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Une formation comodale se caractérise par un enseignement offert simultanément en présence et à distance. Des équipements de captation audio et vidéo présents en salle de cours permettent la diffusion de l'activité par le biais d'un logiciel de classe virtuelle. La personne étudiante a donc le choix de se présenter physiquement sur le campus ou encore de participer en ligne.

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Zoom Fatigue can result from feeling too close to others. Like that awkward elevator moment!

On May 6th I joined the international conference Media and Learning Online Spring 2021. Around 200 colleagues from higher education joined to reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic. (disclaimer: I was one the advisory committee of the conference and also moderated one session). Most sessions had a steady 100 plus participants throughout the day. A sign that the content was relevant and the format right.

I've summarised some of the sessions I attended. They are ordered based on my personal area of interest. My apologies if one of the sessions is not covered (in detail) here! For a complete overview of all conference sessions, resources and video recordings, see this link: Media and Learning Online Spring 2021.

I was very glad to be invited to moderate the session on what we have learned about online teaching during the pandemic which examined Zoom Fatigue and how we can develop 'Resilience' as teachers.

Zoom Fatigue - Why do women experience more Zoom Fatigue than men?

Zoom Doom? Zoom Gloom? Death by Zoom? The software Zoom has been so widely used in the last year that it has become a word to represent any video conferencing tool (MS Teams, Skype, etc). Geraldine Fauville of the University of Gothenburg presented research she had worked on led by the Virtual Human Interaction Lab in Stanford University.

The Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale (ZEF). It is based on five types of fatigue; general, visual, social, motivational and emotional. This scale enables reported fatigue to be quantified.

(How Zoom Fatigued are you? Measure it here. I scored 33 on the ZEF scale. Are you experiencing more or less Zoom Fatigue than I am?)

Close-up eye contact can cause fatigue. Think about how you feel being in a crowded elevator. It is awkward. Most people look away or look down. When you are forced to be close together this interpersonal proximity is uncomfortable. During a face-to-face meeting we 'regulate the intimacy' by how close we sit, where we look. Online it is more difficult since there is an expectation to 'stare at the screen' directly into everyone's eyes. On the screen, faces seem large and everyone is looking into the camera. This perceived physical proximity is associated with the gaze. It is tiring for the brain.

We also experience Mirror Anxiety. Constantly seeing our own image in the mirror. This increases the chance we will continually compare ourselves to certain standards. It can result in a bad mood, depression and anxiety. And women are more susceptible to this. And then there is reduced mobility. In person, we often move about during conversations. During phone calls, we can walk or sit in different positions. Maybe when you are listening intently you like to look away, put your feet on the table, gaze into space to concentrate. This is not considered good practice during most video communication! The expectation is that you will stay in the camera view, facing the screen. This decreases your motion, and we are 'trapped in front of the camera'. Yet we know that motion can really help learning and creativity.

We miss out on non-verbal communication and behaviour. This can be body posture, intonation and use of personal space. These are very important for communication, to help social judgement and task performance. These non-verbal communication cues are spontaneous and unconscious. During a video call you only see the head and shoulders. The communication power of the body in a space is reduced. This means that in order to try to understand 'what the other person means', you need to consciously and continuously monitor this non-verbal communication. We do this much more actively than if we were in a room together. Which also costs mental and physical energy. And for you as someone communicating via video, you have to intensify these cues. By nodding more vigorously than if in person. Could you imagine what face-to-face meetings would be like if we interacted as vigorously in person as we do when communicating online?

The ZEF Scale collected data from 10,000 users. The survey examines the frequency, duration and space between online meetings. The more calls, the longer calls are and the shorter the breaks, the more Zoom fatigue experienced.

Women experience greater Zoom Fatigue than men

There is also a gender effect. Zoom fatigue is experienced by more women than men. Why did 14% of women (1 in 7) vs 5% of men (1 in 20) report being very or extremely Zoom Fatigued? Women are more susceptible to the aspects of mirroring, immobility and feeling stared at.

How can we reduce Zoom Fatigue?

If possible, hide your own image on your screen. This reduces the mirroring effect. You can still be seen by others, but you won't see yourself. Shrink the size of the screen in which the faces appear. I tried this a few moments ago in a meeting and it makes a huge difference. The faces I was talking to were not so large on my screen which meant I felt less like I was being stared at, and less pressure. You can also simply turn off the incoming video (I do this very often, during meetings and also when teaching). I can focus on the teaching. And not get distracted by a student who is smoking in the garden, or a colleague who has their camera pointing right up their nose! Increase the distance between yourself and your camera. Use a good microphone and a long cable for your earphones or use cordless headphones. Use an external key board on your computer so you can move around and not be tied to your screen.

Also, stand up! This allows you to move more, and to gesture more naturally. After her presentation, I asked Geraldine if she was standing up and she was. I was also standing during the session for my role as moderator. It gives additional energy and expressiveness to our communication.

Finally, we should not overschedule the number of meetings we attend. They should be shorter. There should be more space between them. I try to schedule and provide regular screen breaks during my lessons (even if it is 5 minutes). I regularly challenge my students to go outside and take a picture of a plant or their street (and then to add it to their Zoom background). I also asked students to inform me when they need a break in case I run over.

However from an educational perspective, we need to ensure that those planning the education (management and time-table makers) need to establish appropriate policies. And even if we are scheduled for a 90 minute online lesson, it is up to us as lecturers to plan, adjust and modify how we use that time. That can also include a 'check-in' at the beginning, sections where students switch off incoming video and do a silent reflection, or take a break outside and post a picture in the chat. Organisations can also set up policies (e.g., a certain number of online hours scheduled per day, with sufficient breaks in between). We can also have guidelines for certain meetings where we agree there is no video.

This presentation got us all thinking and reflecting. The links to the research are here: Publication with Zoom Scale and Publication with Gender Effect.

How resilient are you as a teacher?

Rebecca M. Quintana from the University of Michigan has designed and is running a new MOOC on Resilient Teaching. Resilience is 'being able to spring back into shape, position after being pressed or stretched'. Which 'shape' will we spring back to post pandemic? Education can be viewed as a series of 'interactions'. We can plan education to strengthen these interactions. Planning for resilience creates multiple alternative ways of facilitating these interactions. Allowing education to be flexible. Three perspectives were shared:

Designing for Extensibility takes possible changes or additions into consideration (consider the most basic version of the course and which elements you may need to change in the future).

Designing for Flexibility is about anticipating and responding (consider which elements may need to change and how to facilitate that).

Designing for Redundancy focuses on finding pieces of your course that could perform similar operations and could be interchangeable (consider creating multiple alternative ways of facilitating interaction wherever possible).

Rebecca polled the conference attendees on their biggest concerns when teaching online. Concerns were 'Maintaining engagement between students, instructors and materials' (43%), 'Having the time and support necessary to create an effective online course' (25%) and 'Building a sense of community in the online classroom' (18%).

Marco Kalz is full professor of technology enhanced learning at Heidelberg University of Education. He shared unpublished research into how higher education lecturers coped with the pandemic. We are moving from a non-navigated reactive response (e.g., Emergency Remote Teaching) to more navigated practices of adaptation and transformation. The research examined what factors have influenced the instructional resilience of lecturers in higher education. What are the experiences of these lecturers in maintaining teaching quality and which factors contribute to demonstrating instructional resilience, during Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education?

Instructional resilience was based on; individual variables (e.g. general resilience, TPACK, Big 5 and Self-Determination) and the contextual variables (e.g., Workload, and available support from organisation, technical and social). There were 102 valid responses. 75% experienced a decrease of ¼ of their teaching quality while 20% saw no change. Those who found online teaching a challenge also reported a perceived decrease in quality. 50% perceived no increased teaching load while 15% reported a decrease and 37% an increase. The activities that were well implemented during teaching online were presentation of content and feedback. Peer feedback and interactive discussions were considered more difficult. The support from the institutions was high but did not influence the perceived challenges of online teaching. Older staff showed higher resilience than younger staff. A lecturer's own rating of their ability to use technology was an important predictor for how well they managed in the new context. The concept of 'Instructional Resilience' was defined in more detail.

How did universities maintain quality video production during the pandemic?

The panel included Lana Scott of MIT, Marco Toffanin of the University of Padova, Labhaoise Ní Dhonnchadha of NUI Galway and Alastair Creelman of Linnaeus University. The panel discussed the elements of a good educational video. It does not have to be entertainment. Can you see and hear the lecturer and their personality? Is the content relevant? Is the audio quality sufficient? Is there a clear link to learning goals? The right format of video should be created with a clear production design outlined in advance. Keep it simple and don't overcomplicate the process. At MIT, it took some work to convince faculty that they could record at home. Many filmed with their iPhones, then got better microphones, cameras and green screens. Support staff 'walked through' the homes of the faculty, to advise on best recording location (maybe the bedroom!), helping them set-up lighting and checking sound quality.

Perhaps we all had unrealistic expectations that overnight, 'faculty would become content producers'. They needed help with editing and post production. Padova combined Zoom and Kaltura but needed a good editing tool to integrate. Sometimes something as simple as stitching two clips together can become very complex. Most did not recommend software that was not supported by their university. Or that students install unsupported software on their personal devices. Stick to those with university licenses. MIT set-up covid-safe recording studios with sufficient space and strictly followed safety guidelines. OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) was used in some cases because it is a free format.

The discussion turned to legal information on authoring rights and privacy of participants. Some were supporting staff regarding using Creative Commons. In Europe, in some cases staff could own the copyright if they moved to another location. Though this was becoming more complicated when that content was co-created with support from the university. Whereas in Galway, staff are fully responsible for this process. Or they support students by giving advice on finding high quality copyright compliant images. At Linneaus not much video was being reused. When teaching a sensitive subject, faculty have to be very careful about making it public. Net Hate and trolling can happen if the wrong content appears in the wrong place out of context. MIT helped staff to find good copyright free images and video. They also have access to graphic artists and student assistants to create animated after affects. It is important to have a good storyboard. In the US, content created remained the property of the university.

Free your students from their screens - Its time for Podcasts!

Podcasting in full swing at Saxion

Podcasting is hot. The panellists were Alexandra Mihai (Maastricht University), Jantine te Molder, Tim Dalhoeven & Dennis Broekhof (Saxion University of Applied Sciences and Giselinde Kuipers & Luuc Brans (KU Leuven). Podcasting technology should be used intentionally and linked to learning objectives. Courses have become video heavy and there is space for more audio content to be created. Our reflex is to transform the lecture to video. But in a lecture, it is your voice that carries the message. 'We like flashy things and we like to make our lives more difficult!' but podcasting is an alternative approach. And we can use our voice, one of our most natural attributes. We can free the student from the screen so learning can take place in different spaces. The teacher can be present in asynchronous environments. Content can be small one minute introductions to each week, or re-caps. Active listening can be developed as a specific skill.

We've been told to keep our message short because learners have short attention spans. But long form podcast and audiobooks are quite popular and easily consumable. Yes, we can handle long and deep discussions! Sitting and being immobile is really killing us. Podcasts free us from our desks so we can run, walk or move while listening. Saxion produces a variety of podcast formats, with students also involved. Tips when recording include getting to know the person first before you record the podcast with them. Aspects involve story telling, sound design, recording and editing. Zencastr was mentioned as a useful tool to support this process.

Leiden University shared their link on What if Education Education 2030 In this series, colleagues explained how they were running a course and asked those around the world for their experiences. Podcasts became the format of choice. This resulted in interviews with the academics who wrote the articles that students were studying. Increasing the engagement and involvement of students. The content was reaching a young and wide global audience and from different countries. A podcast can replace a lecture and appeal to students in a different way. Consider the audience and tone, how it fits in the course and how often to release episodes. Establish a clear script to give signposting, add jingles. You need to stop academics talking too much so they need to be briefed in advance.

