can't solve. Elearning is perfect for addressing gaps in skill or knowledge but is typically not an effective cure for lack of customer satisfaction or a job design problem. By analyzing first, you rule out these other issues and get to the heart of the problem faster than if you have gone on assumption.

Read: DON'T Skip the Training Needs Analysis! Here's Why.
Make sure, you've ask yourself these questions before continuing to the next step:

What problem or challenge is this e-Learning going to overcome?

What do we hope to achieve with elearning? What outcomes do we expect?

How will it help the organization or your client meet their business goals?

Writing a course entirely in Spanish to a group of people just beginning to learn Spanish is not an effective way to teach. This might sound like an extreme example of an eLearning designer not knowing their audience, but consider the fact that this is really no different than teaching a beginning javascript course but including advanced terms with no explanation of them.

Designers often go into a project treating their audience with a one-size-fits-all approach in order to get the information out quickly. This, however, ignores your audience's technical capabilities, existing knowledge, how they will use the knowledge you're giving them and their basic demographics.

If a business has low interest in their training programs from employees, it is often the case that the courses are too difficult or too easy or completely irrelevant to the employees' jobs. By knowing your audience first and learning what they already know and need to know you can create better, more useful content.

Also Read:

Once you've determined why training is needed and who your audience is, it's time to analyze your content. It won't matter how good your course is designed if the content your sharing doesn't have value for your audience. This is why this step is so important.

You have to take the problem you defined in point #1 and find information that addresses it specifically. To do this, we analyze the content and break it down into categories and types:

Categories: Declarative, Procedural and Situated.

Types: Fact, concept, process, procedure, principles, interpersonal skills, and attitudes.

Structure: Defining these categories and types also lets us see how the information is interconnected and how important each piece is, what category is most prevalent, information gaps and how information should be arranged.

Starting out on your eLearning journey without defining the information or skills that you want your learners to obtain by the end is like setting out on a road trip without a destination. While this might make for a neat setup for an indie film about four friends trying to find themselves, this really doesn't work for eLearning.

So, what is a learning objective? It is an expected outcome of each lesson/unit and, overall, what you want your learners to be capable of by the end of the it. They also break down the content from step #3 into more manageable chunks that can be applied to modules within the overall course.

During this step we, as designers, have the job of asking questions and considering both the desirable and undesirable results of the course. Then we write our objectives based on the final desired results. Start by picking 3-4 objectives. Now make sure your content doesn't wander too far away from these objectives.

Creating relevant learning objectives can be a big challenge, and before we accept the challenge we have to make sure these are set under the SMART criteria:

Specific: Make sure you can answer the questions: Who are my learners? What will be accomplished?

Measureable: Can we measure/observe the progress of the objective? If not, then it doesn't make a good objective.

Achievable: Make sure that your goals cannot only be measured but that they can be achieved. This means setting realistic goals for realistic timeframes and available resources.

Relevant: A good objective must make sense for your target audience. Make sure you know why the objectives are necessary and what their impact will be to ensure they are worth the time and effort.

Time-sensitive: Can learners accomplish this by the end of the course? If not, then it is not reasonable or worth considering.

Note: Make sure learning objectives are aligned to business objectives

Also read: Do's and Don'ts for writing learning objectives

Now is the time to decide on your instructional strategy. This strategy is the process or approach by which your course is going to be developed to engage learners. There are a variety of approaches eLearning designers can take including storytelling, discovery learning, situational learning and several others. This infographic guide is a great tool to learn about the primary instructional strategies: Instructional Strategy Infographic

When deciding on a strategy, think about:

The type of content: How can I best teach a fact versus a concept? A procedure versus an interpersonal skill?

Impact: What is the best way to make this training meaningful and relevant?

Objectives: How can I ensure each trainee will master the objective?

Learn the differences between strategies and models here: Models Vs. Strategies Infographic

A storyboard is a rough, visual outline that helps map out how text, pictures, and other elements will look on a page. This will help you see how your page will look before you waste time putting together the final design only to find out the elements don't fit together right.

However, before you start in on the design phase, make sure your content has been approved. There's no reason to include content in your planning if your client or team leaders might end up telling you not to use it.
Download: Storyboard Template
When determining what authoring tools and learning management systems you should use, look at reviews from other designers, available features, cost and what is best for your organization. There is not one tool that works for everybody. Needs vary from one company to another.
Also, look at these aspects to get yourself thinking about what's right for your company:

How many people will be accessing the program at one time? The average? The max?

Is your hardware, including servers, database, and computers, up to implementing the technology?

Will the course be accessed on the company's devices or will each learner be using their own?

Are there required applications to be installed?

Does your company have enough bandwidth to run the courses?

What is your plan for backing up information and security?

How will you maintain your server?

What kind of support system will you offer end users?

Now, it's time to build a working, prototype of a module from your course to make sure it actually works. A prototype defines the representative look-and-feel and functionality of the entire course. It also is used to test out technical functionality. This allows eLearning designers to create and discard multiple versions quickly to get the best fit before wasting too many resources on designing the whole course then finding out something doesn't work.

Note: Get approval of the prototype from the project leader before going for the whole course.

Read: Instructional Design for the Greater Good: Developing a Prototype

Once you have your prototype approved, it's time to start designing the actual course. During this process you need to keep an eye on the original objectives and problems to ensure the course, as a whole, is geared towards solving these.

You also need to determine a design method that meets the needs of learners. Professional eLearning designers use different models. Some of the most popular are: ADDIE/SAM, Gagne's 9 Principles, and Action Mapping among others.

Learn the 4 Top Instructional Models here.

Applying Gagné's 9 Events Of Instruction In eLearning

Take feedback and comments from your team (and clients), make corrections as needed, then publish!

Why do your learners need your course? How will they find it? You know that your course can help them, but now they need to know about it! It's time to promote and market. To do this, focus on the benefits to your learners to get them invested in the learning journey.

Promotion should be part of your development plan, and your very first slide should engage your audience from the start. Creating an internal promotion plan will save you the heartache of creating an awesome course only to find out nobody is taking it.

Determine how effective your course has been by asking your learners. This will help you figure out what you did right and what you can improve on in the future. To determine if this has been achieved, many use Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation.

You will also look at such factors as return on investment, cost, and performance. To get the best idea of your key performance indicators, you should involve the management team and stakeholders.

REFERENCES:
http://www.mylearningspace.com.au/news/6-steps-to-an-effective-learning-strategy/http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/i2516e/i2516e.pdf http://www.tacso.org/doc/doc_manual9.pdf https://training.fws.gov/courses/references/job-aids/trainers/HOWTO-create-online-course.pdf http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/i2516e/i2516e.pdf

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How to Create an eLearning Course in 12 Steps

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Looking at all the things that are involved in creating an eLearning course could make you feel like your first step should be to "Give Up." However, with these 12 steps, we break down the process into manageable chunks, which is a big part of what makes for good eLearning course design.

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Design is not accidental; it is based on intentions and choices. It is inevitably great to put your heart into designing a course that looks "nice", but at the same time, you must ensure that your design is functional and effective. A beautiful design would be of no use if it were not able to communicate your message to the target audience.

If you learn the science behind good eLearning design and use it properly, you will be able to connect with your learners, make them care about the subject and even change what they do and how they think.

Color, fonts, contrast, imagery, and shapes (and more) all factor into the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a good eLearning design. Let's take a look:

Your eLearning course is not the time to take an Avant Grade approach to design. The elements on your screens shouldn't compete with information, but should, instead, point your audience in the right direction.

Your screen's organization should create a visual hierarchy, meaning it will lead learners' eyes from the first thing they should see to the next in the proper order.

The concept of visual hierarchy is rooted in the Gestalt theory of perception. According to this theory, the human brain is wired to make sense of the world by ordering and structuring diverse elements into an organized, logical whole.

When designing your screens, you should consider these points:

for the most important element, then use spacing, sizing and shapes to lead to the next most important things. Watch out: Without a focus point, the learner's attention gets scattered easily as the eyes move all over the screen without resting on anything particular.

Use large, rich, and eye-catching fonts to make headings, sub-headings, and critical pieces of information stand out.

Make clear sections. Sections can be created with boxes and frames, headings, colors or anything else that clearly defines what goes with what.

Let white space do the work. Sometimes less really is better. White space helps define sections and gives your learners a kind of visual breather. White space is a design element all on its own, and it doesn't even have to be white! Blank space would be another word for it.

Images and graphics should be oriented in a way that directs the reader's attention inward and onward, never away from the screen or your content.

Make it easy to read: Your learners are here to read through the content in your course. So don't make them strive hard just to make out what's written on the screen.

Make your font easy on the eyes (nothing too elaborate or cartoonish).

Don't cramp your words or space them out too much.

Style your headlines and subheadings the same throughout the course to give a sense of unity and visual cues.

Utilize bullet points (Kinda like how this list is bulleted out. Clever, huh? *wink*)

Put related information and elements closer to help learners see them as connected and so they don't have to waste any additional energy trying to pull them together in their mind.

Read more: Design Tools to Build Visual Hierarchy in eLearning
When you want your viewers' eyes to be drawn to a particular element within other elements, you can use techniques to make it stand out. A very basic version of creating contrast is when you bold a phrase within a paragraph. Your eye is instantly drawn to that difference. You can also do this with shape, size, typography and a variety of other elements.

Don't overuse Contrast: Obviously highlighting out an entire paragraph isn't a great idea, nor is using multiple contrasting elements on the same screen. Emphasize the most important element only!

Before Using Contrast: Before contrasting elements in your screen, ask yourself what you want to accomplish? What do I want my learners to see or interact with? Once you've answered that, take your primary element and put in a bright color to contrast it with a darker or more dull background or make it bigger to grab attention immediately.

Important note: Whatever you do, don't be that designer who doesn't contrast their text enough from their background. It's not year 2000, and whatever cool look you get is not worth how hard it is to read! Follow these rules for better text visibility.
Read more: Understand These 10 Principles of Good Design Before You Start Your Next eLearning Project
As purveyors of instructional information, eLearning designers can usually get the rational side of things down, but you also need to engage your audience's emotions. You can often succeed in this by using the right images.

Example: When you buy a new smartphone, the technical features are likely a big part of what draws you in. The amount of memory, screen resolution, camera pixels, etc. are all relevant. However, for most of us, what gets us to buy is what these aspects can do for our lives.

More memory means I can save more of the things I love, and a better camera means I can have nicer pictures of my loved ones and big life events. Therefore, it's important to include information about this and images that convey what the phone will do for me.

Speaking to your learners' emotions will help them tune in and relate to the info which will also make them want to continue learning and retaining what they've heard.
So, how do you choose images that will do this?
Let's say you're creating a financial course and you want to convey the importance of monetary security in retirement. Instead of choosing an image of a bank or money or a random landscape, you choose one of an older couple relaxing on a porch together. You could also go another route, and use an image of an older person still having to work at a crappy job or, worse, on the streets. Both images are far more effective at getting your audience's attention over a random one of dollar signs.

When choosing an image, you need to ask what it's saying. What feeling are you trying to provoke by using a particular image? Is the image relevant? Will it resonate with your audience? Use Plutchik's Emotion Wheel to explore each of the eight primary emotions (and their combinations) to identify which are the best to use or emphasize in your courses.

Read more: Can You Really Change Behavior Using E-Learning Design? Yes!

Since you won't literally be able to stand next to your students and point at stuff, the next best thing is to use shapes and icons to point out info. This can be done with arrows as an obvious choice or with lines and other elements. This also helps control the speed and direction at which viewers go through the page.

Shapes and icons unclutter our focus, making it easier to skim through major ideas presented on a screen. The right use of shapes and icons allows the learner to easily grasp the basic ideas before reading through the material for further details.

In 2008, a Nielson Norman Study found that web visitors only read 20% of the text on the page. In late 2013, Slate asked Chartbeat to analyze its pages only to find that on average (on any website) most of the readers were not reading more than a few starting paragraphs of the text even reading through. This time around last year Tony Haile, CEO at Chartbeat how 55% of the visitors spent less than 15 seconds being active on a page.

The problem is that people do not want to digest content at first sight. They want to skim them to determine if they're worth the effort.

What these stats scream out is the need for visual content that could streamline the scanning process for the users. A long screen of text may bore a learner unless there is a visual break in the form of a shape or an icon that will instantly draw attention, making the text less intimidating.

This is where shapes and icons come in. The use of shapes and icons helps organize content into a scannable and easily digestible form. This discourages distraction, and helps learners make sense of your content quickly.
Read more: Bring Your eLearning Designs to Life with Simple Shapes and Icons
Color is about more than just making your course look nice. On a basic level, you should use a harmonious color palette that works to enhance your information, not distract from it.

But, on a grander scale, you also need to consider the psychological factors involved with color. A study featured in Management Decision showed that 90% of quick decisions we make regarding products are based on color. These intuitive responses are some of the strongest we have and shouldn't be ignored by designers.

Why are these reactions so strong? This largely has to do with our survival instincts, and our reactions are not conscious. It starts in our central nervous systems which respond to our basic needs for food and water along with a fear of danger. So, somewhere within certain colors and designs, something is triggering our responses to these things.

Colors also connect to emotions and culture along with being tied to certain seasons, holidays, weather, etc. For example, orange and black are highly recognizable as Halloween colors to Americans though these colors might not have the same significance for other cultures.

Overall, there isn't one color or color scheme that is going to suit everything. You have to take your audience and course type into account to determine the appropriateness of color.

Learn more about making good color and design choices here: The Complete Guide to Color Combinations in eLearning
Also read: A Look at Why Good Design Is Absolutely Critical for eLearning Success

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The Science Behind What Makes an eLearning Design Effective

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Design is not accidental; it is based on intentions and choices. It is inevitably great to put your heart into designing a course that looks "nice", but at the same time, you must ensure that your design is functional and effective.

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Can I Have Your Attention? 7 Tips On How To Engage Learners

Learner engagement is the most important aspect of corporate training (or any training for that matter). That's because learning is an activity, not a passive process. You can't teach someone who isn't interested in the material, or worse, bored to tears by it.

It's difficult to achieve learner engagement in the design and delivery of your training content. This is especially true for new instructors. If you're one of them, keep reading. In this article, we're going to share 7 Instructional Design tips and strategies to increase learner engagement in your training courses.