KU Leuven shared a link to their series on culture and inequality Podcast - EUCCI and Podcasting for Sociologists: lessons learned from making an international teaching podcast on culture and inequality in pandemic times - section CULTURE (asaculturesection.org). You need an RSS feed. Sound cloud is the most used platform for creating an RSS feed. This is then posted on Spotify or Apple Music. A good podcast on a well-known public platform signals quality and seriousness to (prospective) students and key note speakers. The audience polled at the end of the session agreed that podcasting has an important role to play in higher education and the audience had become more interested in making their own podcast in the future. I admit, I should really give it a go sometime soon! (enough video for now).

Jisc Survey - UK Higher Education student online learning experiences

Sarah Knight of Jisc shared research findings on how UK higher education students experienced learning online. DEI Pulse 1 HE student briefing 2021 (jisc.ac.uk) Students were mostly satisfied with the online education they received. They considered digital skills and how to learn online as being an area to focus on. Online is different to in person and it asks a lot to stay focused. Trying to teach 200 students in a large online class has many challenges. Lectures should be a social experience. Sanna Brauer of Oulu University of Applied Sciences gave an overview of their vision for the Smart Campus Oulu University of Applied Sciences (smartcampus.fi). This is a platform and partnership model for innovation, collaboration with SMEs, accelerating the digitalisation of society. 8 universities and colleges in Finland are working together in this initiative.

Creating engaging and interactive learning experiences at a distance

Rod Cullen & Orlagh McCabe of Manchester Metropolitan University introduced the TREC approach to active learning. Their icebreaker immediately set a positive tone. In a Padlet we all posted a meme that captured our mood regarding teaching in the current situation. This was quick, fun and easy to do. As well as a great way to get a visual overview of where the audience is at and to keep us active.

How you experienced online teaching? Post a meme on the Padlet

They shared definitions of interactive teaching and learning which focused on discussions, debates, problem solving, collaboration, quizzes and polls, mind mapping and more. Watching, listening and taking notes are not considered very active! Their TREC approach involves four stages. A Trigger (what students already know), Review (sharing different opinions), Evidence/Expectations (compare and contrasting), and Consolidation (getting student to reflect on their position). Break lessons into smaller sections by provoking interest every 10 to 20 minutes. Change the pace, create a buzz, simulate and facilitate, encourage more critical thinking and deeper learning. See further here: TREC approach to active learning

Deborah Arnold from AUNEGe shared how they are stimulating active learning with the eLene4Life Dynamic Toolkit and how teachers across Europe used it as part of a community of practice. And Richard Beggs of Ulster University contrasted Consuming and Creating: Encouraging active learning in the fully online environment. The blank screen of switched off student cameras facing teachers online proved challenging. Planning immersive activities based on constructive alignment proved challenging. Fully online teaching is not about mirroring face-to-face, but reinventing it. Consuming, passive activities can be moved to the asynchronous space outside of class and can be self-paced. While creative, active learning activities should happen in the synchronous space and involve collaboration and discussion. They used digital story telling as an example of how to engage the students. Students enjoy being interactive in class if it is valuable. The pandemic has moved digital teaching forward and there has been some exceptional practice.

Some Universities were better prepared than others for the shift online

Richard Goodman of Loughborough University gave an overview of their 10 years of preparation for the pandemic. They were already doing live lecture capture for a while and equipped 140 rooms with full lecture capture back in 2017. All lectures were automatically recorded with an opt out for teachers. Once the pandemic kicked-in they were already prepared. They copied all recorded lectures from the previous year into their learning management system. Then they programmed a combination of flexible education (in physical rooms, in Teams, on demand). These schedules were visible to staff and student on their time tables. It was also adaptable which meant flexibility during the second lockdown in November 2020. All exams were run online. They provided virtual drop-in sessions to support faculty in their teaching. Most of the lecture recordings were not edited. Students find the content they need and go straight to it. They now have a large archive of online content of recorded lessons. The new content for this year, which was pre-recorded, was shorter than the live lectures.

Michel Beerens of the NewMediaCentre at Delft University of Technology explained how Delft managed cooperation, experimentation and frustration in times of crisis. They have a library with video content and they help staff find relevant material. Studios with green screen and do-it-yourself studio booths are provided with relevant software. The 2,500 lecturers at the university ensured there was a lot of variety in how lecturers made the switch. Creating video from their kitchen table or home office or recording at campus. Adjusting and updating content. Lecture capture boomed at the beginning. Lots of teachers came to campus and recorded in front of an empty lecture hall. Teaching in the lecture hall was a format they and students were used to. Those teaching from home had many new support questions which challenged the team, about software or how to film video at home. The different systems used made it complicated. Faculty wanted to have better cameras and audio. And to know how to edit the videos made at home. At a certain point, lecturers started to reflect on whether the recorded lectures was the kind of education they wanted to deliver. One way transfer of content. Faculty missed interaction and stimulating students to study. The big question was how to create interactivity. Lecturers became creative, developing their own solutions. They used Open Broadcasting Software, started live streaming to students via Twitch platforms and opened their own YouTube channels. They set up green screens for better quality content, bought better cameras and microphones. Delft shifted from centrally arranged support to providing more locally organised solutions. This facilitated more two-way interaction.

There was also a new challenge. Where to store all the new material recorded and how to make it accessible. The content was in different formats. Support staff had to check which licences were involved in order to maintain the new individually purchased software. They are now piloting Hybrid Virtual Classrooms (synchronous teaching that combines teaching to in-person and online students). They are running a pilot on converting lecture halls into hybrid virtual lecture halls.

What do we do with all that video? Keep it or bin it?

Jade Stappaerts & Stef Stes of KU Leuven explained how the pandemic influenced the use of educational video. The amount of video recorded increased steadily. With the same question of how to store it all (see graphic). The internet traffic increased dramatically the moment the epidemic began. The viewing of videos on their Kaltura platform also increased significantly. They expect this volume to remain similar after covid.

KU Leuven's decision tree for media storage. Keep it or bin it?

Their policy is that if a video has not been used for more than a year they move it out of the Learning Management System and store it externally. If someone wants to access it after this time, they can see a low resolution version, and then, via hotspot, access the old version at the original quality. It was clear that each university has its own policy (e.g., the University of Amsterdam keeps everything for 7 years). KU Leuven presented their decision tree which helps them in the archiving process. It is based on the following factors; is the material up-to-date and complimentary, length of the video, audio-visual quality, meets the guidelines for digital accessibility and has the necessary didactic multimedia qualities. Leuven shares viewing data with faculty about how their videos are being viewed. They recommend a maximum length of 15 minutes per segment. This may involve cutting up long recordings into shorter chapters. Quizzes and tags can be added. If students watch the same section of a video many times, this may indicate that a section should be clarified by the teacher.

Jim Bain of Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, explained their approach. Staff are backing up different versions of recorded material resulting in duplication on different servers. This increases demand on space and raises costs. They have a basic two-year retention policy on their cloud storage. This is for content on the virtual learning environment. After two years, the teacher is informed their content will be deleted unless the teacher decides otherwise. Jim stressed the importance of directly involving both staff and student reps in this decision-making process. It was the students who originally drove the need for lecture capture. They now have live lecture capture available in most teaching spaces.

Carlos Turro Ribalta of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia explained that most lecture rooms are automatically recorded during the pandemic. If the teacher does not use the scheduled time in the lecture hall, this will result in a recording of an empty room. They set up a 'people detector' to scan all the videos. This software filters out these empty videos and deletes them. They have their own policies regarding where to store the media and for how long. They select which videos to keep based on number of views, most 'liked' by students, using the people detector, and those videos that have been edited.

There were excellent presentations from our technology partners. However, I do not have space to go into that here.

Thanks for reading this far!

As mentioned above, I could not report on all sessions but hope this overview is helpful. The full recordings are an excellent resource to explore further: Media and Learning Online Spring 2021.
Editor's note: this article has been republished from Zac's blog.

Author
Zac Woolfitt

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Reflections on a year of teaching online at Media and Learning Spring Conference

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Zoom Fatigue can result from feeling too close to others. Like that awkward elevator moment! On May 6th I joined the international conference Media and Learning Online Spring 2021. Around 200 colleagues from higher education joined to reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic.

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La boîte à outils pour vos enseignements

Afin de vous aider à préparer la rentrée, un ensemble de formations et de présentations des équipements des salles de cours vous est proposé principalement entre le 11 et le 22 janvier 2021.

Formations :

Prendre en main Zoom :

Prendre en main Moodle :

Pédagogie (cours à distance, cours en salle hybride, évaluer à distance, créer des ressources en autonomie, dynamiser son cours avec Wooclap, etc.) :

Enregistrer des contenus de cours avec le RapidMooc :

Présentation des équipements des salles de cours :

Prendre en main une salle de cours hybride :

Salles A31, A32, A33, A34 au 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, campus de Paris

Inscriptions

Prendre en main un amphi hybride :

Amphithéâtre Chapsal, au 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, campus de Paris

permanence du lundi au vendredi de 10h à 12h et de 14h à 16h

Autres campus : veuillez contacter les responsables techniques de site

Les calendriers des formations sont régulièrement mis à jour.

Nous mettons également à votre disposition un guide d'accompagnement vers le déploiement de l'enseignement hybride. Vous y trouverez un ensemble de conseils pratiques, fiches pédagogiques et tutoriels pour vous accompagner dans la conception et l'animation de vos cours.

Les guides du semestre de printemps Enseigner à distance et Animer un cours à distance restent utiles et complémentaires pour concevoir ceux de vos enseignements qui se dérouleront entièrement en ligne.
À noter : Toute la documentation qui vous est proposée est accessible à l'aide de votre compte Sciences Po prénom.nom@sciencespo.fr et mot de passe.
Pour des besoins d'information plus précis, n'hésitez pas à contacter vos responsables pédagogiques.

Vos outils pédagogiques numériques

Apprendre à utiliser Zoom

Vous trouverez également ci-dessous des tutoriels pour vous faciliter votre appropriation de l'outil de web-conférence Zoom que vous utiliserez dans vos classes virtuelles, vos cours dispensés en salle de cours hybrides et vos réunions.

Téléchargez les arrière-plans Sciences Po pour Zoom

Des questions ?

Apprendre à utiliser Wooclap

Consultez les tutoriels :

Pour participer à une session de formation, voir la rubrique "Vos formations" ci-dessous.

Prendre en main une salle de cours hybride

Consultez les tutoriels :

Prendre en main une salle de cours hybride

Se connecter avec les étudiants distants depuis la salle de cours - bientôt disponible

Partager ce que j'écris au tableau avec les étudiants distants - bientôt disponible

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Ressources utiles et formations pour la rentrée

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La boîte à outils pour vos enseignements Afin de vous aider à préparer la rentrée, un ensemble de formations et de présentations des équipements des salles de cours vous est proposé principalement entre le 11 et le 22 janvier 2021.

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EDEN NAP webinars Learn and Discuss! Interactive discussions and showcases about recent issues.

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Concevoir des évaluations en lignes - Garantir la qualité de vos quizz

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Concevoir des évaluations en lignes - Garantir la qualité de vos quizz

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In the fall of 2020 EDUCAUSE conducted a special study to gain insights on the student experience during what has been an exceptional time of disruption. In these reports, we share our results from the study related to student experiences with technology in the for-credit courses they were taking in fall 2020 in which they felt they were learning the most, as well as experiences, issues, and pain points students had with connectivity-specifically internet and device access-as they did their academic work in 2020.

The studies include key findings from our analysis of students' responses, concrete next steps your institution can take in response to those findings, and opportunities for connecting with peers who are implementing innovative practices.