1. Engage Learners With Storytelling

From ancient times to the Netflix era, people have always loved stories. We enjoy listening to them, reading them, and watching them unfold.

So much so, that stories can be used as powerful business tools, help affect change, and even cause neurochemical changes [1] to the audience's brains. Just like a nice cup of coffee will make you more alert and connected to your surroundings, stories have the power to prop up learners' interest and engage them in their learning.

Here's how to engage learners with story-based learning:

Use mini-stories instead of dry examples

Include anecdotes relevant to your subject

Invent fictional characters and plots

Structure lessons as dialogues

Use conflict and tension to create suspense

Borrow characters and storylines from pop culture and history

2. Boost Engagement Through Gamification

If there's something people love more than stories, it's games.

Adding game-like elements to your courses is one of the most effective learner engagement strategies; in fact, this practice (known as gamification) has been very popular in corporate training, and modern LMS platforms such as TalentLMS support it out of the box.

But how can you engage learners through gamification?

Invest in an LMS that supports gamification

Link training progress to higher scores and level advancement

Use leaderboards to promote competitiveness between learners

Tie reward points and successes to real-life rewards

Set up gamification options based on your training objectives

Keep it simple so that learners don't have a hard time learning the rules

Gamification should serve the learning (and not the opposite)

3. Hook Learners By Adding Multimedia To The Mix

A text-heavy course can, and will, quickly become boring. Long texts are difficult to follow. They lack variety, require constant attention, and fail to draw the learner's eyes. They also do nothing for visual learners.

So, how to engage learners with a primarily text-based course? Why, through the careful use of multimedia, of course! Multimedia features like video, audio, and images, are excellent tools to help you increase learner engagement, and have a very important role to play in corporate Instructional Design.

Some tips to help you engage learners through multimedia:

Choose interesting photos and illustrations to accompany your content

Use relevant illustrations

Avoid cliché-looking stock photos

Record live lectures to spice up your online courses

Make sure your audio and video quality is high

Leverage your LMS's built-in interactive elements (e.g., drag-and-drop and quizzes)

Use tools like Adobe Animate to create training animation and mini-games

Combine multimedia with training-focused storytelling

Provide accessible alternatives for staff with disabilities

4. Keep Engagement High With Scenario-Based Learning

Scenario-based learning (SBL) is one of the most engaging teaching strategies. In SBL, the instructor sets up a hypothetical scenario and asks the learners to use their skills, knowledge, reasoning, and experience to complete a task or solve a problem.

Scenario-driven training increases engagement because it is much closer to the employee's work experience than a theory-heavy course. It encourages the learner to put their new skills into practice and solve life-like problems in a risk-free context. Such learning is excellent in boosting knowledge retention and building the learners' problem-solving skills. SBL expands upon storytelling-based learning by making the learners the protagonists in the story.

To engage learners through scenario-based learning:

Come up with realistic work-related scenarios, but leave out details that don't serve any training purposes

Create scenario-based activities to engage learners and get them to collaborate during ILT sessions

Allow learners the freedom to sort things out themselves, but assist them whenever they seem to need it

After an SBL session, ask learners to explain their approach, and give them ample and clear feedback

Tell learners which approach is best for SBL problems, but encourage innovative alternative solutions

5. Grab Learners' Attention By Giving Them The Freedom To Roam

Engagement is not available on tap. Even if your training content is highly engaging, different employees might not always feel ready to engage with it. That's the reason self-paced study is one of the most revolutionary Instructional Design techniques. It's also one of the key differences between traditional classroom-based and online learning.

Give your employees the freedom to study from wherever they are and whenever they feel like. Allowing them to study when they feel most motivated is the perfect way to achieve high levels of engagement.

To engage learners through self-paced learning:

Emphasize online courses over classroom-based lectures and webinars

Record in-person training sessions for on-demand viewing

Invest in an LMS with native mobile client applications

Offer your content in microlearning-friendly formats

If possible, have your course materials available offline

6. Encourage Engagement By Making Learning Interpersonal

Online learning is great and offers a lot of freedom and flexibility. Βut it can also feel impersonal and demotivating to some learners. That's because different learners have different preferences, and there is no one-size-fits-all rule. Some people learn best when they study alone. Others are more engaged when they can collaborate with fellow learners and interact with their instructors.

To cater to your more social-inclined learners, adjust your LMS Instructor-Led Training (ILT) support to incorporate in-person training (ILT) sessions to your courses. The mix, known as blended learning (learning that combines in-person and online training), has several major benefits.

It combines the freedom to study at one's own pace, with the feedback and group dynamics of in-person examination and team collaboration. You can use blended learning both for subjects that can be studied in isolation (e.g., theory) and subjects that involve physical action or personal interaction.

Of course, in-person doesn't have to mean a traditional classroom setting. Webinars and teleconference sessions are also perfectly valid forms of in-person training sessions in a blended-learning program.

To engage learners through instructor-led learning:

Invest in an LMS with strong ILT support

Combine ("blend") regular online training with ILT sessions and, if possible, give learners the opportunity to choose

Include group assignments and collaborative work in your training

Use features like virtual whiteboards to create classroom-like experiences online

Use the group chat or forum features of your LMS for class discussions

Arrange for one-to-one sessions between learners and instructors

7. Raise Engagement By Making It Personal

Learners come from all kinds of backgrounds and can have widely different knowledge levels. Having a learner study something beyond their current knowledge level, or having another study skills or topics they're already familiar with are sure to kill their engagement.

It doesn't make sense to force all your learners to go through the same courses and in the same order. And, thankfully, with eLearning, you don't have to.

Ask your instructors to talk to your employees and get a rough idea of their educational background and professional experience. Use your LMS' testing tools to create a detailed map of their skills gaps. Finally, combine both insights to come up with personalized learning plans for different employees (or groups).

Here are some ways to engage learners through eLearning personalization:

Survey your learners to learn their educational background and professional experience

Create and run tests to measure their skills gaps

Create personalized learning paths for each of your employees, or provide a few learning paths for staff with similar skills and backgrounds

Monitor learner progress for employees that struggle with particular courses, and give them the knowledge they need

Conclusion

Attention is hard to get and easy to lose. Especially the attention of busy staff, concerned with their everyday responsibilities and workflows. By incorporating our tips and suggestions into your corporate Instructional Design, you can boost learner engagement, and ultimately, training effectiveness.

You'll also need a dependable LMS, like TalentLMS, that comes with the right features for engagement. Think gamification, Instructor-Led training, testing options, multimedia-embedding, reporting, and microlearning. A trusty training platform can be a reliable partner as you attempt to boost your engagement with these seven proven tips.

References

Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling

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7 Instructional Design Tips Proven To Boost Learner Engagement - eLearning Industry

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Learner engagement is the most important aspect of corporate training (or any training for that matter). That's because learning is an activity, not a passive process. You can't teach someone who isn't interested in the material, or worse, bored to tears by it.

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How do you typically measure learning? Do you find yourself using multiple-choice tests as your go-to strategy for assessing learners?

Of course, a well-designed multiple choice test can be effective in measuring performance, but there's more to it than just grades. Many benefits can be gained by assessing while the training is underway, too.

The two approaches are formally defined as:

Formative assessments, which are trainer or learner activities that assess and provide feedback during the learning process, and

Summative assessments, which use grades (or quantifiable data) to demonstrate learner growth after instruction

Ready to shake things up and give your learners a performance boost? Check out the Mix & Match Your Assessment Techniques to Boost Performance Infographic for ideas on how to mix and match assessment techniques for your next training program.

Formative Assessment Examples

Visual models

Verbal/written summaries

Peer activities

Self-assessments

Lists-charts and graphic organizers

Smmative Assessment Examples

Performance tasks

Written essays/reports

Oral presentations

Open book exams

Multiple choice tests

Participation tasks

Top performing companies and their L&D teams find it most beneficial to offer both formative and summative assessments. Not only are they able to improve overall performance measurement, but they are also able to provide a fuller learning experience for their training participants.
View aslo: Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic

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Mix and Match Your Assessment Techniques to Boost Performance Infographic - e-Learning Infographics

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How do you typically measure learning? Do you find yourself using multiple-choice tests as your go-to strategy for assessing learners? Of course, a well-designed multiple choice test can be effective in measuring performance, but there's more to it than just grades. Many benefits can be gained by assessing while the training is underway, too.

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The differences between formative and summative assessment - Infographic

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Summative and formative assessment are two ways to evaluate a student’s learning. What kind of assessment strategy should you choose for your lesson or teaching? It all depends on the huge differences between them. So, what exactly are those differences?

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System Resources Facilitate Online Course Success at Compton College for Students and Faculty

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Keeping Students Engaged in Digital Learning

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Whether you’re new to teaching online or a veteran, these six tips can help you make sure your students stay connected and immersed in learning.

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4.4.1 What is online collaborative learning?

The concurrence of both constructivist approaches to learning and the development of the Internet has led to the development of a particular form of constructivist teaching, originally called computer-mediated communication (CMC), or networked learning, but which has been developed into what Harasim (2012) now calls online collaborative learning theory (OCL). She describes OCL as follows (p. 90):

OCL theory provides a model of learning in which students are encouraged and supported to work together to create knowledge: to invent, to explore ways to innovate, and, by so doing, to seek the conceptual knowledge needed to solve problems rather than recite what they think is the right answer. While OCL theory does encourage the learner to be active and engaged, this is not considered to be sufficient for learning or knowledge construction......In the OCL theory, the teacher plays a key role not as a fellow-learner, but as the link to the knowledge community, or state of the art in that discipline. Learning is defined as conceptual change and is key to building knowledge. Learning activity needs to be informed and guided by the norms of the discipline and a discourse process that emphasises conceptual learning and builds knowledge.

OCL builds on and integrates theories of cognitive development that focus on conversational learning (Pask, 1975), conditions for deep learning (Marton and Saljø, 1997; Entwistle, 2000), development of academic knowledge (Laurillard, 2001), and knowledge construction (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006).

From the very early days of online learning, some instructors have focused heavily on the communication affordances of the Internet (see for instance, Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). They have based their teaching on the concept of knowledge construction, the gradual building of knowledge mainly through asynchronous online discussion among students and between students and an instructor.

Online discussion forums go back to the 1970s, but really took off as a result of a combination of the invention of the WorldWide Web in the 1990s, high speed Internet access, and the development of learning management systems, most of which now include an area for online discussions. These online discussion forums have some differences though with classroom seminars:

first, they are text based, not oral;

second, they are asynchronous: participants can log in at any time, and from anywhere with an Internet connection;

third, many discussion forums allow for 'threaded' connections, enabling a response to be attached to the particular comment which prompted the response, rather than just displayed in chronological order. This allows for dynamic sub-topics to be developed, with sometimes more than ten responses within a single thread of discussion. This enables participants to follow multiple discussion topics over a period of time.

4.4.2 Core design principles of OCL

Harasim emphasises the importance of three key phases of knowledge construction through discourse:

idea generating: this is literally brainstorming, to collect the divergent thinking within a group;

idea organising: this is where learners compare, analyse and categorise the different ideas previously generated, again through discussion and argument;

intellectual convergence: the aim here is to reach a level of intellectual synthesis, understanding and consensus (including agreeing to disagree), usually through the joint construction of some artefact or piece of work, such as an essay or assignment.

This results in what Harasim calls a Final Position, although in reality the position is never final because for a learner, once started, the process of generating, organising and converging on ideas continues at an ever deeper or more advanced level. The role of the teacher or instructor in this process is seen as critical, not only in facilitating the process and providing appropriate resources and learner activities that encourage this kind of learning, but also, as a representative of a knowledge community or subject domain, in ensuring that the core concepts, practices, standards and principles of the subject domain are fully integrated into the learning cycle.

Harasim provides the following diagram to capture this process:

Another important factor is that in the OCL model, discussion forums are not an addition or supplement to core teaching materials, such as textbooks, recorded lectures, or text in an LMS, but are the core component of the teaching. Textbooks, readings and other resources are chosen to support the discussion, not the other way round. This is a key design principle, and explains why often instructors or tutors complain, in more 'traditional' online courses, that students don't participate in discussions. Often this is because where online discussions are secondary to more didactic teaching, or are not deliberately designed and managed to lead to knowledge construction, students see the discussions as optional or extra work, because they have no direct impact on grades or assessment. It is also a reason why awarding grades for participation in discussion forums misses the point. It is not the extrinsic activity that counts, but the intrinsic value of the discussion, that matters (see, for instance, Brindley, Walti and Blashke, 2009). Thus although instructors using an OCL approach may use learning management systems for convenience, they are used differently from courses where traditional didactic teaching is moved online.

4.4.3 Community of Inquiry

The Community of Inquiry Model (CoI) is somewhat similar to the OCL model. As defined by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000)

An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

Garrison, Anderson and Archer argue that there are three essential elements of a community of inquiry:

social presence " is the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities."

teaching presence is "the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes"

cognitive presence "is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse".

However, CoI is more of a theory than a model, since it does not indicate what activities or conditions are needed to create these three 'presences'. The two models (OCL and CoI) are also more complementary rather than competing.

4.4.5 Developing meaningful online discussion

Since the publication of the original CoI paper in 2000, there have been a number of studies that have identified the importance of these 'presences' within especially online learning (click here for a wide selection). Although there has been a wide range of researchers and educators engaged in the area of online collaborative learning and communities of inquiry, there is a high degree of convergence and agreement about successful strategies and design principles. For academic and conceptual development, discussions need to be well organized by the teacher, and the teacher needs to provide the necessary support to enable the development of ideas and the construction of new knowledge for the students.

Partly as a result of this research, and partly as the result of experienced online instructors who have not necessarily been influenced by either the OCL or the Community of Inquiry literature, several other design principles have been associated with successful (online) discussion, such as:

appropriate technology (for example, software that allows for threaded discussions);

clear guidelines on student online behaviour, such as written codes of conduct for participating in discussions, and ensuring that they are enforced;

student orientation and preparation, including technology orientation and explaining the purpose of discussion;

clear goals for the discussions that are understood by the students, such as: 'to explore gender and class issues in selected novels' or 'to compare and evaluate alternative methods of coding';

choice of appropriate topics, that complement and expand issues in the study materials, and are relevant to answering assessment questions;

setting an appropriate 'tone' or requirements for discussion (for example, respectful disagreement, evidence-based arguments);

defining clearly learner roles and expectations, such as 'you should log in at least once a week to each discussion topic and make at least one substantive contribution to each topic each week';

monitoring the participation of individual learners, and responding accordingly, by providing the appropriate scaffolding or support, such as comments that help students develop their thinking around the topics, referring them back to study materials if necessary, or explaining issues when students seem to be confused or misinformed;

regular, ongoing instructor 'presence', such as monitoring the discussions to prevent them getting off topic or too personal, and providing encouragement for those that are making real contributions to the discussion, heading off those that are trying to hog or dominate the discussions, and tracking those not participating, and helping them to participate;

ensuring strong articulation between discussion topics and assessment.

These issues are discussed in more depth by Salmon (2000); Bates and Poole (2003); and Paloff and Pratt (2005; 2007).

4.4.6 Cultural and epistemological issues

Students come to the educational experience with different expectations and backgrounds. As a result there are often major cultural differences in students with regard to participating in discussion-based collaborative learning that in the end reflect deep differences with regard to traditions of learning and teaching. Thus teachers need to be aware that there are likely to be students in any class who may be struggling with language, cultural or epistemological issues, but in online classes, where students can come from anywhere, this is a particularly important issue.

In many countries, there is a strong tradition of the authoritarian role of the teacher and the transmission of information from the teacher to the student. In some cultures, it would be considered disrespectful to challenge or criticize the views of teachers or even other students. In an authoritarian, teacher-based culture, the views of other students may be considered irrelevant or unimportant. Other cultures have a strong oral tradition, or one based on story-telling, rather than on direct instruction.

Online environments then can present real challenges to students when a constructivist approach to the design of online learning activities is adopted. This may mean taking specific steps to help students who are unfamiliar with a constructivist approach to learning, such as sending drafts to the instructor by e-mail for approval before posting a 'class' contribution. For a fuller discussion of cross-cultural issues in online learning, see Jung and Gunawardena (2014) and the journal Distance Education, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2001), the whole edition of which is devoted to papers on this topic.

4.4.7 Strengths and weaknesses of online collaborative learning

This approach to the use of technology for teaching is very different from the more objectivist approaches found in computer-assisted learning, teaching machines, and artificial intelligence applications to education, which primarily aim to use computing to replace at least some of the activities traditionally done by human teachers. With online collaborative learning, the aim is not to replace the teacher, but to use the technology primarily to increase and improve communication between teacher and learners, with a particular approach to the development of learning based on knowledge construction assisted and developed through social discourse. This social discourse furthermore is not random, but managed in such a way as to 'scaffold' learning:

by assisting with the construction of knowledge in ways that are guided by the instructor;

that reflect the norms or values of the discipline;

that also respect or take into consideration the prior knowledge within the discipline.

Thus there are two main strengths of this model:

when applied appropriately, online collaborative learning can lead to deep, academic learning, or transformative learning, as well as, if not better than, discussion in campus-based classrooms. The asynchronous and recorded 'affordances' of online learning more than compensate for the lack of physical cues and other aspects of face-to-face discussion;

online collaborative learning as a result can also directly support the development of a range of high level intellectual skills, such as critical thinking, analytical thinking, synthesis, and evaluation, which are key requirements for learners in a digital age.

There are though some limitations:

it does not scale easily, requiring highly knowledgeable and skilled instructors, and a limited number of learners;

it is more likely to accommodate to the epistemological positions of faculty and instructors in humanities, social sciences, education and some areas of business studies and health and conversely it is likely to be less accommodating to the epistemological positions of faculty in science, computer science and engineering. However, if combined with a problem-based or inquiry-based approach, it might have acceptance even in some of these subject domains.

4.4.8 Summary

Many of the strengths and challenges of collaborative learning apply both in face-to-face or online learning contexts. It could be argued that there is no or little difference between online collaborative learning and well-conducted traditional classroom, discussion-based teaching. Once again, we see that the mode of delivery is less important than the design model, which can work well in both contexts. Indeed, it is possible to conduct either model synchronously or asynchronously, at a distance or face-to-face.

However, there is enough evidence that collaborative learning can be done just as well online, which is important, given the need for more flexible models of delivery to meet the needs of a more diverse student body in a digital age. Also, the necessary conditions for success in teaching this way are now well known, even though they are not always universally applied.

Activity 4.4: Evaluating online collaborative learning models

1. Can you see the differences between 'Open Collaborative Learning' (OCL) and 'Communities of Inquiry'? Or are they really the same model with different names?

2. Do you agree that either of these models can be applied just as successfully online or face-to-face?

3. Do you see other strengths or weaknesses with these models?

4. Is this common sense dressed up as theory?

5. Does it make sense to apply either of these models to courses in the quantitative sciences such as physics or engineering? If so, under what conditions?

Bates, A. and Poole, G. (2003) Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Brindley, J., Walti, C. and Blashke, L. (2009) Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 10, No. 3

Entwistle, N. (2000) Promoting deep learning through teaching and assessment: conceptual frameworks and educational contexts Leicester UK: TLRP Conference

Garrison, R., Anderson, A. and Archer, W. (2000) Critical Inquiry in a Text-based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education The Internet and Higher Education, Vol. 2, No. 3

Harasim, L. (2012) Learning Theory and Online Technologies New York/London: Routledge

Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Jung, I. and Gunawardena, C. (eds.) (2014) Culture and Online Learning: Global Perspectives and Research Sterling VA: Stylus

Laurillard, D. (2001) Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies New York/London: Routledge

Marton, F. and Saljö, R. (1997) Approaches to learning, in Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (eds.) The experience of learning: Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press (out of press, but available online)

Paloff, R. and Pratt, K. (2005) Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Paloff, R. and Pratt, K. (2007) Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Pask, G. (1975) Conversation, Cognition and Learning Amsterdam/London: Elsevier (out of press, but available online)

Salmon, G. (2000) e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online London: Taylor and Francis

Scardamalia, M. and Bereiter, C. (2006) Knowledge Building: Theory, pedagogy and technology in Sawyer, K. (ed.) Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences New York: cambridge University Press

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The concurrence of both constructivist approaches to learning and the development of the Internet has led to the development of a particular form of constructivist teaching, originally called computer-mediated communication (CMC), or networked learning, but which has been developed into what Harasim (2012) now calls online collaborative learning theory (OCL).

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"The pace of change right now is the absolute slowest it will be for the rest of your life. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a fascinating ride."

This is how Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, commented on the recent technological boom. The tech disruption in education has brought advancements such as blended courses, the online whiteboard, and adaptive e-learning designs. Instead of being passive, today's students are used to interaction and having control over all areas of study. Clearly, the one-size-fits-all approach is no longer optimal. Adaptive learning designs are here to help.

First things first: what is an adaptive learning design?

The adaptive learning concept dates back to 1963 when John Carroll at Princeton University pointed out that people have different abilities, opportunities, and reasons to process information. So, if learning outcomes are constant, what can be changed is the time and quality of instruction.

Thanks to technology there has been a recent resurgence of this concept. Adaptive learning design is a term coined in 2005 by scholars at The Open University. It involves personalizing behavior to give each student an adequate learning flow for their individual styles. The authors of this definition use the Lego metaphor in which a teacher has a set of blocks to build a virtual learning environment: activities, rules, roles, methods, plays, etc. Elements are adaptively assembled to meet students' emerging needs, instead of simply relying on pre-emptive designs.

Five benefits of adaptive learning designs

Knowledge

When instructors address individual needs, students are more likely to succeed. Data confirms that adaptation in learning can significantly increase knowledge, especially when it comes to complex subjects. The Colorado Technical University boosted pass rates for trigonometry from 76% to 92% by incorporating its principles in traditional tutoring.

Motivation

An adaptive design demonstrates care and readiness for support. Thus, motivational deficits that sometimes occur in web conferencing environments are addressed.

Engagement

"Adaptive learning can help students think about meaning," expert Christina Yu observes. The point is that an adaptive design creates a link between details and the bigger picture. By thinking about meaning, students are forced to reflect on their work, on the work of their peers, and on their tutor's work. The content is no longer dead and static, but alive and immersive.

Course satisfaction

More than 70% of learners report that they find adaptive course designs helpful, signaling excellent satisfaction levels. Eventually, dropout rates will be reduced and pupils will meet educational goals faster.

Such findings are encouraging, but the question remains:

What is to be adapted?

Let's be clear - answering questions in class is not an adaptive learning design. However, changing a task in response to a question is. There are five adaptive learning designs that are repeatedly described in the literature:

Content-driven design

Material that is too hard decreases motivation, yet if it is too easy, learners are bored. Academics compared effortful and effortless thinking and found that the former significantly improves intrinsic motivation, engagement levels, self-directed learning, and well-being. The sweet spot is using content that is just above one's ability level. This requires a student to put in some effort, but not so much as to get discouraged.

An advanced learning management system (LMS) like Canvas makes it possible to place pupils on individual pathways to provide the content they need. Canvas MasteryPaths makes it possible for educators to assign adapted tasks, often with a choice over activities. It is not necessary for pupils to know that they are working on assignments that are slightly different from what their peers are working on. But they will all achieve the same learning outcomes and will have the same sense of accomplishment and success.

Content adaptation during live sessions may sound like a challenge, but not when an LMS has a powerful integrated web conferencing environment. VEDAMO Virtual Classroom is a case in point, as it is equipped with a handy tool for quick integration with the Canvas LMS and an online whiteboard, which facilitates seamless content adaptation on the go. Images and text can be added, resized, or deleted in a jiffy.

The following principles are particularly relevant to live design adaptations:

The multimedia rule: Learning is improved by almost 90% when a relevant graphic is added to text.

The redundancy effect: There is no need to unnecessarily repeat a message in different modes, e.g., a picture with large chunks of text that you read from the screen.

The split-attention effect: We comprehend less effectively if text and pictures are separated in space and time.

The symbol-system principle: Aligning form to the nature of the message can reduce elaboration and the difficulty of comprehension.

Learner-centered design

Teach-to-the-middle instruction may traditionally be the most popular, but it is no longer relevant in virtual courses. Participants come to the online classroom with fundamentally diverse backgrounds. With this design, adaptive pretesting is used to determine knowledge levels, personal aims, and learner styles. Once the course is up and running, instructional scaffolding often takes place, as does working closely with a student to carry out a task or solve a problem.

Support can take many forms in a potent LMS such as Canvas. For instance, instructors can prepare tailored resources and guides and students can use Canvas 24/7, as well as take advantage of all the materials provided to go deeper into the subject. Moreover, the integration with a virtual classroom like VEDAMO makes it easy to leverage learner-centered principles during web conferencing sessions. Teachers can also contact their students in real time to monitor performance and provide targeted feedback when needed.

Evaluation-driven design

Think of Duolingo, the language learning platform with more than 300 million users in 2020. What makes it so successful and addictive is the daily gratification of small achievements. Likewise, an assessment-driven design will cut material into bits and map them into a hierarchy. Learners need to master basic skills before moving on to more advanced topics in the hierarchical structure. The key is to regularly check performance in order to decide on acceleration or remediation. The Canvas LMS is equipped with a tool from the future - MagicMarker - which makes assessments quick and easy. The powerful grading wizard records, calculates, tabulates, and reports mastery on the fly. A snapshot of comprehension and performance in class facilitates smarter decision-making.

Time-driven design

Very often people with the same abilities or motivation levels require different amounts of time to achieve the same objectives. The traditional educational system normally sets fixed timelines, but web conferencing environments can be very flexible. In her work with temporal culture, the sociologist Barbara Adam shows how changes in five time variables can improve the learning experience.

A smart LMS makes all of these variables fluid. Students are free to select when to make use of the available resources, and tutors can adapt the sequences and tempo. Even if web conferencing sessions are fixed at hours that are convenient for all, there is still a lot of room for flexibility. VEDAMO Virtual Classroom is equipped with tools to make time adaptations. For example, a "raise hand" button to take a break with a question, and breakout rooms to allow some time for discussion.

Gamification

An integral part of the designs already explained is making learning more like a game. Goals, levels, points, and fun are the arsenal of gamification, or taking techniques from games and using them in non-games. Scholars at the University of Washington found that most students (76%) prefer a gamified course. Participants describe gamification as enjoyable (almost 70%) and motivating (50%), and felt that they learned more (60%). The virtual classroom features tools like the online whiteboard that enable shared gaming activities. Leaderboards, quizzes, puzzles, and working against the clock come in handy to bring the heat and fight fatigue.

It sounds useful, yet meeting individual needs in a group is very challenging. Technology makes all of this much easier. It takes what the instructor does and automates it on a larger scale to promote efficiency.

The future of adaptive learning

Adaptive learning design is an emerging area, but it is here to stay. This article can be helpful to those who are considering simple designs that are available for everyone using Canvas. Set up your web conferencing sessions with VEDAMO Virtual Classroom and enjoy the synergy of choice and live customization.

At its core, the idea is to set learners free to select an educational experience, instead of having it be dictated to them. Recently, adaptive learning systems have been gaining momentum in the automation of the designs discussed so far. They allow for sequencing, real-time data collection, and quick assessments at a large scale. Rest assured, technological advancements can support the talents of great teachers, but they cannot replace them.

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Adaptive Learning Designs in LMSs with Web-Conferencing for Better Results

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"The pace of change right now is the absolute slowest it will be for the rest of your life. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a fascinating ride." This is how Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, commented on the recent technological boom.

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Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software - Canva

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Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software - Canva

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Have you heard that (partly thanks to smartphones) humans have a shorter average attention span than goldfish?
Goldfish: nine seconds.
Humans: eight!
This sounds a little unsettling considering that, as humans, our futures largely depend on having to pay attention in class for hours on end. However, we have something the goldfish don't: a prefrontal cortex, a.k.a. the part of our brain that allows for planning and willpower. As the saying goes, "with great power comes great responsibility." So given all of our abilities, it is our duty to bring our own vitality to the classroom-every day, in every subject.

For the good of our edification, our future, and our sanity, let's look at some strategies for staying engaged-for longer than eight seconds. Let's show those goldfish what we're capable of.

1. First, get your mind right.

Much of how we perform any task starts with how we set up our mentality. Before your next class, instead of thinking, "I'm tired" or "This class is going to be so boring," try thinking "How interesting, I get to learn something today that I've never heard of!" or "Today I'm going to stay alert by pretending I'm taking notes for someone who's absent." Come up with whatever thought helps you establish a mindset that works for you and not against you.