Read the Student Experiences with Connectivity and Technology in the Pandemic Report: HTML

Read the Student Experiences Learning with Technology in the Pandemic Report: HTML

Other materials

Student Experiences with Connectivity and Technology in the Pandemic

Not All Internet Access Is Created Equal

Nearly all students have internet access at home, but some connections are better than others. Most participants (83%) reported having home internet reliable enough to meet most or all of their needs as a student.
Read more about internet access >

The Struggle Is Real

Many students struggled with internet access, no matter their housing situation. Over a third (36%) of respondents reported that they always, very often, or sometimes struggled to find an internet connection that met their academic needs; students in rural areas very often or always struggled (16%) more than students in suburb (9%), city (8%), and town (7%) locales.
Read more about the struggle >

Get Creative or Go Without

Students have limited options away from home for an internet connection, and even then they may need to get creative. When we asked respondents where they most typically go when they are struggling to find an internet connection to do their academic work, the most common response was "home or primary place of residence" (43%), followed by "a public space on campus" (23%).
Read more about getting creative and going without >

Some Devices Aren't Up to the Task

Nearly all students have access to devices for school, but not all devices can handle the demands of remote learning. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of students reported having access to a reliable device that meets most or all of their academic needs. Most (76%) told us those devices were laptops; 18% said they primarily use a desktop for their school work, and 3% said they primarily use a cellphone.
Read more about devices >

"Do-It-Yourself" Device Support

Most students are DIY'ers when it comes to troubleshooting devices problems. Our results indicate that students don't often tap their school's IT/tech support units for help when they have a device issue. Almost three-quarters (72%) of respondents reported that they try to resolve device problems themselves when issues do occur.
Read more about device support >

Student Experiences Learning with Technology in the Pandemic

Learning Environment and Course Modality

Pandemic learning happens everywhere and whenever. While the choices students had for the type of learning environments and modalities were dependent on their institutions' approaches to pandemic course delivery, some students reported good learning experiences in almost every combination we tracked.
Read more about learning environment and course modality >

Instructor Use of Technology

Subject matter experts (SMEs) helped us to identify seven instructor behaviors associated with the effective use of technology in teaching that we asked students to evaluate in the courses in which they were learning the most.
Read more about instructor use of technology >

Course Organization and Design

Because course organization and design shapes students' learning experiences and their opportunities to interact with their instructors and one another, we asked students to rate eight design features of the courses in which they were learning the most.
Read more about course organization and design >

Most Effective Use of Technology

When we asked students about the most effective uses of technology that they experienced in their courses during the fall 2020 term, some common themes emerged. Perhaps the most frequently cited technology critical to the student experience during the pandemic was the learning management system (LMS).
Read more about effective use of technology >

Least Effective Use of Technology

Students' worst technology experiences in their courses last fall were all over the place, but generally fall into one of three very broad categories: 1) explicit technology issues, 2) attempts to use technology that failed, and 3) poor pedagogical choices and course management practices.
Read more about the least effective use of technology >
Other Resources You Might Find Helpful:

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educause technology research in the academic community

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Student Experiences with Technology in the Pandemic

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In the fall of 2020 EDUCAUSE conducted a special study to gain insights on the student experience during what has been an exceptional time of disruption.

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In these times of lockdown due to the Coronavirus COVID-19, face-to-face educational functions and activities are being moved online, using remote working sites and tools. Many of us are struggling with the adjustment to working and teaching online, especially those who have always taught in a traditional classroom and are now being asked to rapidly regroup and prepare for a longer period of educational "social distancing". Where do you begin? How do you manage the process?

To address these questions and many others, EDEN will be rolling out a series of practical webinars on how to take face-to-face education online. These webinars will start by focussing on the day-to-day challenges our teachers and educators face and move on to consider other, broader institutional aspects.

These #onlinetogether #covid19 webinars are especially developed for these uncertain times, featuring experts and experienced practitioners within the field of open, distance, and e-learning. These weekly, one-hour webinar sessions will be held every Monday at 17:00 CEST, starting on March 30, 2020. Each webinar will consist of a brief presentation addressing the webinar topic, that will be further complemented by a question-and-answer session, where you are greatly encouraged to participate, share your opinion and experiences, and ask your most pressing questions.

The first webinar in this series will take place on Monday, March 30, 2020, at 17:00:
How to start teaching online

Monday, March 30 2020 at 17:00 CET

Description

The current pandemic has accelerated a change from what was already beginning to happen anyway, that of the transition from traditional classroom education to its online equivalent. Given this sudden change, the teachers, instructors and faculty are having to adopt new technology and techniques. In this talk some guidelines are covered to help make decisions about online teaching and helping students in the digital age.

You will meet

Tony Bates
Research Associate, Contact North | Contact Nord, Canada
https://www.tonybates.ca/tag/contact-north/

Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario's Distance Education & Training Network.

Antonella Poce
Associate Professor, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Roma, Italy

Antonella Poce is Associate Professor in Experimental Pedagogy at the University Roma Tre, Department of Education, where she teaches Measurement in Education, Educational Research Methodology and Educational Writing Methods and Techniques. Antonella is a member of EDEN since 2009 and Chair of the NAP (Network of Academics and Professionals) Steering Committee. She is author of different publications on the employment of innovative didactic tools in higher education.

Registered webinar participants will be awarded by EDEN open badges.

Planned upcoming webinars (dates to be announced):

When education moves home: implications for students, academics, administrators, and education leaders

How to manage the onslaught of information and fake news: The 2019-nCoV 'infodemic'

How to develop XXI century skills through teaching online

How to engage and support students online

How to build community online

How heritage institutions can support educators in developing new programmes

How to assess learning outcomes in e-learning

How to facilitate flexible learning during educational disruption

How to use online assessment to improve learning (use of eportfolios)

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EDEN webinar series: Education in time of a pandemic #onlinetogether #covid19

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In these times of lockdown due to the Coronavirus COVID-19, face-to-face educational functions and activities are being moved online, using remote working sites and tools. Many of us are struggling with the adjustment to working and teaching online, especially those who have always taught in a traditional classroom and are now being asked to rapidly regroup and prepare for a longer period of educational "social distancing".

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Increasing Social Presence in Online Learning through Small Group Discussions

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Increasing Social Presence in Online Learning through Small Group Discussions

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Transitioning for synchronous to asynchronous teaching

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Transitioning for synchronous to asynchronous teaching

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Variety in teaching modes can benefit students, and paying attention to the transitions is as important as choosing the best mode for learning activities.

Credit: Taisiya_art / Shutterstock.com © 2021

This article is part of a series about incorporating asynchronous video into educational activities:
The United States had been in quite a drought. The American 4×100-meter relay teams have consistently been among the fastest in the world-the men have won the gold medal at the Olympics fifteen times, while second place on the list is shared by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Jamaica, all tied at two gold medals. Meanwhile, on the women's side, the United States has won eleven gold medals, with East Germany next on the list with two. In addition, the United States men's team has medaled at all but seven Olympics.

But for twelve years, the United States had, astonishingly, been denied victory at the world stage. That changed on October 5, 2019, when the U.S. men's team finally ended the drought and claimed the gold at the world championships in Doha, Qatar.

But even then, it almost did not happen. In their qualifying heat, the United States botched two handoffs, the second of which was so poor that the team was very nearly disqualified. Anchor leg Noah Lyles had to push to keep the United States qualified for the final.

"I don't know...the timing was off. I hope we got in," Mike Rodgers told NBC Sports as the team anxiously awaited review to see if their final handoff was completed before the end of the handoff zone.

Botched Handoff Leaves USA 4×100 Team's Fate in Limbo

The U.S. men's team was strong. They were prepared. But a poor transition from one part of the race to another nearly destroyed their momentum. Similarly, in teaching, teachers and students generate a momentum that propels the class effectively forward in learning. A change in modalities, however, can disrupt this momentum, causing students to disengage from the course or slowing the rate of learning as information is lost from one part of the course to another. This is particularly a concern in online learning where all of the communication happens via technology.

However, teaching all of the course in a single modality-for example, either completely through text-based discussion, videoconferencing, or asynchronous video-is also problematic. Variety can help students stay engaged, but moving from one part of the course to another carries a risk of poor handoffs. How can instructors effectively combine these different technologies and modalities in their teaching?

Know the Strengths of Each Modality

The first key strategy for teaching with multiple media is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. For example, with its increased fidelity or detail provided, video can be better at establishing connection, whereas text can be better for well-argued responses to questions. Synchronous technologies (such as live conversations or videoconferences) can be better for improvisational conversations, brainstorming, and quickly coming to agreement on a topic. Asynchronous technologies, such as discussion boards or asynchronous video, can be better for measured responses and increased flexibility for class members who are not located in the same physical space. Good instruction is more than just understanding the content of a course-it involves understanding how to best communicate that content to others, and the best option can vary depending on the subject, class objective, and the students involved.

Transition the Discussion from One Modality to Another

In my living room, there is a very small gap between the carpet and the laminate flooring. This gap is only one centimeter wide, and yet the exposed pins have caused enormous irritation to us walking barefoot in our home! The lesson? How we transition from one space to another matters a great deal in how well we enjoy those spaces. The same is true online, as care should be provided in how the course transitions from one online space to another. Here are a few suggestions to take advantage of the ebb and flow between online spaces with minimal disruption:

Spend the time to design your course well in your learning management system (LMS). Try to provide all the links to all of the online discussion spaces within one place so students are not scrambling to find where they should go.

Have a clear purpose for each discussion or interaction. Open-ended discussions in which students can "ask me anything they like" or "reflect on anything they find interesting in the reading" are useful sometimes, but often they become unfocused and feel like a waste of time for students. Thus, these discussions are often best offered as optional activities, office hours, or study sessions. More effective for required interactions are specific prompts such as "Jones and Smith mentioned X. How have you seen evidence for X in your own life?" or "How does their explanation of X further explain what we read last week about Y?"

Clearly communicate the purpose. Because you are designing each interaction with a clear purpose, it is often helpful to tell students what that purpose is. If they understand why the asynchronous video or text discussions are important, for example, they may be more likely to stay engaged.

Be clear with students about which learning spaces begin a conversation and which ones end it. For example, in one of my classes, we begin the week with a synchronous videoconference in which I introduce the coming topics for the week and frame the discussion. The class discussion then continues asynchronously through text discussions using online social annotation tools as the students complete the readings. We then end the week with an asynchronous video discussion in which students respond to reflection questions that draw upon all of the week's learnings. Then, the following week, we begin our synchronous video conversation by recapping the discussion from the previous week, answering any questions that were never resolved asynchronously, and highlighting the key points of the discussion. This provides some closure to the discussion from the previous week and helps students know that questions they raise asynchronously will be addressed, either in the text discussions, the asynchronous video discussion, or the videoconference.

A chronological view within an LMS is often helpful for students, enabling them to move step by step through the assignments for the week and know which activities begin or continue which discussions (see figure 1).

Alert students to what work should be completed before, during, or after a class discussion. For example, you might ask students to complete the readings before participating in the asynchronous video discussion; or you could ask them to bring unfinished work to a synchronous session so they can raise concerns with the group. You might ask during a videoconference for students to record asynchronous responses to the day's discussion, or you might ask them in discussion boards to brainstorm ideas that will be discussed later through video. By reflecting on what you want students to do before, during, and after their interactions with you, you are also reflecting on what you see as the purpose for every activity, which will help you prepare better learning activities.

Having a consistent rhythm for the class is usually helpful for students. For example, students appreciate having synchronous sessions at the same time each week and having the same window of time for responses to asynchronous discussions.

Establish expectations for interactions between students. Asynchronous discussions can feel like "shouting into the wind" if people do not return to read or "hear" the comment and respond. Thus, an important approach is to develop class norms about when people will provide the first post and when (and how often) they will return to participate in responses.

Figure 1. Sample lesson from a graduate course, indicating the order of discussions

Use Higher-Fidelity Technologies Earlier to Establish Social Presence

Some of the ways we communicate are richer and deeper than other modes of communication in how they engage us. For example, do you yourself more easily distracted in an in-person conversation or in a videoconference? What about in an email correspondence?