2. Minimize distractions.

Choosing to sit in the front of the class will help in a few ways. First, it will prevent you from looking at all the people and eye-catching things going on between you and the front of the classroom. Second, sitting right in front of the teacher will remind you to keep your phone out of sight. Phones apparently want all the attention; don't give in! Instead, get distracted by everything the teacher is saying. Also, being in front is just more engaging. People pay big money for front row seats at concerts, sporting events, and plays. Front row seats in class are free!

3. Optimize your note-taking skills.

Rather than trying to write everything down, listen as if the teacher is speaking just to you and jot down the key concepts. To make note-taking even more effective, experiment with formats, abbreviations, and pen colors. Mark any parts you don't understand so you can ask questions. Involving yourself in this active note-taking process will keep your brain on task. Moreover, according to psychologist Stanislas Dehaene, "When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated" and "learning is made easier." And the more you learn in class, the less you will have to study before an exam.

4. Be active.

Other than taking notes, find ways to be active. The most beneficial way is probably to use your voice. Asking questions, answering questions, and contributing to class discussions not only helps you better understand the material, but also helps you stay alert and feel part of the class. Even just good posture, making eye contact, and nodding to affirm you're listening can help make class lectures feel less like a monologue and more like a dialogue between you and your teacher.

5. Talk to your teachers.

Be open to developing a relationship with even your most intimidating teachers. By interacting with them before, during, or after class, you'll start to know them a little better. Once you feel more connected to them, you'll likely feel more personally invested in their purpose and thus the class. This will further reduce your chances of being bored and increase your chances of getting good grades. As a bonus, if you ever need a letter of recommendation or some help, there's a better chance your teacher will go the extra mile for you.

6. Be prepared.

When you are not understanding what has happened in class so far, it's like coming into a conversation late: you're confused, bored, and can't contribute much. Consequently, staying engaged becomes a struggle and learning becomes nearly impossible. To avert such a dreadful situation, before going to class, look over the main points covered last time and ask classmates or teachers any questions you have. You'll then be able to take interest and participate in class. Plus, less stress about being lost or falling behind will also contribute to a more fun experience. And you'll always perform better, no matter what you're doing, when you're having fun.

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6 Ways to Stay Engaged in Class - Elite Educational Institute

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Have you heard that (partly thanks to smartphones) humans have a shorter average attention span than goldfish ? Goldfish: nine seconds. Humans: eight! This sounds a little unsettling considering that, as humans, our futures largely depend on having to pay attention in class for hours on end.

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In education, learning objectives are brief statements that describe what students will be expected to learn by the end of school year, course, unit, lesson, project, or class period. In many cases, learning objectives are the interim academic goals that teachers establish for students who are working toward meeting more comprehensive learning standards .

Defining learning objective is complicated by the fact that educators use a wide variety of terms for learning objectives, and the terms may or may not be used synonymously from place to place. For example, the terms student learning objective, benchmark, grade-level indicator, learning target, performance indicator, and learning standard -to name just a few of the more common terms-may refer to specific types of learning objectives in specific educational contexts. Educators also create a wide variety of homegrown terms for learning objectives-far too many to catalog here. For these reasons, this entry describes only a few general types and characteristics.

While educators use learning objectives in different ways to achieve a variety of instructional goals, the concept is closely related to learning progressions , or the purposeful sequencing of academic expectations across multiple developmental stages, ages, or grade levels. Learning objectives are a way for teachers to structure, sequence, and plan out learning goals for a specific instructional period, typically for the purpose of moving students toward the achievement of larger, longer-term educational goals such as meeting course learning expectations, performing well on a standardized test , or graduating from high school prepared for college. For these reasons, learning objectives are a central strategy in proficiency-based learning , which refers to systems of instruction, assessment , grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating understanding of the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn before they progress to the next lesson, get promoted to the next grade level, or receive a diploma (learning objectives that move students progressively toward the achievement of academic standards may be called performance indicators or performance benchmarks, among other terms).

Learning objectives are also increasingly being used in the job-performance evaluations of teachers, and the term student learning objectives is commonly associated with this practice in many states. For a more detailed discussion, including relevant reforms and debates on the topic, see value-added measures and student-growth measures.

Learning objectives are also a way to establish and articulate academic expectations for students so they know precisely what is expected of them. When learning objectives are clearly communicated to students, the reasoning goes, students will be more likely to achieve the presented goals. Conversely, when learning objectives are absent or unclear, students may not know what's expected of them, which may then lead to confusion, frustration, or other factors that could impede the learning process.

While the terminology, structure, and use of learning objectives can differ significantly from state to state or school to school, the following are a few of the major forms that learning objectives take:

School-year or grade-level objectives: In this case, learning objectives may be synonymous with learning standards, which are concise, written descriptions of what students are expected to know and be able to do at a specific stage of their education. Grade-level learning objectives describe what students should achieve academically by the end of a particular grade level or grade span (terms such as grade-level indicators or grade-level benchmarks may be used in reference to these learning objectives or standards).

Course or program objectives: Teachers may also determine learning objectives for courses or other academic programs, such as summer-school sessions or vacation-break programs. In this case, the objectives may be the same academic goals described in learning standards (in the case of a full-year course, for example), or they may describe interim goals (for courses that are shorter in duration).

Unit or project objectives: Teachers may determine learning objectives for instructional units, which typically comprise a series of lessons focused on a specific topic or common theme, such as an historical period, for example. In the case of project-based learning-an instructional approach that utilizes multifaceted projects as a central organizing strategy for educating students-teachers may determine learning objectives for the end of long-term project rather than a unit.

Lesson or class-period objectives: Teachers may also articulate learning objectives for specific lessons that compose a unit, project, or course, or they may determine learning objectives for each day they instruct students (in this case, the term learning target is often used). For example, teachers may write a set of daily learning objectives on the blackboard, or post them to an online course-management system, so that students know what the learning expectations are for a particular class period. In this case, learning objectives move students progressively toward meeting more comprehensive learning goals for a unit or course.

In practice, teachers will commonly express learning objectives in different ways to achieve different instructional goals, or to encourage students to think about the learning process is a specific way. While the minutia and nuances of pedagogical strategy are beyond the scope of this resource, the following are a few common ways that learning objectives may be framed or expressed by teachers:

Descriptive statements: Learning objectives may be expressed as brief statements describing what students should know or be able to do by the end of a defined instructional period. For example: Explain how the Constitution establishes the separation of powers among the three branches of the United States government-legislative, executive, and judicial-and articulate the primary powers held by each branch. State learning standards, which may comprise a variety of learning objectives, are commonly expressed as descriptive statements.

"I can" statements: Teachers may choose to express learning objectives as "I can" statements as a way to frame the objectives from a student standpoint. The basic idea is that "I can" statements encourage students to identify with the learning goals, visualize themselves achieving the goals, or experience a greater sense of personal accomplishment when the learning objectives are achieved. For example: I can explain how the Constitution establishes the separation of powers among the three branches of the United States government-legislative, executive, and judicial-and I can articulate the primary powers held by each branch.

"Students will be able to" statements: "Students will be able to" statements are another commonly used format for learning objectives, and the abbreviation SWBAT may be used in place of the full phrase. For example: SWBAT explain how the Constitution establishes the separation of powers among the three branches of the United States government-legislative, executive, and judicial-and articulate the primary powers held by each branch.

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In education, learning objectives are brief statements that describe what students will be expected to learn by the end of school year, course, unit, lesson, project, or class period. In many cases, learning objectives are the interim academic goals that teachers establish for students who are working toward meeting more comprehensive learning standards.

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Benefits of Bubbl.us mind maps over text:

Superior clarity of structured information

Whether it's a family tree, a decision flow map, or an algorithm, mind maps have a huge advantage in presenting complexity clearly and concisely.

Better retention of complex ideas.

Visualizing complex ideas in shapes, lines, and pictures leads to much better recollection later than simple text.

Creative collaboration with others.

Visual brainstorming with a team can dramatically improve the quality of the final product because of diversity of perspectives and experiences.

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Bubbl.us - Create Mind Maps | Collaborate and Present Ideas

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Mind map and brainstorm online with Bubbl.us! Create colorful mind maps to print or share with others. Millions of people are using Bubbl.us worldwide to generate ideas, map out processes and create presentations.

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MindMup Cloud

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Create a new map Open an existing map

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Free online mind mapping. The most productive online mind map canvas on the Web. Supports Freemind mindmap import/export. Easy mindmapping software.

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The way that teachers assess students has been under scrutiny since the UK government announced that this would be one element of a range of evidence used to replace GCSE and A Level exams this year.

Teacher assessment is a key part of university study, too. University educators play a pivotal role in judging and grading written and non-written tasks in both academic and workplace settings.

Although teachers are the ones who spend most of the time with students during their learning journey, the reliability of teachers' judgements has sparked heated discussions. There are fears that teacher bias regarding students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds could affect student results.

Teachers have to fight against their own subjectivity when giving grades, and being aware of their potential biases is important. My research has identified four factors that can contribute to biases in teachers' judgements.

1. Their beliefs about assessment

Teachers who believe the purpose of an assessment is to provide students with an opportunity to learn are likely to be more open to supporting students during the assessment process. For example, they would ask leading questions to help students to cover all the important points in an oral examination.

Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock

In contrast, some teachers will believe an assessment is a hurdle, intended to only allow the most competent students to progress. They will usually oppose offering cues to students and adhere strictly to the guidelines.

These different beliefs about assessment influence the level of support provided to students, which may enable some students to be awarded higher marks.

2. Their confidence in the process

Well-defined marking criteria - guidelines that clearly describe the key attributes that teachers should follow to assess student performance - are hugely important. They allow teachers to validate their own judgements. Without a set of specific marking criteria, teachers do not feel confident to make pass-or-fail decisions for borderline students.

If teachers believe that the criteria they are given are not up to scratch, they are likely to deviate from them. This means that they may include additional criteria that they consider to be essential, or pay less attention to criteria they perceive as less useful.

This can result in students being assessed using different marking criteria by different teachers, depending on the teachers' own confidence in the materials they have been given.

3. Their experience

Experience in assessment and expertise in speciality teaching areas influence teacher expectations of student performance. Teachers with years of experience in assessing students usually have a leading role over those with less experience. Less experienced teachers are likely to follow decisions made by experienced teachers, even if they may not always agree with the decisions.

DGLimages/Shutterstock

For example, if an experienced teacher regarded a particular assessment as a teaching opportunity for students to learn and therefore did not fail any students, the less experienced teachers are likely to follow their lead.

Another interesting point to note is that when teachers are teaching and subsequently assessing students outside their own specialist area, they may bring with them their own subject-specific expectations. The expectation that students will use a systematic approach to report events for a history class probably isn't quite applicable when marking a creative essay in English.

4. Their emotions

Emotion plays a key part in teaching and learning. In face-to-face performance assessment, teachers could become frustrated if they perceive the student, for whatever reason, as not being respectful of the examination process. These frustrations might distort teachers' judgements - the perceived poor behaviour could overshadow the ability demonstrated by the student.

In fact, teacher emotion is an underlying factor which affects all the above interrelated factors. Teacher emotion will influence how they use the marking criteria, which also depends on their beliefs about the purpose of the assessment.

While teacher subjectivity might seem worrying, the picture is not all gloomy. The current situation creates an opportunity to rethink teacher assessment as a professional practice. We can consider how it can be best combined with other evidence to provide students with accurate and credible assessment of their ability.

An understanding of the above four factors helps to increase teachers' awareness of their own biases when marking student performance. Research showed that providing teachers with feedback on their assessment practice might help them to realise their marking behaviour.

The feedback creates a learning opportunity for teachers to formally review and reflect on their marking behaviour, and potentially make changes. After all, everyone appreciates feedback about their work if it is constructive and means well.

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Four things that can bias how teachers assess student work

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The way that teachers assess students has been under scrutiny since the UK government announced that this would be one element of a range of evidence used to replace GCSE and A Level exams this year. Teacher assessment is a key part of university study, too.

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Includes testimony from students on the importance of peers in an online learning environment.

Book chapter from Effective Online Teaching. Heavy focus on creating effective online discussions with minimal treatment of other collaborative strategies.

Conversational blog post from a seasoned online instructor.

A few practical tips to create an interactive online community before and during the class.

Quick guide that presents the research and a list of easy ways to establish presence.

A robust guide designed specifically to utilize Canvas tools. Goes beyond online presence to include course design tips. Links to how-to and support pages.

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Includes testimony from students on the importance of peers in an online learning environment. Book chapter from Effective Online Teaching. Heavy focus on creating effective online discussions with minimal treatment of other collaborative strategies. Conversational blog post from a seasoned online instructor. A few practical tips to create an interactive online community before and during the class.

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Center for Teaching and Learning | Wiley Education Services

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Our world today is full of video. According to Donchev (2018), more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! If you're teaching an online course, chances are you've included-or considered including-a video. In addition, the barriers to creating video have been dropping away. Nearly all contemporary computers contain high-quality built-in webcams and microphones, and software options for capture and editing have multiplied.

Despite the relative ease of producing them, creating effective videos still takes careful planning and preparation. Similarly, not all video is created equal, at least with respect to pedagogical efficacy. In addition, some videos may afford advantages that extend beyond the skillful communication of instructional material. With this in mind, here are five great ways you can use video in your online course.

1. To Create a Sense of Presence

Especially when compared to face-to-face education, taking an online course can be an isolating experience. Humans are social creatures, and residential courses are, in a fashion, social gatherings. Instructor-made videos allow you to breathe a little life into the course by establishing yourself as an enthusiastic and supportive expert and facilitator. In so doing, you reduce one element of anonymity in the course that can serve to discourage and demotivate students.

But what do we mean by "presence"? There are three types of presence that can be created in online courses: cognitive (or content) presence, social presence, and teaching presence. (If you're interested in learning about strategies about creating presence in your course, check out our article "Establishing Presence: Quick Tips.") Different types of interaction in a course generate each of these kinds of presences.

Cognitive
The degree to which students build their own knowledge base

Student-Content, Student-Student

Social
The perception that the course is populated by real, live people

Student-Instructor, Student-Student

Teaching
The degree to which the students' learning experiences are shaped

Student-Instructor, Student-Student

Although instructors aren't involved in cognitive presence, they are involved in creating social and teaching presence. Arguably, the effort to create teaching presence may be the most important, given that research suggests that teaching presence is the primary catalyst for the other two (i.e., cognitive and social presence; Shea & Bidjerano, 2009).