The more that all of our senses are engaged in the process of understanding and perceiving others, the more potential there is for our engagement, which also increases the likelihood of feeling a sense of connection, understanding, and trust with each other.

In discussing various ways we can facilitate online or blended learning, Charles Graham referred to these spaces as having four dimensions: space, time, fidelity, and humanness (see figure 2). A "traditional" in-person class, for example, is limited in both space and time-the class meets at the same time and at the same place each week. However, it has high fidelity, as we can see, hear, touch, and even smell each other. This makes us seem more "human" to each other, and we feel a greater ability to relate to each other as people rather than as names or avatars.

Figure 2. Graham's dimensions of online learning spaces

In general, in-person teaching has more fidelity than online teaching and video has more fidelity than text. This is, of course, a general statement with plenty of exceptions-for example, an immersive experience watching a movie in a theater can have higher fidelity than watching an elementary school play from the back of a gym where you cannot hear or see very well. The point is that some learning experiences have higher fidelity than others, and higher fidelity is usually helpful in establishing relationships and norms. For this reason, often the best strategy is to schedule these higher-fidelity experiences at the beginning of the course. For example, many online programs require students to attend an in-person retreat at the beginning of their studies. Similarly, many effective teachers begin their courses with in-person class sessions before moving online-or at least begin with synchronous video sessions before moving to asynchronous discussions. Holding higher-fidelity sessions at the end of the course can also help bring closure to the human experience the students and instructor had together in the course.

Use More Efficient Technologies Later to Complete Projects

Depending on the task, higher-fidelity media tend to be comparatively inefficient. How many meetings have you sat through and thought "This could have been an (asynchronous) email"? Perhaps the takeaway is this: When the goal of the activity is to efficiently complete straightforward tasks or communicate information that is easily understood, select a medium that emphasizes flexibility and focuses the communication to a point. When the goal is to develop relationships, increase connection and engagement, or brainstorm and problem solve, select a medium with greater fidelity.

Be Aware of and Sensitive to Students' Needs

This article ends with a big "but," which is, above all, we need to understand and know our students' needs. Less flexible learning environments may have higher fidelity, but pay attention to whether the lack of flexibility excludes some learners from participating. If it does, we may be perpetuating and extending systemic prejudices that prevent some groups of students from succeeding to the same degree as others. For example, even though in-person meetings can build relationships, they can exclude the mother with young children at home, the working professional unable to leave work, or the international student working in the middle of the night to participate. Synchronous videoconferences can provide the back and forth of conversation unless some participants have poor internet access or no access at all.

In addition, even in perfectly equitable learning conditions, there is great variety in how students engage with various media. Introverted students often prefer asynchronous settings in which they can compose their thoughts before posting. However, extroverts may find this tedious and prefer synchronous settings where they can "think out loud." International students often can read a non-native language better than hear it and, as a result, can better participate in text-based discussions. Sometimes, the difference comes down to just a simple learning preference. For example, I like to listen to conversations while standing or doing something routine like housework because it helps me focus.

Know Your Students, Know Your Technology

All of this means that the best answer needs to be personalized to your teaching situation. Within that truth lie a few key conclusions:

Instructors should seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various communication technologies and thoughtfully consider which to be most effective for each learning activity.

Instructors should pay attention to the transitions from one modality to another so that students understand where they are supposed to go for a discussion and why.

Variety can be helpful, as it can enable students with different learning preferences to participate in the ways they find most comfortable.

Be aware of students' needs and provide alternative ways for students to participate in a conversation if needed.

Oftentimes compromises must be made between flexibility, equity, and fidelity. Recently, asynchronous video has emerged as one technology that may hold great promise as an educational method that can be both flexible and higher in fidelity than text-based discussions. It may not be the right answer for every teaching scenario, but it could be another arrow in the quiver for instructors.

Acknowledgment

This series of articles was written with the support of EdConnect.

Notes

See 4×100 metres relay at the Olympics, Wikipedia.

"U.S. Men End 4×100m Relay Drought with First Title in 12 Years," NBC Sports, October 5, 2019.

Charles R. Graham, "Blended Learning Systems: Definition, Current Trends, and Future Directions," in The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs, eds. Curtis J. Bonk and Charles R. Graham (San Francisco: Pfeiffer Publishing, 2006), 3-21.

Richard E. West is Associate Professor in the Instructional Psychology & Technology department at Brigham Young University.

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The Handoff: Transitioning from Synchronous to Asynchronous Teaching

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Variety in teaching modes can benefit students, and paying attention to the transitions is as important as choosing the best mode for learning activities. This article is part of a series about incorporating asynchronous video into educational activities: The United States had been in quite a drought.

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Ce billet présente un outil graphique, pouvant être aisément réalisé sur un outil de dessin, permettant d'identifier sa pratique tutorale au regard des objectif tutoraux génériques poursuivis.
Les objectifs tutoraux génériques (cf. Pratiques du tutorat à distance. Livret d'interventions) sont identifiés au croisement des fonctions tutorales et des plans de support à l'apprentissage. Ils sont au nombre de 28.

Les tuteurs à distance, mais aussi les institutions qui les emploient, peuvent tirer un grand bénéfice à identifier les objectifs de soutien à l'apprentissage qui sont les leurs. Si chacun des objectifs tutoraux génériques a sa pertinence, il est bien rare que tous puissent être retenus dans le cadre d'un digital learning. Il s'agit donc de les prioriser et pour cela de procéder à certaines actions d'ingénierie tutorale (cf. L'ingénierie tutorale). Toutefois, il est fréquent que les institutions ne définissent que peu ou pas leur stratégie tutorale. Aussi, le graphe du " Périmètre tutoral " ci-dessous peut permettre de cartographier le positionnement du tuteur par rapport aux objectifs tutoraux et d'identifier le positionnement de l'institution vis à vis du tutorat à distance.

Pour chaque plan de support à l'apprentissage (cognitif, socio-affectif, motivationnel et métacognitif), 7 objectif tutoraux génériques peuvent être investis. Il s'agit pour le tuteur à distance d'identifier, pour chacun, s'il fait l'objet, de sa part, d'interventions auprès des apprenants et ce qu'elles que soient les modalités retenues. Pour chaque plan de support à l'apprentissage, un indice est calculé de manière simple. Si par exemple, sur les 7 objectifs tutoraux génériques du plan de support cognitif, il est identifié des interventions tutorales effectives pour 5 d'entre eux, l'indice est de 5. En procédant de la sorte pour chaque plan de support à l'apprentissage, il est possible de tracer l'aire correspondant au périmètre d'interventions du tuteur.
Exemple tiré de ma pratique dans l'UE Ingénierie tutorale du master MFEG de Rennes 1
Après avoir examiné mes pratiques, il apparaît que certains objectifs tutoraux génériques ne font pas l'objet d'interventions tutorales de ma part.

Faire émerger les objectifs personnels de l'apprenant . Mon UE étant planifiée trois mois après le début du master, cet objectif n'est pas déterminant pour mon accompagnement dans la mesure où il a déjà fait l'objet d'interventions lors du recrutement et par les enseignants qui animent l'ouverture du master.

Les objectifs tutoraux Aider à maîtriser l'environnement d'apprentissage - Susciter l'entraide technique entre apprenants - Encourager l'utilisation des outils ont également fait l'objet d'interventions auprès des étudiants en amont de la tenue de mon UE.

Faire conscientiser ses préférences cognitives - Faire identifier les motivations intrinsèques - Aider à s'autoévaluer ne font généralement pas l'objet d'interventions de ma part même si cela peut arriver pour des étudiants rencontrant des difficultés spécifiques.

Le tableau des objectifs tutoraux que j'investis s'établit donc ainsi :

5 objectifs tutoraux génériques du plan cognitif étant investis, son indice est de 5, de 6 pour le plan socio-affectif, de 4 sur le plan motivationnel et de 6 sur le plan métacognitif.

Le graphe de mon périmètre tutoral est matérialisé par la zone en gris (la zone en pointillé indique le périmètre pouvant être investi pour des étudiants ayant des besoins plus spécifiques) :
Usages du graphe de périmètre tutoral
Comme indiqué ci-dessus, le graphe de périmètre tutoral peut être utilisé par les tuteurs à distance pour situer leurs pratiques. Dans ce cas, il a une fonction descriptive permettant la prise de recul réflexif.

Il peut également être utilisé par les institutions pour définir une stratégie tutorale globale.

Les concepteurs des dispositifs tutoraux peuvent aussi s'en servir pour prescrire les profils de tuteurs à distance.
Limite du graphe de périmètre tutoral
Il s'agit d'une représentation graphique essentiellement quantitative qui ne peut réellement remplacer la réalisation de deux des livrables de l'ingénierie tutorale, à savoir "le système tutoral" qui permet d'analyser et de prioriser les besoins de soutien des apprenants et de "l'audit tutoral" qui vise à évaluer le dispositif tutoral et à faire des préconisations pour l'améliorer.

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Ce billet présente un outil graphique, pouvant être aisément réalisé sur un outil de dessin, permettant d'identifier sa pratique tutorale au regard des objectif tutoraux génériques poursuivis. Les objectifs tutoraux génériques (cf. Pratiques du tutorat à distance. Livret d'interventions) sont identifiés au croisement des fonctions tutorales et des plans de support à l'apprentissage.

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Teacher need support to find and make quality digital resources

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Teacher need support to find and make quality digital resources

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Latest research tells us that, while teachers have made huge efforts to support learners through lockdown, not enough of them are able to find appropriate digital resources and use them to best effect. This means that some learners are missing out.

In an ideal world, fun, exciting and rich digital learning experiences would be the norm because teachers would have the vision, skills and confidence to make a wealth of top-quality resources really 'sing'. Think online groups in discussion, taking part in polls, games and quizzes and using animations and simulations - all far more engaging than passive experiences, such as listening to a recording of a lecture.

Unfortunately, and despite the shot-in-the-arm lockdown has delivered towards digital transformation in the sector, this Eutopia is still some way off.

Challenges

The research, part of a point Jisc and project, shaping the digital future of FE and skills, was conducted between May and July with more than 400 teachers, learners, senior leaders and edtech experts.

The project's first report confirmed what we already know about digital resources - ie, that there aren't enough of them in and the ones in existence are disparate and of varying quality across different subjects.

In line with all Jisc's content for , which included for hairdressing, health and social care and construction, we'd like to see all course-specific, curriculum-mapped content passing through a quality control exercise.

A significant minority (49 per cent) of learners rated the quality of online learning resources they did have as very poor to average.

During the study, via three webinars and two roundtables, some staff were surprised how much content was available, but 30 per cent stated they did not have the digital resources they need. A significant minority (49 per cent) of learners rated the quality of online learning resources they did have as very poor to average.

This is backed by Jisc's 2020 learner digital experience insights survey, involving more than 19,000 learners, which shows that only 32 per cent have access to e-books or online training resources whenever they need them, and 71% never have access to augmented or virtual reality (/) or simulations.

Subjects where decent content was lacking included construction, hospitality and catering, travel and tourism and some A-levels.

This further chimes with the summer survey findings, demonstrating that certain courses are supported with high-quality and engaging digital resources and content; in particular, maths, computing and IT, business, health and social care, early years and childcare. However, there are also some significant gaps. Subjects where decent content was lacking included construction, hospitality and catering, travel and tourism and some A-levels.

Where colleges did not consider that they had access to sufficient high quality and engaging digital resources, the most common reasons were: insufficient interactivity (58 per cent of responses); inability to develop in-house digital resources (52 per cent); inability to find suitable digital content or insufficient formative assessment (45 per cent) and inadequate curriculum coverage (42 per cent).

Solutions

As a result of this research, Jisc and the AoC have recommended that government funds digital content creation for priority subjects and high-demand sectors identified by employers and professional bodies. A second recommendation asks government to fund a centralised and skills digital content search and discovery platform that highlights content.

In the meantime, my team has produced a free-to-use interactive toolkit to help teachers find and make the most of existing digital material, including but not limited to Jisc's resources. It also contains direct links to useful websites, additional training and articles that might be of interest.

Finally, there is some good practice in the sector around the use of digital resources, which the wider sector might find useful, including at Hull College, Borders College, Plumpton College and Ashford College.

About the author

Karla Youngs

Head of digital content services for FE and skills, Jisc

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Teachers need support to find and make better use of digital resources

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Latest research tells us that, while FE teachers have made huge efforts to support learners through lockdown, not enough of them are able to find appropriate digital resources and use them to best effect. This means that some learners are missing out.

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Même si l'on n'a pas attendu l'ère du tout numérique ni de crise sanitaire pour commencer à enseigner et former à partir de supports multimédias, le contexte actuel a fait basculer l'ensemble de la communauté éducative sur le mode distanciel, ce qui, par conséquent a engendré un recours important et sans précédent à l'usage et la création de documents numériques.

Si certains se contentent d'intégrer des supports existants à leurs cours, d'autres au contraire peuvent se laisser tenter par les technologies et procéder à la conception de leurs propres documents pédagogiques. Toutefois, malgré les bonnes intentions et une parfaite manipulation des outils, le risque qui existe est qu'au lieu d'optimiser l'apprentissage chez leurs apprenants, certains documents, peu pensés en termes d'ergonomie, ne prennent pas suffisamment en compte les fondements de l'apprentissage en contexte multimédia et enfreignent ou compliquent le processus de l'apprentissage.

C'est donc dans une approche cognitive et ergonomique que cet article se propose d'aborder la conception de documents multimédia.

Apprendre en contexte multimédia

"L'usage d'éléments multimédias ne se justifie pas en termes de quantité ou de prouesse technologique liée à leur mise en œuvre; l'image et le son doivent bien plus être au service de l'apprentissage et contribuer à le rendre plus efficace. " (B. De Lièvre, C. Depover, J.J. Quintin, A. Strebelle)

Le travail de tout concepteur, pédagogue consistera à prendre en compte le fonctionnement du traitement de l'information afin de concevoir des documents pédagogiques multimédia qui soutiennent l'apprentissage et facilitent ainsi le traitement des nouvelles informations. Pour cela, ils devront également s'appuyer sur le contexte particulier de l'environnement médiatisé et les spécificités sous-jacentes.

Mais avant de poursuivre en ce sens, et pour définir le périmètre de cet article relatif à la conception d'un document pédagogique, il conviendra de définir tout d'abord ce qu'on entend par le terme de document et ce à quoi notre article renvoie. Tout d'abord, la définition que nous retenons du terme de document ici est celle d'André Tricot qui en définit 6 aspects portant sur des codes, des discours, une structure, un support, un accès ainsi qu'un canal.

Le document numérique comporte donc de manière simultanée plusieurs caractéristiques citées sur le schéma précédent avec comme support exclusif la composante électronique.

Ainsi, A. Tricot distingue quatre types de documents numériques répartis de la sorte : les documents multimédias, les hypertextes, les hyperliens, les plateformes de formation à distance. Il sera question ici dans cet article de document multimédia. Mais au fait, qu'est-ce donc un document numérique?

Dans Apprentissages et documents numériques d'André Tricot, l'auteur identifie la qualité d'un document numérique selon cinq aspects:

Des codes (linguistiques, iconiques, imagés)

Des canaux sensoriels (visuels, auditifs)

Des formats (enregistrement sonore, film vidéo, texte écrit)

Des sources ( auteurs, points de vue)

Des interactions (manipulations par geste, voix)

Des images et des sons

Apprendre via un environnement médiatisé suppose l'insertion des éléments précités mais il ne suffit pas de combiner sons, images et textes pour faire apprendre. En effet, il convient de les présenter à bon escient. Comme le rappellent certains auteurs (De Lièvre, Depover, Quintin, Strebelle) dans un article, c'est " C'est l'usage qui est fait d'une technologie dans une situation donnée qui détermine les qualités de cette dernière dans un contexte de formation. ". Les auteurs ont également mis en exergue des bénéfices liés à l'intégration d'éléments multimédia dans le processus d'apprentissage. Ainsi, l'intégration d'éléments visuels qu'ils soient statiques ou dynamiques doit être pertinente au regard de l'objectif visé. Les auteurs parlent de deux fonctions de l'image: soit elle représente un objet d'analyse indispensable, soit elle sert de soutien à l'apprentissage (plus à visée illustrative).

De même, l'intégration d'éléments sonores répond à diverses fonctions comme renforcer le réalisme, transmettre des consignes (consigne pédagogique ou consigne fonctionnelle). Dans cette deuxième fonction, le bénéfice porte sur la simplification de l'interface visuelle, augmenter l'ergonomie ou encore transmission directe de la nature d'une information.

La question qu'il convient de se poser en tant qu'enseignant-concepteur est la suivante: un document pour quoi faire?

Les trois incontournables de la conception pédagogique multimédia

Outre les différentes théories de l'apprentissage qui conçoivent l'apprentissage comme une résultante d'un changement de comportement chez le sujet apprenant, deux théories viennent étayer et rendre explicite l'apprentissage multimédia : la théorie de la charge cognitive et la théorie cognitive de l'apprentissage en contexte multimédia.

La théorie de la charge cognitive

Trois types de mémoires soutiennent la théorie de la charge cognitive de John Sweller:

la mémoire sensorielle avec ses deux canaux d'entrée: le canal auditif (verbal) et le canal visuel (imagé).

la mémoire de travail qui réceptionne les informations nouvelles et les traite pour en faire des connaissances nouvelles. Elle possède une capacité limitée.

la mémoire à long terme qui après encodage des connaissances nouvelles les stocke de manière illimitée.

La capacité d'informations nouvelles traitée dans la mémoire de travail étant limitée, il convient donc de bien sélectionner les informations à traiter dans cette partie de la mémoire afin qu'elle puisse être encodée et transmise vers la mémoire à long terme. Lorsque les informations qui arrivent sont en excès dans cette partie de la mémoire de travail, on parle alors de surcharge cognitive. Cette surcharge va alors engendrer de la difficulté dans le processus d'apprentissage puisque la mémoire de travail ne peut traiter que trois à quatre informations nouvelles de manière simultanée. Ces considérations prises en ligne de compte, deux orientations caractérisent le travail des chercheurs en sciences cognitives afin de contrer cette charge cognitive: altérer l'information dans la mémoire de travail ou alors diminuer l'entrée d'information dans la mémoire sensorielle. Il existe trois types de charge:

la charge intrinsèque liée à l'information faisant figure d'objet d'analyse,

la charge extrinsèque liée à tous les éléments inutiles, le superflu. La présentation de l'information via le document pédagogique peut être modifiée en vue de favoriser l'apprentissage.

la charge essentielle qui constitue le lieu des représentations mentales contribuant au stockage dans la mémoire à long-terme.

La théorie cognitive de l'apprentissage en contexte multimédia

La théorie cognitive de l'apprentissage multimédia ( CMTL pour Cognitive Multimedia Theory Learning) de Richard Mayer, professeur de psychologie cognitive, s'appuie également sur cette théorie de la charge cognitive pour éclairer l'apprentissage en environnement médiatisé. Elle s'articule autour de trois concepts clés:

l'apprenant a recours à deux canaux (visuel et verbal) pour traiter l'information

la capacité de mémoire de travail est limitée et les informations nouvelles ne peuvent toutes être traitées en même temps

l'apprentissage est issu d'un processus actif: sélectionner, organiser, intégrer.

A partir de cette théorie, Mayer a dégagé un certain nombre de principes fondamentaux à prendre en compte lors de la conception de supports multimédia à destination de l'apprentissage:

Quelques principes ergonomiques

La présentation et l'organisation des constituants d'un documents pédagogique comporte un impact sur l'apprentissage. Aussi, il est souhaitable de s'approprier quelques principes liés à l'ergonomie des documents pédagogiques.

Par exemple, dans un article sur la conception de documents pédagogiques, M. Bétrancourt et S. Caro évoquent l'utilisation d'organisateurs en vue d'organiser le texte d'un document:

organisateurs linguistiques: titres, connecteurs, marques de thématisation

organisateurs para-linguistiques: marques de ponctuation, typographie, caractères spéciaux, couleur, disposition spatiale des informations

Même s'il n'est pas question d'autres formes que le document multimédia, précisons tout de même que certaines formes sont spécifiques aux documents numériques comme par exemple le multi-fenêtrage, effet loupe, animations d'éléments iconiques, animations complexes et enchaînements de texte/images,etc.

Un ensemble de recommandations ont été listées par Bétrancourt et Caro dans Ergonomie des documents électroniques. Nous recommandons aux lecteurs d'en prendre connaissance pour une appropriation plus approfondie.Ces recommandations portent par exemple sur les combinaisons de couleurs à utiliser à l'écran, celles à éviter, sur la typographie( 2 à 3 typographies au maximum par document) ou encore sur la combinaison de graphiques et de textes car ce sont là les éléments les plus présents dans les documents numériques.
Illustrations : Sabrina BUDEL via Canva Références :
Dans quelle mesure les supports numériques peuvent-ils compliquer ou faciliter l'apprentissage et la pratique de la lecture ?
http://www.cnesco.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/15-Tricot.pdf

Pour une justification pédagogique des aspects multimédias intégrés aux dispositifs de formation (C.Depover, B. De Lièvre, J.J. Quintin, A. Strebelle)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/36380355_Pour_une_justification_pedagogique_des_aspects_multimedias_integres_aux_dispositifs_de_formation

Charge cognitive et apprentissage. Une présentation des travaux de John Sweller (A. Tricot)À
https://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/teaching/staf15/ref/A.Tricot-Sweller.html

Applying the Science of Learning: EvidenceBased Principles for the Design of Multimedia Instruction (Richard E. Mayer)
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=A3759C8F178D93B94CB37A4A641C39A7?doi=10.1.1.457.5957&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Comprendre la théorie cognitive de l'apprentissage multimédia (Téluq)
https://jenseigneadistance.teluq.ca/mod/page/view.php?id=262

Comment concevoir des documents électroniques favorisant l'apprentissage ? (M. Bétrancourt, S.Caro)
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/mireille/papers/BetrancourtCaro2006.pdf

Ergonomie des documents numériques (S.Caro Dambreville, M. Bétrancourt)
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00451208/document

Voir plus d'articles de cet auteur

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Conception de documents pédagogiques : ergonomie et cognition

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Produire ses propres documents pédagogiques numériques implique la prise en compte de principes clés liés à l'environnement multimédia. En effet, certains documents non suffisamment pensés en termes d'ergonomie enfreignent ou compliquent le processus de l'apprentissage. C'est donc dans une approche cognitive et ergonomique que cet article se propose d'aborder la conception de documents multimédia par les enseignants.

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How Technology Can Support Student Success during COVID-19

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How Technology Can Support Student Success during COVID-19

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The focus of higher education's COVID-19 adaptations is on remote learning and working. Advising systems, degree progress tracking, and other technologies to support student success will be equally critical to help students complete courses and attain credentials.

Credit: MSSA / Shutterstock © 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning, remote work, and other activities to help contain the spread of the virus. In the past decade, institutions have recognized the importance of advising, early alerts, degree planning, and other services to help students attain their academic goals affordably and efficiently. A wide range of new applications and technologies to support student success are now available and may prove invaluable to help students adapt to fully remote learning. EDUCAUSE data from 2019 reveal that many, but far from all, institutions, students, faculty, and staff are ready and able to use these technologies during the pandemic.

This research summary is one of a series of reports outlining higher education's readiness to adapt in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

How Many Institutions Are Using Technology to Support Student Success?

Core technologies that support student success include advising center management (which is deployed partially or institution-wide at 76% of institutions) and an advising case management system that tracks student interactions (70% partial or institution-wide deployment).