Ideas for how to use video to create presence:

Create end-of-week video announcements that summarize what the students should have learned and either how future content will build on that knowledge or how it's relevant to the real world.

Upload a video response to the aggregated results of an exam, discussing common mistakes and recommending remedial material.

Provide video feedback to individual students on a summative assessment.

Include a video biography in which you describe your background and interests.

Create a video for the beginning of a new module, covering the module objectives and what students can expect.

2. To Provide a Unique Perspective

For hundreds of years, the written word has been the primary means of sharing a wide variety of perspectives. Each author's personality and performance can deeply inform the knowledge he or she is communicating. Likewise, as video has become an increasingly widespread medium with easy and inexpensive ways to capture and distribute content, there's been a corresponding increase in compelling and effective arguments delivered via multimedia.

Sometimes, you're the one with the unique perspective that's best communicated via video. Indeed, every instructor brings something unique to every class he or she teaches. What unique takes do you have on the material students are consuming? Do you have a perspective that productively differs from arguments that the students are reading? If so, try to capture that perspective on camera! This gives students a greater sense of value that you are their instructor, and that the course is not just a list of materials to consume and assessments to complete. Your differentiated approach to the course material rightfully depicts you as a thoughtful expert in your field. If you're the facilitator for a course that someone else has designed, you can even submit an announcement with a linked (or embedded) video.

Other times, though, it's worth including videos of others discussing the material related to your course. Whether it's their creative delivery, skillful use of visuals, or expensive postproduction, sometimes outside videos can communicate ideas and concepts much better than anything you could try to produce. Whether it's TED Talks, expert lectures, clips from science shows, or OER videos, if it's available on the Web, you can always link to it. ( Our article on copyright basics can help you determine how to use video legally in your course.)

Ideas for how to use video to provide a unique perspective:

Synthesize or contrast multiple authors' arguments based on your own research.

Tell a personal story that involves the principles at hand.

Introduce a wacky metaphor to help explain a complex process.

Include a link to a compelling TED Talk.

3. To Demonstrate a Process

Video is an obvious choice for showing and telling in an online course. Because you don't have face-to-face contact, it's often your only means to communicate steps in a process, how to solve problems, and how theory becomes practice. Demonstrations serve to render complex processes more legible to many students, and students benefit from hearing how experts think.

It's important to note that videos involving demonstrations raise significant accessibility concerns. Consider a student with a visual disability who encounters a software walkthrough. If you're saying things like "move the mouse up here" or "click on this," that visually disabled student won't necessarily be able to understand what's happening, even if subtitles or transcripts are available. So when performing demonstrations on camera, try to remember to dictate every step of what you do. It may not feel natural, but your video will be more accessible.

Ideas for how to use video to demonstrate processes:

Use a document camera to break down the steps of a challenging solution on paper.

Use screen capture software to demonstrate a new Java function.

Present OER videos of chemistry experiments.

4. To Present Intellectual Exchanges

As discussed in the article "Engagement in Online Courses," "engagement" really boils down to interaction: interaction between the students and each other, the students and the course content, and the students and you. (As mentioned above, these forms of interaction also map to types of presence that you can create.) Although "interaction" is concerned more with students' activities rather than simply an observation of interaction, it stands to reason that a video containing dialogue, debate, or conversation can help bring some ideas to life in a more engaging way than simply listening to an individual deliver a lecture.

In addition, as mentioned above, students benefit from hearing how experts think. Are there colleagues, professionals, researchers, or authors in your field who would be willing to discuss a topic on camera? Perhaps you could stage a debate. The more expert voices that you can bring to your course, the more perceived value it can bring to your students.

Ideas for how to use video to present intellectual exchanges:

Present the recording of a three-way video call with colleagues who present (and defend) their perspectives on the lasting impact of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reach out to an author of a novel you've asked the students to read and ask if you can record your Skype interview.

Edit two existing OER videos to juxtapose different perspectives on the significance of one of the novels you've assigned.

5. To Provide Real-World Connections

When it comes to teaching, one of the advantages of including visuals is that it can make knowledge "stickier" in students' brains by giving visual learners an image to attach the concepts to. That being said, even nonvisual learners may benefit when pictures (still or moving) accompany explanations or definitions, to make them clearer.

In addition, research on motivation suggests that real-world illustrations of course principles enhance students' sense of the material's relevance (and thus enhance their overall motivation within your course; Norman, Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, & Lovett, 2010). Students want to know that what they're studying has relevance. So if you're thinking about making a video for your online course, consider if there are places you can visit with a camera that can help bring your course materials to life.

Ideas for how to use video to provide real-world connections:

For each principle in a statistical thermodynamics class, film a simple real-world "video hook" that demonstrates an application of the principle. For example, demonstrate how ice floats in water, but small pebbles (another solid) sink, explaining that the principles in this module will address why this occurs.

Film a short module introduction in an urban neighborhood that indicates clear signs of gentrification, using it as a leaping-off point for a political science course.

Post a YouTube link to the infamous video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge swaying and collapsing as an example of the application (or lack thereof) of eigenvalues.

Conclusion

You can use videos in a variety of ways in online courses. They can play a valuable role in helping your students achieve your learning goals while also accomplishing important secondary goals, such as enhancing motivation, building community, and establishing presence. Even if you aren't an experienced speaker or tech pro, the wide availability of technology allows you to easily dive into video creation, and your unique voice and perspective will help your course stand apart among other online content.

References

Donchev, D. (2018, April 4). 37 mind blowing YouTube facts, figures and statistics - 2018. Retrieved from https://fortunelords.com/youtube-statistics/

Norman, M. K., Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., & Lovett, M. C. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2009). Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster "epistemic engagement" and "cognitive presence" in online education. Computers & Education, 52(3), 543-553.

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5 Great Uses of Video in Online Courses - Center for Teaching and Learning | Wiley Education Services

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Our world today is full of video. According to Donchev (2018), more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! If you're teaching an online course, chances are you've included-or considered including-a video. In addition, the barriers to creating video have been dropping away.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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If you use PowerPoint lectures in your face-to-face classes, you can use those same lectures as jumping-off points for creating narrated animations for your online students to watch. That's the good news.

However, chances are you'll need to make extensive changes - both to your existing PowerPoint slides, and to how you deliver them. Typically, this means scripting the lecture before narrating and recording it so that all information presented online is:

As concise as possible

Organized logically (no skipping around)

Relevant to the important concepts you're trying to convey (as opposed to spending equal time on minor points or details)

Rich with stories, personal examples, and/or examples that clarify and amplify the important concepts

Primarily visual (very little text presented on any screen)

Broken down into separate 2-7 minute recordings, each based around a single concept

Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy way to adapt face-to-face lectures for effective online presentation. Simply recording yourself narrating your PowerPoints as you would in a face-to-face classroom is ineffective because the online environment differs from the classroom in several ways:

The time and attention students are willing to spend watching a screen is much less than the time and attention they're willing to spend watching a live human being lecturing.

The online environment is poor at conveying information in text form (but excels at conveying information visually).

Online students can't ask questions in real-time-and you won't be able to see when they're "getting it" so that you can diverge from your standard lecture and supplement their understanding. Therefore, your presentation has to be extremely clear and explicit.

Online students are typically much less tolerant of extraneous or confusing information presented in a recorded lecture than they are of an in-person lecture.

Students will be accessing lecture recordings differently-and for different reasons-than they "access" face-to-face lectures. Face-to-face students come to class, listen to lecture, and leave. Online students may use lecture recordings for previewing material, as their main source of course content, or for review. They may access recordings never, once, or multiple times for any of all of these reasons.

All of this means that you'll need to rethink the way your existing lectures are organized, what information they contain, and how that information is conveyed.

Below are best practices for converting a PowerPoint presentation for online delivery:

Break long lectures into five minute (or so) chunks. Studies show that online students won't sit through hour-long lectures-so don't create them. Instead, create a handful of smaller lecture "chunks," each of which defines and elaborates a main concept. Chunking lectures in this way also makes it possible for online students to customize their learning by reviewing-and re-reviewing-only those concepts they're having trouble grasping.

Write a script for each concept. Speaking off-the-cuff may work in a classroom, but it doesn't online. Scripting forces you to organize the presentation of your material-to make sure you don't leave anything out or throw in anything extra. It also gives you time to think about the most effective approach to convey material in the highly visual online environment. If you decide not to write a script beforehand, be prepared to spend the same amount of time you would have spent on the script in the recording studio instead, recording and re-recording your lecture chunks (in effect, scripting your recordings during the recording process instead of beforehand.) There really is no way around the scripting step in the production of effective content optimized for online delivery; it's "pay me now or pay me later."

Rework your PowerPoint slides to act as a storyboard for your script. Your PowerPoint slides should contain mostly visuals; you'll need to reduce text to a few words per screen at most. Animations (recorded PowerPoints) are good at conveying visual information; they aren't good at conveying text information. Any text that appears on the screen should be the "take aways" or critical notes you would expect students to take, not simply explanations or nice-to-have details.

Time any text or images that appear on your PowerPoint slides to display at the same time that you, the narrator, speak the text or discuss the image. Studies show that presenting text causes students to try to read it-which means they're missing whatever the narrator happens to be saying at the same time. Learning theory also suggests that displaying images and talking about them later isn't as effective as introducing the images at the very time you begin speaking about them.

For some PowerPoint design examples, both good and bad, go here "
Emily A. Moore, M.Ed., is an instructional designer in the online learning office at Texas State Technical College - Harlingen Campus.

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Adapting PowerPoint Lectures for Online Delivery: Best Practices

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If you use PowerPoint lectures in your face-to-face classes, you can use those same lectures as jumping-off points for creating narrated animations for your online students to watch. That's the good news. However, chances are you'll need to make extensive changes - both to your existing PowerPoint slides, and to how you deliver them.

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In This Post:

An experience with a badly created rubric.

What rubrics should measure... and what they shouldn't.

Ideas to include students in rubrics and assessment.

Some time ago, I sat listening to presentations from my students. I paused at a student who obviously had not understood the concepts they were presenting on. The student spoke well, included the required components in the presentation, and created neat and well designed slides. But they clearly learned very little based on their responses to questions, and they had an inability to deeply explain the concepts from the presentation.

As I prepared to provide the student a less than stellar grade on the project, I realized I couldn't. Not because they somehow proved they knew the content better than it seemed, but because they had met all the requirements on my rubric.

It was a simple 1-4 point rubric with categories. The categories included things that sound great. But do they really measure understanding? Categories like...

All required components are included in presentation

Slides are well developed and easy to read

Speaks clearly during presentation

The problem lies in the fact that these do not measure the learning goals. The student successfully met all these categories, even though they didn't have a great understanding of the concept.

And I couldn't provide any meaningful feedback. Because I had created a bad rubric to measure their understanding.

This moment caused me to rethink rubrics. Here are a few of the things that I changed.

It should always be the mastery of the content standard that we grade and measure with rubrics...NOT the completion or appearance of the product. Click To Tweet

Rubrics Should Reflect Knowledge NOT Task Completion

The first way you can easily improve rubrics is by making them mastery-based. That is, based on mastery of the content and not completion of the project itself.

The project or task you are grading should show a student's mastery. It's completion should require the student to have learned and developed content skills. It is these skills and learning that should be measured, not the product.

For example, instead of " A ll required components are included", you can say " Student can explain and define the characteristics of [topic] ".

By using learning objectives and targets instead of arbitrary descriptors of the project, your rubric will not only be more accurate, but it will more closely align to the daily instruction and learning in the classroom.

Neatness Shouldn't Count

I know some of you are getting angry as you read this, but before you send me an angry email just hold on. I am not saying that your students shouldn't create presentable products of learning, but that's not what we should be measuring (unless that is the we are measuring).

If you are an ELA teacher and you have taught students to deliver a clear and concise message using multiple modes of communication (verbal, visual etc.), then the product would become something you should measure. In this case, you are assessing their ability to effectively communicate their message, and the neatness of the visual may impact that.

However, if you are just trying to figure out if a student understands the steps of a scientific process, then that is what you should be measuring. Not how nice their product, presentation, or poster is.

It should always be the mastery of the content standard that we grade and measure with rubrics...NOT the completion or appearance of the product.

This also includes things like " Uses lots of color." This has NOTHING to do with the students' understanding of the material and, therefore, shouldn't be on the rubric.

Consider Student-Centered Rubrics or Grading

Many teachers I've worked with implement student meetings or conferencing to produce a final grade.

This could involve the teacher creating a rubric and having the student fill it out, defending the case for how their project demonstrates learning. This not only cultivates great discussion and conversations, but will most likely show you what your student knows far more effectively than a traditional "here's your grade" situation.

By involving the learner in this process, we are holding them accountable for their work and mastery of the learning targets or objectives of the project. We are also allowing them to defend their work. This works very well with providing the opportunity to correct or re-do assignments. Students can either accept the feedback and grade, or they can re-work it to improve their understanding and improve their mastery score.

[scroll down to keep reading]

The next time you are watching students present or evaluating student projects, papers, or assignments with a rubric, simply ask yourself, " Am I measuring mastery and knowledge or completion of a task?"

This is a simple way to ensure your rubrics are mastery-based and more effective and accurate.

About Chad Ostrowski

Chad Ostrowski is the co-founder of the Teach Better Team and the creator of The Grid Method, but he is a middle school science teacher at heart. He now travels the country sharing his story, working with teachers, schools, and districts to help them to reach more students.

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An experience with a badly created rubric. What rubrics should measure... and what they shouldn't. Ideas to include students in rubrics and assessment. Some time ago, I sat listening to presentations from my students. I paused at a student who obviously had not understood the concepts they were presenting on.

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There is ongoing debate about whether using a particular delivery technology improves the learning (Beynon, 2007; Clark, 2001; Kozma, 2001). It has long been recognized that specialized delivery technologies can provide efficient and timely access to learning materials; however, Clark (1983) claims that technologies are merely vehicles that deliver instruction, and do not themselves influence student achievement. As Clark notes, meta-analysis studies on media research show that students gain significant learning benefits from audiovisual or computer media, as opposed to conventional instruction; however, the same studies also suggest that the reason for those benefits is not the medium of instruction, but the instructional strategies built into the learning materials. Similarly, Schramm (1977) suggests that learning is influenced more by the content and instructional strategy in the learning materials than by the type of technology used to deliver instruction.