Other data and analytics technologies and practices support managing, sharing, and decision-making related to student success. Table 1 shows technologies that support student success, which are in place in at most half of institutions. Technologies that allow students to opt in or out of data collection or analytics are still uncommon (in place at only 28% of institutions).

Table 1. Student success data and analytics technology and practice adoption

Table 2 lists best practices related to student success data management and governance. Although policies and practices to safeguard data are widespread (in place at 78% of institutions), fewer institutions report having the data they need and sharing data across systems. This suggests that even though most institutions have the core technologies and policies in place, they still have significant progress to make in accessing and integrating needed data.

Table 2. Student success data and analytics best practices

Some types of institutions are more prepared-or less prepared-than others to use technology to support student success. Figure 1 compares student success technology maturity (i.e., the extent to which an institution has incorporated EDUCAUSE's recommended student success technology best practices) by Carnegie class. Bachelor's institutions, which typically place the strongest emphasis on campus-based learning, are least ready to use data and technology to support student success, while associate's institutions, which generally adopt learning and instructional technologies more rapidly, are the most prepared.

Figure 1. Student success technology maturity, by Carnegie classification

Are Faculty, Staff, and Students Able to Use Technology to Support Student Success?

Having technologies and analytics is one step. Providing students, faculty, and staff with the access and training to use these systems is a critical additional step. More than half of institutions take steps to facilitate the adoption and use of student success technologies by faculty, advisors, and other staff (see table 3). Six in ten institutions provide applications that enable students to access data such as current academic standing and resources including tips for improvement. Students at institutions that don't provide such access might struggle to track their progress during times when it's difficult to get such feedback, and faculty, advisors, and other staff may lack sufficient training or even access to use tools to help students.

Table 3. Best practices in place to support faculty, advisors, and staff use of student success technologies

Do Institutions Have Technology to Help Students with Credential Planning?

Students need to develop, monitor, and adjust their academic plans to ensure they are on track to attain the credentials they seek as expeditiously as possible; sometimes that entails managing academic credits across multiple institutions. This need may be even more pressing given the current disruption and uncertainty brought on by the pandemic. Fortunately, most institutions have a core set of applications to help students plan their educational programs and manage credits, even across institutions. However, fewer than half of institutions have technologies that can recommend courses or degree programs for students based on their academic record or other factors. Most students who have used these technologies find them very or extremely useful (see table 4).

Table 4. Institutional availability and students' perceived utility of systems to support degree planning and credit management

Percentage of Institutions with System

Percentage of Students Who Find the System Very or Extremely Useful

What about Technologies to Help When Students Are at Risk?

Even in stable times, students may encounter academic or personal difficulties. The COVID-19 pandemic is upending lives and livelihoods, increasingly the likelihood that large numbers of students will need extra help. In the past decade, technologies to help identify and support students at risk have become increasingly useful and widespread.

Most institutions have systems to identify academic difficulties early and to help students, faculty, and advisors address those difficulties. More than one-third of institutions (39%) also have tools that can refer students to social or community resources for help (see table 5).

Table 5. Deployment of tools to help students at risk

Although tools to support at-risk students are still relatively new, growing numbers of students and faculty who use them are finding them useful. In 2019, more than half of students and between 30% and 40% of faculty rated them as very or extremely useful. Fewer than 10% of student users found them not very useful or not at all useful, but as many as one in five faculty saw them this way (see table 6).

Table 6. Students' and faculty rating of tools that support at-risk students

Technologies to help identify and intervene with students at academic risk or to give students social or community resource referrals are still extremely new. Even so, students in particular appreciate them and might especially need them now.

Institutions that have adopted student success technologies early and deployed them widely have a significant advantage during COVID-19, when digital life is far less constrained than life in the physical world. Students need help completing their academic terms and earning credentials during this extraordinary crisis, and EDUCAUSE data show that student success technologies can provide digital sources of help and support. The COVID-19 pandemic will have many, many lessons for us all; among them will likely be the ways in which student success technologies can help ameliorate students' academic and even personal concerns and the ways in which these systems and data can be improved to better help students and those who support them when a new normal has established itself.

EDUCAUSE will continue to monitor higher education and technology related issues during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For additional resources, please visit the EDUCAUSE COVID-19 web page.

Notes

This report is based on three data sources: the 2019 study of faculty and technology, the 2019 study of undergraduate students and technology, and the 2019 Core Data Service survey. ↩

Comparing the 2017 student and faculty surveys with the 2019 data, more students and faculty find the tools useful, and fewer find them not useful. ↩

Susan Grajek is Vice President of Communities and Research at EDUCAUSE.

D. Christopher Brooks is Director of Research at EDUCAUSE.

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how technology can support student success during covid-19

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How Technology Can Support Student Success during COVID-19

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The focus of higher education's COVID-19 adaptations is on remote learning and working. Advising systems, degree progress tracking, and other technologies to support student success will be equally critical to help students complete courses and attain credentials.

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Rapport ECAR sur numérique et enseignant·e·s

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Rapport ECAR sur numérique et enseignant·e·s

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Practitioners and leaders in digital innovation have been using technology to enhance the curriculum for some time, and our member stories illustrate how much good practice has been established. However, how do we know if this practice is transforming the way we deliver our curriculum? And, what can we do to find out?

Digital teaching and learning models

Models can help you identify which digital practices have become embedded in your curriculum and whether they are starting to bring about digital transformation. One such model is SAMR and it has received a lot of attention in recent times.

What is SAMR?

SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition) was developed by Dr R. Puentedura, following research into how the use of digital technology was transforming classroom-based teaching and learning.

The diagram below explains the four categories.

The first two categories, substitution and augmentation, describe a situation where the technology is either directly replacing an existing process or has replaced an older technology, but with little gain. Think about how interactive whiteboards replaced overhead projectors. Ok, the technology was more advanced, but the teaching mostly remained the same. Where digital use matches substitution or augmentation, the technology is said to be enhancing the existing teaching practice.

The next two categories, modification and redefinition, describe how digital use has led to a significant change in the way teaching and learning is planned and delivered. If the introduction of technology has created a brand new practice, then redefinition has taken place. Collectively, these two categories are more likely to promote digital transformation.

Applying SAMR to digital practice

Talk to people and they'll tell you that their overriding desire for technology is to see it transform the student experience. So, how can you use SAMR to achieve this?

We could use SAMR to carry out a simple benchmarking exercises against the available technology for learning and teaching. However, there's a risk that this diverts our attention to the technology rather than the outcome of our effort to change the way we deliver learning and teaching.

A more useful exercise would be to use SAMR as an audit tool to assess how the use of technology is shaping teaching and learning practice. This would provide valuable insights for individual teachers, while assisting leaders to identify where the investment in digital practice is bringing about worthwhile benefits, for example, with better management of resources.

How can SAMR inform the next steps?

Once we know how technology is shaping our learning and teaching practice, it can be used to inform our plans for innovation.

Start by asking 'how can we use SAMR to extend our practice and improve the student experience?'

Teachers could audit a specific example where their use of technology is just substituting or augmenting practice. Alternatively, you might choose to use SAMR to improve the procurement of new technology by asking whether the investment in technology is likely to lead to worthwhile digital transformation.

As you become familiar with SAMR, it's helpful not to see SAMR as hierarchical - that redefinition is the goal for the application of all technology. There will be situations when it's appropriate for technology to substitute or modify an existing practice.

Alternative models

A few other models you may be familiar with are the TPACK (technological pedagogical and content knowledge) or the RAT (replacement, amplification and transformation) model.

The wider picture

Addressing the challenge for more flexible study patterns is closely tied to digital transformation.

Our tackling digital transformation together event brought experts together to discuss what digital transformation is and is not.

We must remember that innovation doesn't have to be all about using the most advanced technology.

Related guidance

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Applying the SAMR model to aid your digital transformation

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A quick guide to help digital leaders and practitioners identify and amplify transformative digital practice.

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Abstract

The hybrid flexible, or HyFlex, course format is an instructional approach that combines face-to-face (F2F) and online learning. Each class session and learning activity is offered in-person, synchronously online, and asynchronously online. Students can decide how to participate. The flexibility of the HyFlex model demonstrates a commitment to student success, and that flexibility can also enable institutions to maintain educational and research activities during a disruption.

The 7 Things You Should Know About... series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the 7 Things briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page .
This 7 Things was originally published in 2010; we have updated it to reflect 2020 learning environments.

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7 Things You Should Know About the HyFlex Course Model

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The hybrid flexible, or HyFlex, course format is an instructional approach that combines face-to-face (F2F) and online learning. Each class session and learning activity is offered in-person, synchronously online, and asynchronously online. Students can decide how to participate.

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+0 conseils pour les discussions en ligne

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+0 conseils pour les discussions en ligne

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These tips can help educators ensure that online discussions are engaging and beneficial for postsecondary students.

For many of today's students and more than a few educators, effective participation in online discussions in postsecondary education may not be second nature. In particular, graduate-level discussions present challenges quite different from their undergraduate counterparts, as master's degree candidates tend to be highly motivated. This may mean that they frequently exceed the minimum number of required posts and write longer entries. The recommendations below are based on my own experience teaching fully online graduate courses with fifteen to twenty students, although many of these points would benefit those teaching at the undergraduate level as well.

1. Convey Clear Expectations

It would be easy to hold online discussions to higher standards than discussions happening face-to-face. Yet not all students participate equally in a face-to-face seminar. In my courses, I require two answers to the initial questions and two additional replies to classmates by the end of each week.

Be careful what you wish for, however! Remember that you'll need to read everything your students write; therefore, if you have fifteen students and require two posts and two answers per student, you'll receive a minimum of sixty posts by the end of the week. In my experience, graduate students frequently post more than the minimum required, and I routinely wrap up the week with around eighty to ninety posts. For this reason, make it clear that every post needs to be meaningful.

Make sure to provide clear expectations regarding the number of posts, the number of replies, and the associated deadlines. I ask students to read and sign this Discussion Guidelines document prior to posting to the discussion board, and I provide a link to the document under each discussion question for easy reference.

2. Adjust to the Discussion Board

The first discussion assignment in my courses is deliberately low-stakes. Students must introduce themselves and are encouraged (but not required) to post a few photos. Students are then asked to read and reply to two or three of their classmates' introductions. This enables them to get to know each other and their instructors and to get accustomed to the discussion board.

Students-especially those who are new to online courses or new to the learning management system (LMS) you're using-will need some time to get familiar with the discussion board. I have worked extensively with three different types of LMSs; in my experience, their discussion boards are rarely intuitive. If yours is particularly clunky, be sure to provide instructions on how to submit posts and replies. You might think that your students are tech savvy, but very few may have experience with this type of asynchronous, semiformal mode of communication.

3. Clarify Your Role

The norms of online academic discussions are a lot less established than those that occur in person. Students might bring particular expectations to their online course. It is important to share with them how you envision your role in online discussions, which depends upon your pedagogical beliefs and teaching style. I let my students know that I read everything they post and that I respond when I think that I can make a significant contribution by providing useful information, answering a direct question, or clarifying a misunderstanding. Toward the end of the week, I do my best to reply to "orphan" posts (those that have not received any responses).

Keep in mind that your own contributions will set the tone for the discussion. I often copy and paste an excerpt of the post I am reacting to, and students quickly start doing the same. When referencing the readings, I provide a full quote with the corresponding page number, but I do not require a particular styling citation. Again, do not hold your online discussions to higher standards than your face-to-face exchanges. MLA or APA styling takes time; in my opinion, it's simply not necessary in online discussions.

4. Provide Feedback and Coaching

The first two weeks of an online course are critical because this is when students develop good habits. As you begin reading students' posts, kindly prompt them to provide the page number, quote, or the title of the article to which they are reacting (e.g., "Good point, Sam-what's the page number for this quote?"). Ask for clarifications if a post appears vague. Even at the graduate level, students will be students, and early in the course is when they are finding out what they can get away with and what lines they should not cross.

For the first two weeks of a course, I leave detailed feedback in the gradebook comment section. If a student didn't meet the discussion expectations, I deduct points and refer them to the discussion guidelines. This feedback process will take time, but I rarely have to do this beyond the first two weeks. I also promptly email students who miss the first deadline but I do not remove points for late work during the first week.

5. Track Participation

I use a simple Google spreadsheet to track my own participation and that of my students, checking that the required initial answers are posted by the first deadline. Some LMSs provide this information for you in the course's student analytics section. I also keep track of whom I responded to and make sure to provide one meaningful reply to each student by the end of the week. (If you don't keep track of your own posts, you might reply four times to one student and not at all to five others.) This can create resentment or insecurities, and an online course leaves little room to resolve such misunderstandings.

6. Offer Groups and Discussion Board Alternatives

If you have more than fifteen students, consider creating discussion groups or increasing the number of questions students may choose from. It will be easier for your students to stay on top of the discussion as they won't feel that they have to read everything everybody posts.

Consider offering live discussions. Students often take online courses because their schedule or personal life does not allow them to go to class twice a week. It does not mean that they can't attend live sessions.

Two years ago, I introduced live sessions in all my online courses. These are optional. I send a Doodle poll a week ahead to agree on a time, and I select the most popular times. To run a live session, I require at least four students in attendance. I rotate the times so that all who wish to participate can do so at least once. Students who take part in the live session can skip the discussion board, but the expectations are the same: they must prepare responses to two questions. Live sessions are recorded and posted to the LMS. In some courses we hold a live session every week, while others have just one or two throughout the course.

7. Create Questions You Care About

This might be obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me at first. I used to ask questions that I thought were important, but somehow, I dreaded reading the answers. Now, I ask questions that I am really interested in discussing. My questions are always open-ended; I make sure to provide five or six questions so that students can choose the ones they want to respond to, and I always include a general question that prompts students to react to an aspect of the readings that caught their attention.

8. Select Discussion Leaders

My students take turns leading the discussion every week. The discussion leaders are responsible for adding a discussion question and moderating the answers. Previously, I required students to write an end-of-week discussion summary, but I realized that I didn't want to read them-and I don't think students read them, either. I now ask discussion leaders to select three of their classmates' quotes and write a one-paragraph reflection on each, which has proven to be of greater value to all in support of the learning process.

9. Encourage Note-Taking

This might seem odd since the content of the discussion is archived on the LMS, but I encourage my students to take notes on weekly discussions. Courses ultimately close, and sooner or later students will lose access. Discussion posts don't export very well and are difficult to search. As students take notes on aspects of the conversation important to them, they further process the course information, which is a helpful activity in itself.

10. Know When It's Time to Stop Posting

Managing online discussions of any kind can be a time-consuming endeavor, but it is the heart of a distance education course. I noticed early that I didn't get the same sense of accomplishment out of my online discussion as I did from my on-campus classes. Those classes began and ended at specific times; when the bell rings, you know you're done. Online courses, however, are ongoing. It wasn't until I developed a system to manage my online discussions and began tracking my own contributions that I felt comfortable logging out of my LMS at the end of the week.

Edwige Simon is Director of the Graduate Certificate in Language Teaching with Technology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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10 tips for effective online discussions

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10 Tips for Effective Online Discussions

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These tips can help educators ensure that online discussions are engaging and beneficial for postsecondary students. For many of today's students and more than a few educators, effective participation in online discussions in postsecondary education may not be second nature.

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Repenser la première année en ligne pour les étudiant·e·s

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Repenser la première année en ligne pour les étudiant·e·s

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The University of Maryland Global Campus improved online student engagement and success through a new first-year experience course designed to foster a growth mindset and one-on-one relationships with instructors.

Credit: Bo1982 / Shutterstock.com © 2020

For many students, particularly adult learners, entering online higher education for the first time can be overwhelming. At the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), we on the academic affairs and student affairs staff tackled this challenge through a new first-year experience course designed to increase online student engagement and foster meaningful connections between students and faculty. An initial evaluation of the course showed that it significantly improved first-year students' likelihood of reenrolling at UMGC in the next term. Most importantly, we found that students who take the course are significantly more confident in their ability to complete their degrees, find resources, and overcome hurdles. The course also helps students feel more like they are part of the UMGC community. This blog post describes the journey UMGC took in developing the first-year experience course, the challenges we encountered, and the promising early results.

The Challenge of Online Student Engagement in the First Year

A wealth of evidence suggests that student course engagement in the first year is critical for ongoing college success. The Association of American Colleges and Universities designates first-year experience courses as high-impact practices, meaning that educational research shows these courses can increase student retention and student engagement rates. First-year experience courses have long been popular in many traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, but fostering similar levels of academic and social integration in online environments is uniquely challenging, as the sense of community that develops in many face-to-face courses can be difficult to cultivate online.

Research shows that instructors who can foster a sense of community in an online classroom are essential for online student engagement. Students in online courses who feel comfortable and familiar with the instructor and their classmates are more willing to share information and are less likely to feel isolated in an asynchronous online environment. In fact, instructor-student interactions have been shown to have a greater impact on online student engagement than students' interactions with their peers because effective instructors reduce the "transactional distance" of online courses by engaging in open communication, providing holistic and frequent feedback, posting messages and updates, responding to students, participating in discussions, and generally helping students get to know one another as "real people." In short, online students "want to know that someone 'on the other end' is paying attention."

PACE 111: Rethinking the First-Year Experience for the Online Learner

Those of us on the academic and student affairs staff at UMGC shared a growing concern that the university could feel like a faceless bureaucracy for new students. We worried that a new student could be easily overwhelmed and underinformed about various aspects of the UMGC experience, including the resources available at the university and the expectations and demands of being an engaged online learner. Because UMGC is a large institution and offers a substantial number of online courses across a variety of timelines and start dates, new students may not feel like they are part of an intimate cohort or learning community. Particularly in high-enrollment general-education courses, students may find it difficult to forge connections with their classmates and instructors. To address these concerns, in fall 2019, we launched a required new first-year experience course, Program & Career Exploration (PACE) 111.

When designing the course, we prioritized several concepts that are particularly relevant for adult learners in online courses. First, we wanted to encourage and cultivate students' intrinsic motivations for pursuing a college degree. To that end, the curriculum is infused with practices and activities to promote a "growth mindset," which can help students prepare for and persist through the challenges they may encounter on their college journey.

Second, although fundamental aspects of the course were shared across all sections, we sought to create more "cohort-like" communities within our large population of first-year students based on shared academic and professional interests. Students enroll in different sections based on "meta-majors," including business, communication and humanities, health and sciences, public safety, and technology. In addition, because UMGC serves a large population of military-affiliated students, these students can choose to enroll in a multidisciplinary section that includes all academic programs as well as resources specific to the military-affiliated community. Within each meta-major, PACE 111 focuses on the personal and professional opportunities and possibilities related to students' chosen major or course of study. For example, one assignment asks students to conduct informational interviews with a professional in their desired career field and summarize their findings from that conversation.

Because we knew that the success of the course would hinge on the student-instructor relationship, faculty are selected to teach PACE based not only on their subject matter expertise but also on their high-touch engagement and mentoring skills. To cultivate that relationship, every faculty member creates a video to welcome students to the course, and students are asked to schedule at least two one-on-one, synchronous virtual meetings with the instructor, even though the course itself is delivered asynchronously. We deliberately keep sections small-twenty students on average-to make this task more manageable for faculty. Recognizing that this in-depth model of online student engagement may be unfamiliar to some faculty, we developed a targeted professional development course for all faculty who would be teaching PACE 111.

Results

To evaluate the overall success of this initiative, we collected overall course success and reenrollment data and feedback from a variety of sources, including, student post-course surveys, course evaluations, and faculty surveys. The results of this initial evaluation have been overwhelmingly positive.

Student Post-Course Surveys

We asked PACE 111 students to provide more detailed feedback on the course via a post-course survey, which was separate from the course evaluation that students also were asked to complete. The post-course survey asked questions aimed at assessing students' academic preparedness, confidence, and growth mindset, and gauging their sense of community and knowledge of university resources. An identical survey administered to non-PACE students in their first term at UMGC was used as a control. Six hundred and thirty-one PACE students completed the survey, and 159 non-PACE students participated in the control group.

The survey results showed that PACE students fared better in every category, and the difference between PACE and non-PACE responses was statistically significant for every question. Compared to non-PACE students, PACE students were significantly more likely to report confidence in the following areas:

Feeling confident they will be able to complete the work needed to graduate

Feeling prepared for future courses at UMGC

Knowing where to find resources for support

Knowing what they want to accomplish during their time at UMGC

Setting goals that they are working toward

Feeling like they are a part of the UMGC community

Believing that their abilities can be improved through hard work and a commitment to learning (growth mindset)

Course Success and Reenrollment

When we compared PACE 111 outcomes to the outcomes of several other high-enrollment courses that students typically take in their first year, we found a statistically significant difference in completion rates (finishing the course with a C or better): students who were enrolled in PACE 111 had higher completion rates than students who were enrolled in other first-year courses.

Although it is too soon to tell if PACE 111 makes an impact on year-to-year student retention, we found that PACE 111 students were statistically more likely to reenroll in a subsequent term than similar students who did not take the course. In fact, PACE students were sixteen percentage points more likely to reenroll.

Student Course Evaluations

Overall student satisfaction with the course was high, particularly in regard to measures of student engagement and instructor responsiveness. Compared to students in other first-year courses, PACE students were more likely to contact their instructor, feel like their instructor helped them understand the course content, and report that their instructor provided them with useful feedback that helped them improve.

Students' open-ended feedback also suggested that their experience was overwhelmingly positive. When students were asked to discuss what parts of the course they found to be the most interesting, the most common responses included getting to know more resources at UMGC, getting the opportunity to think more deeply about their goals and an academic plan that would help them reach those goals, interacting with their fellow students and faculty members through the discussion board, and having one-on-one meetings with their instructors. However, students also let us know which aspects of the course were less popular. For example, some overseas students noted that the one-on-one meetings with instructors were difficult to schedule.

Faculty Feedback

We conducted a survey of PACE 111 faculty to better understand faculty's satisfaction with the training and preparation they received prior to teaching PACE 111, and to get feedback on the course itself and recommendations for future iterations. Overall, faculty were satisfied with the training they received. Some faculty cited uncertainty around the technology used for scheduling one-on-one meetings with students. Faculty were also generally enthusiastic about the course itself, with many reporting that the course was well-designed and that they enjoyed it and found it beneficial.

What We Learned

We are continuing to make changes to the course for future terms. We learned the following key lessons from student and faculty feedback:

It is possible to implement a high-quality, high-impact first-year experience course in an online, asynchronous context.

Synchronous, one-on-one interactions between faculty and students strengthened the relationship between students and UMGC and made students feel supported.

Working through their degree plans and exploring their potential career paths (particularly via the informational interviews) helped students gain clarity about whether they were in the correct degree program.

Extensive faculty training should be provided to ensure faculty are comfortable and proficient with any new software used in the course (in our case, this included software for scheduling meetings with students and software for making phone calls to students).

Although our initial results are promising, it is still too early to tell if the course will move the needle on measures such as future course success and retention rates. Nonetheless, we believe that a first-year experience course is just as important-if not more so-for online adult learners as it is for traditional students. We hope first-year experience courses will become more widespread among online institutions seeking to provide an engaging and supportive academic experience.