According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old; acquire meaningful knowledge; and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy, not the technology, that influences the quality of learning. Kozma (2001), on the other hand, argues that the particular attributes of the computer are needed to bring real-life models and simulations to the learner; thus, according to Kozma, the medium does influence learning. Kozma claims that it is not the computer per se that makes students learn, but the design of the real-life models and simulations, and the students' interaction with those models and simulations. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners (Clark, 2001).

Online learning allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000); however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning. The delivery method allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually anytime, but the learning must use sound instructional design principles. According to Rossett (2002), online learning has many promises, but it takes commitment and resources, and must be done right. Doing it right means that online learning materials must be designed properly, with the learners and learning in focus, and that adequate support must be provided. Ring and Mathieux (2002) suggest that online learning should have high authenticity (i.e., students should learn in the context of the work-place), high interactivity, and high collaboration. This chapter discusses the foundation of educational theory for the design of effective online learning materials, and suggests a model for developing online instruction based on appropriate educational theory.

[t]he use of the Internet to access learning materials; to interact with the content, instructor, and other learners; and to obtain support during the learning process, in order to acquire knowledge, to construct personal meaning, and to grow from the learning experience. (Ally, p. 7)

BENEFITS OF ONLINE LEARNING

Increasingly, organizations are adopting online learning as the main delivery method to train employees (Simmons, 2002). At the same time, educational institutions are moving toward the use of the Internet for delivery, both on campus and at a distance. For organizations and institutions to make this often expensive move, there must be a perception that using online learning provides major benefits. Some of the benefits for learners and instructors are detailed below.

For learners, online learning knows no time zones, and location and distance are not issues. In asynchronous online learning, students can access the online materials anytime, while synchronous online learning allows for real-time interaction between students and instructors. Learners can use the Internet to access up-to-date and relevant learning materials, and can communicate with experts in the field which they are studying. Situated learning, or the application of knowledge and skills in specific contexts, is facilitated, since learners can complete online courses while working on the job or in their own space, and can contextualize the learning.

DESIGNING ONLINE LEARNING MATERIALS

The goal of any instructional system is to promote learning. Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must tacitly or explicitly know the principles of learning and how students learn. This is especially true for online learning, where instructors and learners are separated. The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories. As discussed above, the delivery medium is not the determining factor in the quality of learning per se; rather, course design determines the effectiveness of the learning (Rovai, 2002).

There are many schools of thought on learning, and no one school is used exclusively to design online learning materials. As there is no single learning theory to follow, we can use a combination of theories to develop online learning materials. In addition, as research progresses, new theories that should be used are emerging and evolving. A recent example is connectivist theory, which is needed for the emerging age of distributed and network learning. Some may question the need for a new learning theory, however, especially when there are already well-established theories used successfully to design instruction. Also, past learning theories have been adapted to address new and changing learning contexts. These existing learning theories, however, were developed before distributed and networked learning was used widely by educators. According to Siemens (2004), we now need a theory for the digital age to guide the development of learning materials for the networked world. Educators should be able to adapt existing learning theories for the digital age, while at the same time using the principles of connectivism to guide the development of effective learning materials. What is needed is not a new stand-alone theory for the digital age, but a model that integrates the different theories to guide the design of online learning materials.

SCHOOLS OF LEARNING

Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behaviour caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974). Behaviorists claim that observable behaviour indicates whether or not the learner has learned something, and not what is going on in the learner's head. In response, some educators claim that not all learning is observable and there is more to learning than a change in behaviour. As a result, there has been a shift away from behaviorist to cognitive learning theories.

Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning. Cognitive theorists see learning as an internal process, and contend that the amount learned depends on the processing capacity of the learner, the amount of effort expended during the learning process, the depth of the processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975), and the learner's existing knowledge structure (Ausubel, 1974).

Recently, there has been a move towards constructivism. Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret the information and the world according to their personal reality, that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997). Learners learn best when they can contextualize what they learn for immediate application and personal meaning.

Under a close analysis of the behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist schools of thought, many overlaps in the ideas and principles become apparent. The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three schools of thought. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can, in fact, be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the (facts); cognitive strategies can be used to teach the (processes and principles); and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the (higher-level thinking that promotes personal meaning, and situated and contextual learning). Janicki and Liegle (2001) analyzed different instructional design models to identify the components that support quality design of web-based instruction. They identify components from each of the behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist schools of learning, and explore connectivist theory to help designers use it to guide the design of learning materials.

Behaviorist School of Learning

The behaviorist school sees the mind as a black box, in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, thereby ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind. This school, therefore, looks at overt behaviours that can be observed and measured as indicators of learning (Good & Brophy, 1990).

Implications for Online Learning

1. Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so they can set expectations and judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson.

2. Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check individual learner's achievement level and provide appropriate feedback.

3. The learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application.

4. Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.

COGNITIVIST SCHOOL OF LEARNING

Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and metacognition. Cognitive psychology looks at learning from an information processing point of view, where the learner uses different types of memory during learning ( ). Sensations are received through the senses into the sensory store before processing occurs. The information persists in the sensory store for less than one second (Kalat, 2007), and if it is not transferred to working memory immediately, it is lost. Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory. The amount of information transferred to working memory depends on the amount of attention that was paid to the incoming information and whether cognitive structures are in place to make sense of the information. The duration in working memory is approximately 20 seconds, and if information in working memory is not processed efficiently, it is not transferred to long-term memory for storage (Kalat, 2007). So, designers must check to see if the appropriate existing cognitive structure is present to enable the learner to process the information. If the relevant cognitive structure is not present, pre-instructional strategies, such as advance organizers, should be included as part of the learning process (Ausubel, 1960).

Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies that enable students to process the materials efficiently. Since working memory has limited capacity, information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing. According to Miller (1956), because humans have limited short-term memory capacity, information should be grouped into meaningful sequences, such as five to nine (i.e., 7 ±2), meaningful units.

After the information is processed in working memory, it is stored in long-term memory. The amount transferred to long-term memory is determined by the quality and depth of processing in working memory. The deeper the processing, the more associations the acquired new information forms in memory. Information transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory is either assimilated or accommodated in long-term memory. During assimilation, the information is changed to fit into existing cognitive structures. Accommodation occurs when an existing cognitive structure is changed to incorporate the new information.

Implications for Online Learning

1. Strategies used should allow learners to perceive and attend to the information so that it can be transferred to working memory. Learners use their sensory systems to register the information in the form of sensations. Strategies to facilitate maximum sensation should be used. Examples include the proper location of the information on the screen, the attributes of the screen (e.g., colour, graphics, size of text), the pacing of the information, and the mode of delivery (audio, visuals, animations, or video). Learners must receive the information in the form of sensations before perception and processing can occur; however, the learner must not be overloaded with sensations, which could be counterproductive to the learning process. Non-essential sensations should be avoided, to allow learners to attend to the important information. Strategies to promote perception and attention for online learning include the following:

Important information should be placed in the centre of the screen for reading, and learners must be able to read from left to right.

Information critical for learning should be highlighted to focus learners' attention. For example, in an online lesson, headings should be used to organize the details, and formatted to allow learners to attend to and process the information they contain.

Learners should be told why they should take the lesson, so that they can attend to the information throughout the lesson.

The difficulty level of the material must match the cognitive level of the learner, so that the learner can both attend to and relate to the material. Links to both simpler and more complicated materials can be used to accommodate learners at different knowledge levels.

2. Strategies used should allow learners to retrieve existing information from long-term memory to help make sense of the new information. Learners must construct a memory link between the new information and some related information already stored in long-term memory. Strategies to facilitate the use of existing schema are the following:

Use advance organizers to activate existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson. A comparative advance organizer can be used to help learners recall prior knowledge to help in processing, and an expository advance organizer can be used to help incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960). Mayer (1979) conducted a meta-analysis of advance organizer studies, and found that these strategies are effective when students are learning from text that is presented in an unfamiliar form. Since most courses contain materials that are new to learners, advance organizers should be used to provide the framework for learning.

Provide conceptual models that learners can use to retrieve existing mental models or to store the structure they will need to use to learn the details of the lesson.

Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure. Questions presented before the lesson facilitate the recall of existing knowledge, help learners to learn the materials, and motivate them to find additional resources to achieve the lesson outcome.

Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials. With the flexibility of online learning, students with diverse background and knowledge can choose the most appropriate path to review previous or prerequisite learning before new information is presented.

3. Information should be chunked to prevent overload during processing in working memory (Miller, 1956). To facilitate efficient processing in working memory, online learning materials should present between five and nine items on a screen. If there are many items in a lesson, their organization should be shown in the form of information maps. A generalized information map is provided as an overview for the online lesson, and can be linear, hierarchical, or spider-shaped, as illustrated in Figures 2 to 4 (Holley, Dansereau, McDonald, Garland, & Collins 1979; Smith & Ragan, 1999). As the lesson progresses, each item in the generalized information map is presented and broken down into sub-items. At the end of the lesson, the generalized map is shown again, but with the relationships among the items illustrated.
To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997). In addition to facilitating deep processing, information maps can provide the big picture, to help learners to comprehend the details of a lesson. Online learning can capitalize on the processing and visual capabilities of the computer to present information maps to learners, or to ask learners to generate information maps using map-making software.

FIGURE 2. Linear information map

FIGURE 3. Spider-shaped information map

FIGURE 4. Hierarchical information map

4. Other strategies that promote deep processing should be used to help transfer information to long-term storage. To make the transfer to long-term memory more effective, strategies should be used that require learners to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate promote higher-level learning. Online strategies to allow learners to apply the information in real life should also be included, to contextualize the learning and to facilitate deep processing.

5. A variety of learning strategies should be included in online instruction to accommodate individual differences and learning styles (Cassidy, 2004). Learning style refers to how a learner perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment; it measures individual differences. Different learning style instruments are used to determine students' learning styles. The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) looks at how learners perceive and process information (Kolb, 1984), whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception (Myers, 1978). In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.
Kolb suggests that two components make up our learning experience: perceiving and processing. Perceiving refers to the way learners sense and absorb the information around them, from concrete experience to reflective observation. Concrete experience relates to learners' desire to learn things that have personal meaning. During reflective observation, learners like to take the time to think about and reflect on the learning materials. The second component, processing, refers to how learners understand and process the information that is absorbed after perceiving. Processing ranges from abstract conceptualization to active experimentation. Learners who have a preference for abstract conceptualization like to learn facts and figures and research new information on different topics. Learners who have a preference for active experimentation like to apply what they learn to real-life situations and to go beyond what was presented. They like to try things and learn from their experience. Online learning can cater for individual differences by determining a learner's preference and providing appropriate learning activities based on that learner's style.

Online learning materials should include activities for the different styles, so that learners can select appropriate activities based on their preferred learning style. Concrete-experience learners prefer specific examples in which they can be involved, and they relate to peers more than to people in authority. They like group work and peer feedback, and they see the instructor as a coach or helper. These learners prefer support methods that allow them to interact with peers and obtain coaching from the instructor. Reflective-observation learners like to observe carefully before taking any action. They prefer that all the information be available for learning, and see the instructor as the expert. They tend to avoid interaction with others. Abstract-conceptualization learners like to work more with things and symbols and less with people. They like to work with theory and to conduct systematic analyses. Active-experimentation learners prefer to learn by doing practical projects and participating in group discussions. They prefer active learning methods and interact with peers for feedback and information. They tend to establish their own criteria for evaluating situations. Adequate supports should be provided for students with different learning styles. Ally and Fahy (2002) found that students with different learning styles have different preferences for support. For example, the assimilator learning style prefers high instructor presence, while the accommodator learning style prefers low instructor presence.

Cognitive style refers to a learner's preferred way of processing information; that is, the person's typical mode of thinking, remembering, or problem solving. Thus, cognitive style is another individual difference indicator. Cognitive style is considered to be a personality dimension that influences attitudes, values, and social interaction. One of the dimensions of cognitive style that has implications for online learning is the distinction between field-dependent and field-independent personalities (Witkin, Moore, Goodenough, & Cox, 1977). Field-independent personalities approach the environment in an analytical manner; for example, they distinguish figures as discrete from their backgrounds. Field-independent individuals experience events in a more global, less differentiated way. Field-dependent individuals have a greater social orientation compared to field-independent personalities. Field-independent individuals are likely to learn more effectively under conditions of intrinsic motivation, such as self-study, and are influenced less by social reinforcement.

6. Information should be presented in different modes to facilitate processing and transferring it to long-term memory. Where possible, textual, verbal, and visual information should be presented to encourage encoding. According to dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1986), information received in different modes (textual and visual) will be processed better than that presented in a single mode (text). Dual-coded information is processed in different parts of the brain, resulting in more encoding. Presenting information in different modes also accommodates individual differences in processing.

7. Learners should be motivated to learn. It does not matter how effective the online materials are, if learners are not motivated, they will not learn. The issue is whether to use intrinsic motivation (driven from within the learner) or extrinsic motivation (instructor- and performance-driven). Designers of online learning materials should use intrinsic motivation strategies to motivate learners (Malone, 1981); however, extrinsic motivation should also be used since some learners are motivated by externally driven methods. Keller proposes the ARCS model ( A ttention, R elevance, C onfidence, S atisfaction) for motivating learners during learning (Keller, 1983; Keller & Suzuki, 1988):

Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners.

Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining learners' interest throughout the learning session.

Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or from known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson.

Satisfaction: Provide feedback on learners' performance and allow them to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.

8. Encourage learners to use their metacognitive skills to help in the learning process (Mayer, 1998; Sternberg, 1998; Yorke & Knight, 2004). Metacognition is a learner's ability to be aware of his or her cognitive capabilities and use these capabilities to learn. When learning online, learners should be given the opportunity to reflect on what they are learning, collaborate with other learners, and check their progress. Self-check questions and exercises with feedback throughout a lesson are good strategies to allow learners to check how they are doing, so they can use their metacognitive skills to adjust their learning approach if necessary.

9. Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations. Simulation of the real situation, using real-life cases, should be part of the lesson. Also, learners should be given the opportunity to complete assignments and projects that use real-life applications and information. Transfer to real-life situations could assist the learners to develop personal meaning and contextualize the information.
Cognitive psychology suggests that learners receive and process information to be transferred into long-term memory for storage. The amount of information processed depends on the amount that is perceived, and the amount stored in long-term memory depends on the quality of the processing in working memory. Effective online lessons must use techniques to allow learners to sense and perceive the information, and must include strategies to facilitate high-level processing for transfer of information to long-term memory. After learners acquire the information, they create personal knowledge to make the materials meaningful. The constructivist school of learning, which is discussed below, suggests that learners construct personal knowledge from the learning experience.

CONSTRUCTIVIST SCHOOL OF LEARNING

In his transformation theory, Mezirow (1991) uses both constructivism and cognitivism to explain how people learn. He sees learning as "the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action" (p. 12). Transformative learning involves "reflectively transforming the beliefs, attitudes, opinions, and emotional reactions that constitute our meaning schemes or transforming our meaning perspectives" (p. 223). Mezirow claims that learning involves five interacting contexts: the frame of reference or meaning perspective in which the learning is embedded; the conditions of communication; the line of action (process) in which the learning occurs; the self-image of the learner; and the situation encountered during the learning process (p. 13).

Implications for Online Learning

1. Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.

2. Learners should construct their own knowledge, rather than accepting that given by the instructor. Knowledge construction is facilitated by good interactive online instruction, since the students have to take the initiative to learn and to interact with other students and the instructor, and because the learning agenda is controlled by the student (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). In an online environment, students experience the information first-hand, rather than receiving filtered information from an instructor whose style or background may differ from theirs. In a traditional lecture, instructors contextualize and personalize the information to meet their own needs, which may not be appropriate for all learners. In online instruction, learners experience the information first-hand, which gives them the opportunity to contextualize and personalize the information themselves.

3. Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (Hooper & Hannafin, 1991; Johnson & Johnson, 1996; Palloff & Pratt, 1999). Working with other learners gives learners real-life experience of working in a group and allows them to use their metacognitive skills. Learners will also be able to use the strengths of other learners, and learn from others. When assigning group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.

4. Learners should be given control of the learning process. There should be a form of guided discovery where learners are allowed to made decisions about learning goals, with some guidance from the instructor.

5. Learners should be given time and the opportunity to reflect. When learning online, students need the time to reflect and internalize the information. Embedded questions about the content can be used throughout the lesson to encourage learners to reflect on and process the information in a relevant and meaningful manner; or learners can be asked to generate a learning journal during the learning process, to encourage reflection and processing.

6. Learning should be made meaningful. Learning materials should include examples that relate to the learners so that they can make sense of the information. Assignments and projects should allow learners to choose meaningful activities to help them apply and personalize the information.

7. Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich, Molenda, Russell, and Smaldino (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information. In the transformation process, learners interact with the content, with other learners, and with instructors to test and confirm ideas and to apply what they learn. Garrison (1999) claims that the design of the educational experience includes the transactional nature of the relationship between instructor, learners, and content that is of significance to the learning experience.

Different kinds of interaction will promote learning at different levels. shows interactive strategies to promote higher-level learning (Berge, 1999; Gilbert & Moore, 1998; Schwier & Misanchuk, 1993). Hirumi (2002) proposes a framework of interaction in online learning that consists of three levels. Level one is learner-self interaction, which occurs within learners to help monitor and regulate their own learning. Level two is learner-human and learner-non-human interactions, where the learner interacts with human and non-human resources. Level three is learner-instruction interaction, which consists of activities to achieve a learning outcome. This chapter goes one step further and proposes interactions that go from lower-level to higher-level interactions, based on behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist schools of learning.

Levels of Interaction in online learning

At the lowest level of interaction, there must be learner-interface interaction to allow the learner to access and sense the information. The interface is where learners use their senses to register the information in sensory storage. In online learning, the interface is with the computer, to access the content and to interact with others. Once learners access the online materials, there must be learner-content interaction to process the information. Learners navigate through the content to access the components of the lesson, which could take the form of pre-learning, learning, and post-learning activities. These activities could access reusable learning objects from a repository to present to learners (McGreal, 2002; Wiley, 2002), or they could use content custom-created by the designer or instructor. Students should be given the ability to choose their own sequence of learning, or should be given one or more suggested sequences. As online learners interact with the content, they should be encouraged to apply, assess, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and reflect on what they learn (Berge, 2002). During the learner-content interaction, learners process the information to transform it from short-term to long-term memory. The higher the level of processing, the more associations are made in the learners' long-term memory, which results in higher-level learning.

As learners work through the content, they will find the need for learner support, which could take the form of learner-to-learner, learner-to-instructor, instructor-to-learner, and learner-to-expert interactions (Moore, 1989; Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001; Thiessen, 2001). There should be strategies to promote learner-context interaction, to allow learners to apply what they learn in real life so that they can contextualize the information. Learner-context interaction allows learners to develop personal knowledge and construct personal meaning from the information.

CONNECTIVIST THEORY FOR ONLINE LEARNING

According to Siemens (2004), connectivist theory is for the digital age, where individuals learn and work in a networked environment. As a result, we do not have control over what we learn since others in the network continually change information, and that requires new learning, unlearning old information, and/or learning current information. Siemens proposes some guidelines for designing learning materials for the learner, based on connectivist theory. Below is an elaboration of these guidelines for the development of online learning materials.

Because of the information explosion, learners should be allowed to explore and research current information. Learners of the future need to be autonomous and independent learners so that they can acquire current information to build a valid and accurate knowledge base. Appropriate use of the Internet is an ideal learning strategy in a networked world.

Some information and procedures become obsolete because of changes in the field and innovation; learners must therefore be able to unlearn old information and mental models and learn current information and mental models. The information that is valid today may not be valid tomorrow.

The rapid increase of information available from a variety of sources means that some information is not as important or genuine as other information. As a result, the learner must be able to identify important information from unimportant information.

Learners must have the ability to recognize what knowledge is no longer valid so they can acquire the new knowledge for a discipline. This requires that learners keep up-to-date in the field and be active participants in the network of learning.

Because of globalization, information is not location-specific, and with the increasing use of telecommunication, technologies experts and learners from around the world can share and review information. Learning and knowledge rests in a diversity of opinions. As a result, learners must be allowed to connect with others around the world to examine others' opinions and to share their thinking with the world. Mobile learning promises to help learners function in a networked world where they can learn at any time and from anywhere (Ally, 2005).

The world is connected by telecommunication technology. Hence, information for learning should not be taken from one source but should be assembled from many sources to reflect the networked world and the diversity of thinking. Learning should be delivered in a multi-channel system where different communication technologies are used to deliver the learning materials to facilitate optimal learning (Mukhopadhyay & Parhar, 2001).

The field of computer systems is altering the learning process. The intelligent agents that are being built into devices and appliances will affect how students learn and where they obtain their learning materials. For example, devices and appliances will have built-in learning materials. When learners interact with the equipment, the training will be provided to them. Or, if the learner makes a mistake while using the equipment, the system will detect the mistake and provide the correct information. Hence, what learners need to learn depends on the type of equipment they use and their prior knowledge.

Because of the information explosion, learners of the future must be willing to acquire new knowledge on an ongoing basis. Online teaching strategies must give learners the opportunity to research and locate new information in a discipline so that they can keep up-to-date in the field. In addition to using the Internet to deliver flexibility, instruction must be designed for experiential and authentic learning (Schmidt & Werner, 2007).

The Internet is expanding education into a global classroom, with learners, teachers, and experts from around the world. As a result, learners must network with other students and experts to make sure that they are continually learning and updating their knowledge.

Because of innovation and our increasing use of technology, learning is becoming more multidisciplinary. Learners must be exposed to different fields so that they can see the connections between the information in the fields. For example, learning about learning theories requires that learners be exposed to what the research says in psychology and information technology.

CONCLUSION

This chapter concludes by proposing a model, based on educational theory, that shows the important learning components that should be used when designing online materials. Neither placing information on the Web nor linking to other digital resources on the Web constitutes online instruction. Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the a sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997). A variety of learning activities should be used to accommodate the different learning styles. Learners will choose the appropriate strategy to meet their learning needs. Refer to for key components that should be considered when designing online learning materials.

Learner Preparation

A variety of pre-learning activities can prepare learners for the details of the lesson, and to connect and motivate them to learn the online lesson. A rationale should be provided to inform learners of the importance of taking the online lesson and to show how it will benefit them. A concept map is provided to establish the existing cognitive structure, to incorporate the details of the online lesson, and to activate learners' existing structures to help them learn the details in the lesson. The lesson concept map also gives learners the big picture.

Learners should be informed of the learning outcomes of the lesson, so they know what is expected of them and will be able to gauge when they have achieved the lesson outcomes. An advance organizer should be provided to establish a structure, to organize the details in the online lesson, or to bridge between what learners already know and need to know. Learners must be told the prerequisite requirements so that they can check whether they are ready for the lesson. Providing the prerequisites to learners also activates the required cognitive structure to help them learn the materials.

A self-assessment should be provided at the start of the lesson to allow learners to check whether they already have the knowledge and skills taught in the online lesson. If learners think they have the knowledge and skills, they should be allowed to take that lesson's final test. The self-assessment also helps learners to organize the lesson materials and to recognize the important materials in the lesson. Once learners are prepared for the details of the lesson, they can go on to complete the online learning activities and to learn the details of the lesson.

Components of effective online learning

Learner Activities

Online learning should include a variety of learning activities to help students achieve the lesson's learning outcome and to cater for their individual needs. Examples of learning activities include reading textual materials, listening to audio materials, and viewing visuals or video materials. Learners can conduct research on the Internet or link to online information and libraries to acquire further information. Having learners prepare a learning journal will allow them to reflect on what they have learned and provide the information with personal meaning. Appropriate application exercises should be embedded throughout the online lesson to establish the relevance of the materials. Practice activities, with feedback, should be included to allow learners to monitor how they are performing, so that they can adjust their learning method if necessary. To promote higher-level processing and to bring closure to the lesson, a summary should be provided, or learners should be required to generate a lesson summary.

Learner Interaction

As learners complete the learning activities, they will be involved with a variety of interactions. Learners need to interact with the interface to access the online materials. The interface should not overload learners, and should make it as easy as possible for learners to sense the information, for transfer to sensory store and then into short-term memory for processing. Learners need to interact with the content to acquire the information needed and to form the knowledge base. There should be interaction between the learner and other learners, between the learner and the instructor, and between the learner and experts to collaborate, participate in shared cognition, form social networks, and establish social presence. Learners should be able to interact within their context to personalize information and construct their own meaning.

Learner Transfer

Opportunities should be provided for learners to transfer what they learned to real-life applications, so that they can be creative and go beyond what was presented in the online lesson.

LOOKING AHEAD

Behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist theories have contributed in different ways to the design of online materials, and they will continue to be used to develop learning materials for online learning. Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies, the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. In addition to the existing learning theories, connectivism should be used to guide the development of online learning, since the other learning theories were developed before we became a networked world. Globalization has also affected what students learn and how they learn. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility, and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners, will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. The integration of 3D interactive graphics and web technologies (Web3D) will allow educators to develop highly interactive and realistic learning environments to enhance online learning (Chittaro & Ranon, 2007). Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse in response to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.

REFERENCES

Ally, M. (2005). Using learning theories to design instruction for mobile learning devices. In J. Attwell and C. Savill-Smith (Eds.), Mobile learning anytime everywhere (pp. 5-8). Proceedings of the Third World Conference on Mobile Learning, Rome.

Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior , , 671-684.

Downes, S. (2006). An introduction to connective knowledge. Retrieved March 26, 2007, from http://www.downes.ca/post/33034

Janicki, T., & Liegle, J. O. (2001). Development and evaluation of a framework for creating web-based learning modules: A pedagogical and systems approach. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 5 (1). Retrieved June 10, 2007, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v5n1/pdf/v5n1_janicki.pdf

Murphy, K. L., & Cifuentes, L. (2001). Using web tools, collaborating, and learning online. Distance Education , (2), 285-305.

Phillips, D. C. (2005). Theories of teaching and learning. In A companion to the philosophy of Education . Blackwell Synergy: Online Journals for Learning, Research, and Professional Practice. Retrieved March 26, 2007, from http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9781405140515_chunk_g978140514051519

Rourke, L., Anderson, T., Garrison, D. R., & Archer, W. (2001). Assessing social presence in asynchronous text-based computer conferencing. Journal of Distance Education, 14 (2). Retrieved June 10, 2007 from http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol14.2/rourke_et_al.html

Rovai, A. (2002). Building sense of community at a distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning , (1). Retrieved June 10, 2007, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/79/152

Siemens, G. (2004). A learning theory for the digital age. Retrieved March 26, 2007 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Simmons, D. E. (2002). The forum report: E-learning adoption rates and barriers. In A. Rossett (Ed.), The ASTD e-learning handbook (pp. 19-23). New York: McGraw-Hill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mohamed Ally is an associate professor for the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University. Dr. Ally teaches courses in distance education and is involved with research on improving design, development, delivery, and support in distance education.

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"1. Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning / Mohamed Ally" in "The Theory and Practice of Online Learning" on AU Press-Digital Publications

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There is ongoing debate about whether using a particular delivery technology improves the learning (Beynon, 2007; Clark, 2001; Kozma, 2001). It has long been recognized that specialized delivery technologies can provide efficient and timely access to learning materials; however, Clark (1983) claims that technologies are merely vehicles that deliver instruction, and do not themselves influence student achievement.

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Why Instructional Design Matters In eLearning

The process usually involves knowing the learners' state of mind, what they need, and assisting them by delivering engaging and effective training that meets their requirements. The assistance can come in several ways, including a well-developed course, interactive elements, and assessments. So, let's talk about why Instructional Designs are vital to the eLearning industry.

1. Good Instructional Design Helps Learners Retain Knowledge

No doubt, good Instructional Design helps guide learners toward achieving the learning goals of a course. Apart from that, it also helps them to acquire and retain knowledge. The way visual graphics are presented in an online course can have a great impact on learners' retaining ability. It can help learners connect the information to prior mental strategies of learning. Research has it that the human brain tends to recall information more often through images, charts, and infographics than through text. Therefore, integrating infographics, images, and videos into your eLearning can help retain knowledge.

2. Good Instructional Design Makes Learners Engage

One of the roles of an Instructional Designer is to make a thorough analysis of their learners before creating their online courses. This enables them to create learning activities that are relevant, engaging and appealing to the learner. Also, a designer's understanding of their target audience is essential, in order to know their retention ability and what visual mix motivates them to learn. This will help them to know exactly the kind of learning design that suits the learners' needs, hence using their skills to create an engaging learning experience.

3. A Good User Experience Contributes To The Achievement Of Learning Goals

One of the most important aspects of Instructional Design to consider during custom eLearning development is the User Experience (UX). It defines how accessible an eLearning course is, and this has a direct impact on the learners' level of engagement. A better UX design is vital in eLearning, as learners tend to lose the main goal of the course if it is not engaging. Also, with a bad UX design, learners tend to be distracted from achieving the aim of the course. For instance, not properly choosing a compelling color for your design will end up distracting and confusing your learners.

4. Good Instructional Design Helps To Communicate Messages

One thing about good design is its ability to communicate a message perfectly and directly to learners. Good Instructional Design is more than just decorations, it involves effective communication which helps learners to achieve learning goals. Designs are great if the mind is put in action with good intentions and choices. However, that is not enough, as there must also be a story behind every design. The story, together with a good design, ensures that you are passing the right message across to your learners. All in all, every Instructional Designer should have good intentions. For example, either changing the learners' behavior, educating them, or something else.

5. Good Instructional Designs Trigger Learners To Take Action

One of the reasons why good design matters in eLearning is because it helps to inspire learners to act and achieve more than expected. So, the role of the designer is to come up with inspiring designs that help motivate learners to acquire more knowledge. Inspiring designs can be difficult, however, you can achieve them if you have a better understanding of your target audience.

In Conclusion

Instructional Design is very essential in learning, and without it, there would be no engagement, only text. Also, nothing beats having your learners stay engaged throughout your course and achieving your learning goal. One secret to engaging your learners is by analyzing them to know what they need, and by putting nice designs in place to meet the requirements. Choose the right Instructional Design software, like Wizcabin, which will help you save time and money to create engaging training for your learners.

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Why Instructional Design Matters In eLearning - eLearning Industry

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The process usually involves knowing the learners' state of mind, what they need, and assisting them by delivering engaging and effective training that meets their requirements. The assistance can come in several ways, including a well-developed course, interactive elements, and assessments. So, let's talk about why Instructional Designs are vital to the eLearning industry.

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Tim Slade | Award-Winning Freelance eLearning Designer

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If I asked you what makes good eLearning, how would you answer? Would you say instructional design? I'm sure you would-that's what everyone says! But, think for a minute about all the other components that go into creating an eLearning course. It's not just instructional design- it's graphic design, user interface design, and visual communications!

Here's some truth for you: humans are visual creatures! We "eat" with our eyes first, we fall in love with our eyes first, and we learn with our eyes first. It's because of this that graphic design is so important when designing good eLearning!

When I first started in eLearning, I put all my efforts into instructional design. Although I wanted my courses to look better, I really only worried about graphic design if I had extra time at the end of a project.

Start with the basics: learn what colors and fonts work well together and how to create a clean and balanced layout. Practicing good graphic design techniques doesn't mean learning how to create custom graphics. Sometimes it's just a matter of moving things around on the screen until they look good.
What to learn more about how graphic design can make good eLearning? Check out these posts:
When designing an eLearning course, how often do you think about the learner's experience? And, when I say, "learner's experience," I'm not referring to the learning content! I'm talking about the literal experience learners have while using your course.

Besides the development of learning content, think about all the other elements you have to develop to make your course functional and interactive. As an eLearning designer, your job also includes user interface design!

When an eLearning course is difficult to use or lacks intuitiveness, it becomes a barrier to your learner! Is there a clear path forward? Do buttons look like buttons? Is the navigation consistent from one slide to the next? Making your course easy to use and navigate lets the learner focus on learning!
What to learn more about how user interface design can make good eLearning? Check out these posts:
Do you know the difference between graphic design and visual communications? If not, you might be missing a huge opportunity to enhance the presentation of your learning content!

Graphic design relates to the way your course looks and feels. This is how your fonts, colors, images, graphics, layouts, and effects work together to create a cohesive design. Visual communications, on the other hand, relates to how you communicate ideas, processes, or procedures visually on the screen.

eLearning is a tool for visual communications. Carefully selecting a collection of images to represent an idea, creating a series of animations to explain a process, or designing a diagram to show the relationship between different concepts are all examples of visual communications. When storyboarding your learning content, you must always consider how you plan to visually communicate it on the screen.
What to learn more about how visual communications can make good eLearning? Check out these posts:
When you're new to eLearning, the concept of creating interactive content might be as simple as the learner clicking to reveal some learning content. However, let me ask you this: how much knowledge or critical thinking does it take for the learner to execute this task? Not much! Instead, strive to create interactions that require the learner to think before clicking.

This means the learner is challenged to make some decision or provide a response based on knowledge provided earlier in the course.

Here are some examples of interactivity that require the learner to think:

The learner is asked how to select an appropriate response to an angry customer.

The learner is asked to sort items by dragging and dropping them into multiple categories.

The learner is asked to type his or her response to an employee's complaint.

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If I asked you what makes good eLearning, how would you answer? Would you say instructional design? I'm sure you would-that's what everyone says! But, think for a minute about all the other components that go into creating an eLearning course. It's not just instructional design- it's graphic design, user interface design, and visual communications!

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is comprised of two components:

Knowledge of one's own cognition:

knowing what factors influence one's own performance (i.e., knowing strengths/weaknesses)

knowing about the various learning strategies that work for you in general

knowing which learning strategy to use in one's specific situation

Regulation of one's own cognition:

Planning and goal setting

Monitoring and controlling one's own learning

Evaluating one's own regulation

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Instructional Strategies to Improve Metacognition & Self-Directed Learning

Establish one's own learning goals/generating one's own research questions

Guided reflection before, during, and after learning events...things to reflect on include:

one's learning strategy, whether it worked and how they can do it differently

one's current understanding and areas in need of improvement followed by self-evaluation of how much was learned and what still needs to be learned

Explaining one's understanding of a topic or one's choices in completing an open-ended assignment

Applying current knowledge to new situations (learning transfer)

Self-evaluation of work

See Activities for Metacognition for more ideas in depth

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Brainstorming activities

Cooperation and Collaboration activities

Problem-based learning

Debates or role-playing where you have to support a different perspective than your own

Socratic dialog focused on exposing one's assumptions

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Some explicit Creative Thinking Objective Examples:

Utilizes a range of idea creation techniques (i.e., brainstorming, mind mapping, role-playing, etc.) (Cognitive domain)

Creates new ideas or combines old ideas in new ways (Cognitive domain)

Values new and diverse perspectives (Affective domain)

Accepts failure as an opportunity to learn (Affective domain)

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strategies might also lend themselves to creative thinking and metacognitive activities:

Inductive learning

Problem-based learning

Case-based learning

Debate

Socratic method

Roleplays

Inquiry labs

Simulations

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How To Choose The Best Instructional Design Model For Your Next eLearning Course

Instructional Design models serve as a framework for your entire eLearning course. They dictate the activities you choose, how you assess online learners, and the level of peer interaction. For this reason, it's essential to take your time selecting the perfect Instructional Design model that aligns with your eLearning strategy. Otherwise, you may end up switching halfway through, which means you'll have to start from scratch. Here are 8 valuable tips for choosing the best Instructional Design model for your eLearning course design.

1. Take A Closer Look At Your Own Cognitions

Before you narrow down your list of Instructional Design models, you should ponder one very important question: what makes this approach stand out from the others? In most cases, personal beliefs, opinions, and experiences play a crucial role. A lot of thought goes into choosing the ideal model or theory for your eLearning course design. You typically draw from past experiences, such as what worked and what you'd like to improve. For instance, another Instructional Design model may have left out one key component that you felt was necessary. You have the power to use all of this personal data during this selection process. However, your cognitions can also work against you in this regard. Especially if you've formed an opinion or bias that prevents you from researching certain Instructional Design models. Take a closer look at your thought process to determine if your cognitions are helping or hindering.

2. Use Your Learning Objectives As A Reference Point

Ultimately, the Instructional Design model serves your learning objectives, goals, and desired outcomes. Not the other way around. You must clearly define your objectives beforehand and then use them as a guide when choosing your ID approach. This allows you to select an Instructional Design model that features the right behaviors, principles, and methodologies. If you skip this essential step, you may have to rework your learning objectives in order to fit the Instructional Design model's mold. As a result, you won't be able to achieve the desired outcomes or meet online learners' needs.

3. Evaluate EVERY Aspect Of The Instructional Design Model

Every Instructional Design model possesses its own principles, ideologies, and behavioral reasoning. For example, one Instructional Design model may recommend a more holistic approach while another involves behaviorist theories. This is why it's important to examine and evaluate every component of the Instructional Design model before you make your final decision. Also, keep in mind that you can blend different Instructional Design elements of different models to create your own eLearning strategy.

4. Get Input From Your eLearning Team

Your eLearning team is going to use the Instructional Design model as a guideline when they create the eLearning content. As such, they should have a direct say during the selection process. This also ties into tip #1, as you have the opportunity to overcome personal cognitions. Their input may sway your opinion and give you a fresh perspective. For example, you may have overlooked an Instructional Design model that is ideal for your next eLearning course. Lastly, your eLearning team knows their skills and abilities. Therefore, they'll be able to tell you which Instructional Design models are within their scope.

5. Consider The Needs And Preferences Of Your Online Learners

In addition to the needs of your eLearning team, you must also consider the needs of your audience. This involves surveys, pre-assessments, and workplace observations. An Instructional Design model may be ideally suited for the subject matter. But does it cater to the specific traits, abilities, and skills of your online learners? Their backgrounds, knowledge base, and personal preferences are all important considerations.

6. Gather Your Resources In Advance

Every Instructional Design model requires certain eLearning resources or activities. The question is: do you have everything you need to uphold the integrity of the Instructional Design model? For instance, you may not have the tech resources to follow all of the key principles. For this reason, you should gather all of your Instructional Design tools, materials, and assets in advance. Take stock to see which Instructional Design models are available to you, based on the resources you already have. Alternatively, you can invest in additional tools and assets to prepare your eLearning team for the task ahead.

7. Look At Each Model With A Modern Eye

Instructional Design models must provide your modern learners with a dynamic, interactive, and engaging eLearning experience. That's why it's crucial to examine every Instructional Design model from a modern perspective. Does it blend technology with human interaction? Are your online learners able to explore the subject on their own and get what they need from the eLearning course? Does it cater to a diverse range of learning needs and preferences?

8. Plan For The Future

In addition to modern learners, you should also consider future audiences. This is especially true for eLearning courses without an "expiration date". Look at it this way: online learners from the future are going to be accessing your eLearning course to get the information they need. But is your Instructional Design model going to date the design or hinder the learning process? Is it a relatively new model that hasn't been tried and tested? Ideally, the Instructional Design model must be tech-forward and flexible so that it stands the test of time.

This article can help you choose the best Instructional Design model for your next eLearning course. If you already have a list of Instructional Design models that you're considering, use it as a rubric to weigh the pros and cons. It may take careful planning and research now, but selecting the right Instructional Design model can save you time and stress later on.

Have you decided which Instructional Design model fits best to your next eLearning course? If, for example, you have chosen the Levels of Processing Theory, read the article 3 Tips To Apply The Levels Of Processing Theory In eLearning Course Design to discover the key principles of this theory and how to apply them in your eLearning course design.

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8 Tips To Choose The Best Instructional Design Model For Your Next eLearning Course - eLearning Industry

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Instructional Design models serve as a framework for your entire eLearning course. They dictate the activities you choose, how you assess online learners, and the level of peer interaction. For this reason, it's essential to take your time selecting the perfect Instructional Design model that aligns with your eLearning strategy.

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To Analyze Thinking We Must Identify and Question its Elemental Structures

More Standards:
There are numerous other standards that may be applied to elements on a contextual basis. Here are just a few:
Completeness, Validity, Rationality, Sufficiency, Necessity, Feasabilty, Consistency, Authenticity, Effectiveness, Efficiency
Can you identify others standards relevant to your situation?

Why the Analysis of Thinking is Important

Everyone thinks; it is our nature to do so. But much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, or downright prejudiced. If we want to think well, we must understand at least the rudiments of thought, the most basic structures out of which all thinking is made. We must learn how to take thinking apart.

All Thinking Is Defined by the Eight Elements That Make It Up. Eight basic structures are present in all thinking: Whenever we think, we think for a purpose within a point of view based on assumptions leading to implications and consequences. We use concepts, ideas and theories to interpret data, facts, and experiences in order to answer questions, solve problems, and resolve issues.

Thinking, then:

generates purposes

raises questions

uses information

utilizes concepts

makes inferences

makes assumptions

generates implications

embodies a point of view

Simply "Mouse Over" any object on the page to learn more about it.
Your purpose is your goal, your objective,
what you are trying to accomplish. We also use the term to include functions, motives, and intentions.

You should be clear about your purpose, and your purpose should be justifiable.

Questions which target purpose

What is your, my, their purpose in doing________?

What is the objective of this assignment (task, job, experiment, policy, strategy, etc.)?

Should we question, refine, modify our purpose (goal, objective, etc.)?

What is the purpose of this meeting (chapter, relationship, action)?

What is your central aim in this line of thought?

What is the purpose of education?

Why did you say...?

Implications are claims or truths that logically follow from other claims or truths. Implications follow from thoughts. Consequences follow from actions.
Implications are inherent in your thoughts, whether you see them or not. The best thinkers think through the logical implications in a situation before acting.

Questions you can ask about implications

If I decide to do "X", what things might happen?

If I decide not to do "X", what things might happen?

What are you implying when you say that?

What is likely to happen if we do this versus that?

Are you implying that...?

How significant are the implications of this decision?

What, if anything, is implied by the fact that a much higher percentage of poor people are in jail than wealthy people?

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CriticalThinking.org - Critical Thinking Model 1

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To Analyze Thinking We Must Identify and Question its Elemental Structures More Standards: There are numerous other standards that may be applied to elements on a contextual basis. Here are just a few: Completeness, Validity, Rationality, Sufficiency, Necessity, Feasabilty, Consistency, Authenticity, Effectiveness, Efficiency Can you identify others standards relevant to your situation?