Notes

Vincent Tinto, "Linking Learning and Leaving: Exploring the Role of the College Classroom in Student Departure," in Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle, ed. John M. Braxton, 1st ed, Vanderbilt Issues in Higher Education (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). ↩

George D. Kuh, "High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview" (excerpt), Association of American Colleges and Universities, June 24, 2014. ↩

William A. Sadera, James Robertson, Liyan Song, and M. Nichelle Midon, "The Role of Community in Online Learning Success," MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 5, no. 2 (2009): 277-284. ↩

Thomas Dyer, Jacob Aroz, and Elizabeth Larson, "Proximity in the Online Classroom: Engagement, Relationships, and Personalization," Journal of Instructional Research 7, no. 1 (2018): 108-118. ↩

Florence Martin and Doris U. Bolliger, "Engagement Matters: Student Perceptions on the Importance of Engagement Strategies in the Online Learning Environment," Online Learning 22, no. 1 (2018): 205-222; Tracey Muir et al., "Chronicling Engagement: Students' Experience of Online Learning over Time," Distance Education, 40, no. 2 (2019): 262-277, 1-16; Krystle Phirangee, Carrie Demmans Epp, and Jim Hewitt, "Exploring the Relationship between Facilitation Methods, Students' Sense of Community, and Their Online Behaviors," Online Learning 20, no. 2 (2016): 134-154. ↩

Doris U. Bolliger and Colleen Halupa, "Online Student Perceptions of Engagement, Transactional Distance, and Outcomes," Distance Education 39, no. 3 (2018): 299-316; Marcia D Dixson, "Creating Effective Student Engagement in Online Courses: What Do Students Find Engaging?" Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 10, no. 2 (2012): 1-13; Dyer, Aroz, and Larson, "Proximity in the Online Classroom." ↩

Martin and Bolliger, "Engagement Matters," 218. ↩

Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008). ↩

Laura Harris is the Applied Research Manager at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Martina Hansen is the Vice President of Student Affairs at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Beth Mulherrin is the Assistant Vice President for Retention Services at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Darragh McNally is Assistant Vice President of Innovation, Research, and Evaluation at University of Maryland Global Campus.

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reimagining the "first-year experience" for online

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Reimagining the "First-Year Experience" for Online, Adult Learners

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The University of Maryland Global Campus improved online student engagement and success through a new first-year experience course designed to foster a growth mindset and one-on-one relationships with instructors. For many students, particularly adult learners, entering online higher education for the first time can be overwhelming.

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12 Key Ideas: An Introduction to Teaching Online

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12 Key Ideas: An Introduction to Teaching Online

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12 Key Ideas: An Introduction to Teaching Online - Simple Book Publishing

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12 Key Ideas: An Introduction to Teaching Online by Dave Cormier and Ashlyne O'Neil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Publishing key data points about the transition to synchronous teaching and learning is helping Arizona State University to be more transparent about the work that is being done to support students and faculty.

Credit: goir / Shutterstock.com © 2020

The best thing about working for Arizona State University (ASU) is its charter. If I or any other ASU staff member is ever unsure about why we do what we do, we just refer back to this statement about inclusion and success. That's never been more true than it's been over the last few weeks as the university transitioned to synchronous teaching and learning. ASU staff have expressed their commitment to the charter through the work they have put in during these trying times. While the bulk of the attention is rightfully focused on students and instructors, there is also a tremendous amount of work going on behind the scenes in IT departments everywhere.

The University Technology Office (UTO) at ASU started publishing some key data points about the university's transition to a new teaching modality from day one. Our goal was to be transparent about the work that was being done to support students and faculty. As a director in ASU's Data Intelligence group, I'm fortunate to work with teams that deal with data from the university's administrative systems, learning tools, student applications, and many other sources. Given that the university was venturing to scale synchronous teaching in an uncharted way, the data intelligence team felt we could add a touch of clarity to the unknown by providing supporting metrics and data.

The Alternative Modality Key Data (alt-modality) page is fairly simple. We're not trying to wow audiences with maps, dials, and lights. We just want to present some key numbers that let our constituents know that we're keeping an eye on things. We also make much of the presented data simple to make the page as accessible as possible. While some of the data are simply descriptive, the data also reveal some wonderful stories:

Technology distributed: This section of metrics doesn't even begin to do justice to the herculean effort our teams expended during the transition to synchronous teaching and learning. We had a bucket brigade of staff who were unboxing, imaging, and testing hundreds of laptops for distribution to students who needed them for synchronous learning. I'm proud to call these folks my coworkers.

Call center: The Experience Center is the students' direct line to ASU for assistance. The call center team does a phenomenal job of supporting students on a week-to-week basis, but they have become a lifeline over the last few weeks. The data do a good job of showing the raw call volume related to the transition to synchronous learning.

Canvas activity: With the move to synchronous teaching, the ASU LMS has become more vital than it already was. We have already seen about a 20 percent increase in the amount of time students are spending daily in Canvas. While that's neither a good nor a bad statistic, it validates that things have changed.

Zoom sessions: Zoom is arguably the single most focused on piece of software (for positive reasons and for some not so positive ones). We felt it was incumbent upon us to track Zoom usage. With the confluence of remote teaching and remote working, ASU went from a peak of 1,500 daily sessions before the transition to synchronous teaching to a peak of more than 13,000 sessions since the transition.

Producing the alt modality page has been educational and is a great example of teamwork. From a CIO who asked for key data points to developers who extracted the data from source systems and data analysts who put the visualizations together, everyone pitched in over the couple of (weekend) days leading up to the transition.

Takeaways for Higher Education

While these specific metrics may not have much meaning for practitioners at other universities, this exercise illustrates the benefits that data-conscious institutions might gain through a similar effort. Being data-conscious is finding the middle ground between "we are data-driven, and students can be boiled down to a number" and "I've been doing this for twenty-five years. I don't need any data." We didn't know what we might do with Zoom data, but we knew collecting these data would be in our best interest. We have built the habit of asking about the data before we need the data. Implementing a new vendor tool? Make sure you know what data you can get from it. Developing a new app in-house? Have the development team instrument it with activity data. This practice is an investment that will pay for itself tenfold over time.

How Becoming More Data-Conscious Has Impacted ASU

I've been active in the higher education data and analytics community for twenty years, and I'm a big believer in the idea that data can be used to help support students throughout their academic journey. There's no silver bullet-everything we do with data is incremental. If we can use data to make a small, positive impact on a student's journey, then we're doing our job well.

The data and metrics that have been generated throughout the first few weeks of the pandemic are no different. They're not revolutionary, but they do two things. First, they demonstrate the university's transparency to its students and the greater ASU community. That's important for institutional credibility in these times when data, privacy, and student agency are such important topics. Second, they allow data practitioners in the UTO to contribute to the ASU charter: "ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed. . . ."

Note

"Alternative Modality Key Data," University Technology Office, Arizona State University, accessed June 1, 2020. ↩

Mike Sharkey is Data Intelligence Director at Arizona State University.

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a data practitioner's view on synchronous teaching and student success

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A Data Practitioner's View on Synchronous Teaching and Student Success

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Publishing key data points about the transition to synchronous teaching and learning is helping Arizona State University to be more transparent about the work that is being done to support students and faculty. The best thing about working for Arizona State University (ASU) is its charter.

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15 scenarios pour la rentrée d'automne 2020

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15 scenarios pour la rentrée d'automne 2020

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It's difficult to imagine higher education facing a more intense set of challenges than what we are seeing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges will likely be felt for years to come, but fall 2020 will test many of the standards and structures that we have come to associate with higher education.

While no one can foresee what will happen in the fall, most colleges and universities are thinking through a range of options. These options tend to fall along a continuum, with everything being back to normal on one end and fully remote learning on the other. The former is mostly outside the control of most institutions and the latter an option that many would rather not choose, at least not yet. In between is where it gets complicated.

Here are 15 scenarios for the fall that we think schools will be considering.

In this scenario, the fall semester looks like any other fall semester. Residential students return to campus; commuting students participate in classes on campus as usual. All co-curricular and curricular activities pick up as usual. Life is back to normal, perhaps (hopefully) with some lessons learned from the upheaval of the spring about the importance of investments in teaching and learning support.

One possibility for the fall is that colleges and universities begin the semester later than usual, perhaps sometime in October or even early November, whenever the social distancing restrictions can accommodate students gathering together in classes on campus. Schools may choose to start online and then pick up face-to-face slightly later in the semester, or they may postpone the start of the semester until there is a vaccine, better testing or a clear turning point in our fight against the ongoing spread of COVID-19.

While under the previous scenario the fall semester would start late, it still assumes a fall semester would take place within the boundaries of the normal fall semester. In this scenario, the fall semester would be postponed until January 2021. From there, schools might choose to push back the spring semester to the summer, or push through a modified calendar to make spring and a much shorter summer session possible. This is a drastic step, but it is one that some colleges are actively considering as part of their fall planning.

How a student begins their college experience may be the best predictor of how their college experience will end. The ability of a student to persist through the rigors of college life is in part dependent on the quality of the support they receive in orienting to the independence and intensity of college-level work. Recognizing the importance of the first year and the first few weeks and months of the transition to college, this plan brings only first-year students to campus in the fall. First-year students learn in residential classes, while also participating in a full range of campus-based orientation and social-connecting exercises. Sophomores, juniors and seniors continue to learn remotely for the fall semester.
5. Graduate Students Only
Like the first-year intensive model, this approach would identify select student populations for return to campus. In this model, a smaller population of graduate students might return to campus to continue studies and to help with research continuity. There are other ways of identifying student populations -- by school, by major, by class -- that could also be combined with curricular and administrative considerations such as class size and need for face-to-face interaction.

Many colleges and universities have extensive study abroad and gap year options. While study abroad will still likely be a challenge in the fall, one approach to creating a lower-density model for the fall would be to implement a broader-scale approach to gap year experiences. Students could propose project-based experiences that could be implemented and managed while social distancing rules are still in place. This model would depend heavily on whether options for students to make the gap year a meaningful experience are available given social distancing restrictions.

One approach option for fall is to reduce the number of courses being offered to limit on campus density and to prioritize support resources. Schools are considering a variety of ways of doing this, including focusing on core courses or signature experience courses, eliminating low-enrollment courses, and prioritizing courses that can be more easily adapted to multiple modalities. Courses that are not part of the targeted pool are taught online.

In a split curriculum scenario, courses are designed as either residential or online. Students who are able to come back to campus (up to the population in which social distancing rules can be enforced) can choose to enroll in either format. Requiring a defined proportion of enrollments to be in online courses for residential students may increase the number of students that can return to campus. This scenario has the advantage of simplifying the course-development process for faculty and the course-selection process for students, while also running the maximum number of residential courses possible while adhering to social distancing guidelines.

This scenario mimics what some colleges already do. Students would take one course at a time during much shorter (three or four weeks) sessions or blocks, run consecutively for the entire semester. The advantage, besides an interesting and intensive pedagogy, is flexibility. If something were to change in the situation related to the pandemic, such as a new second wave of infections, schools could more easily pivot to remote or face-to-face learning at breaks between blocks.

The block plan is a dramatic departure from the normal curricular structure at most schools. It would likely require a full rethinking of the curriculum, teaching practice and administrative processes. Moving to a more modular course model might be more attractive and more easily implementable within existing structures. Courses could be structured in a variety of ways that would be consistent with the mission and signature strengths of the institution. At one institution, students might take five course modules over seven and a half weeks and then switch to a different five courses. Or students might take a semester-long seminar in their major with shorter modules for electives and labs.
11. Students in Residence, Learning Virtually
Much like the model of Minerva Schools at KGI, this approach would bring students back to campus, perhaps at a slightly less dense rate, while still teaching courses in a virtual environment. Students would be able to take advantage of many co-curricular activities that were set up for effective social distancing, but classes, where the correct density of students sitting for long periods of time in a room is still a relative unknown, would be taught online.
12. A Low-Residency Model
In this model, similar to how many online and executive programs work now, students would come to campus for intensive face-to-face experiences and then return home to complete the semester online. Students would be brought to campus in iterative waves. This would allow for greater density control. Rich face-to-face pedagogical experiences with peers and faculty could be developed while still maintaining social distancing. The online part of the semester would be enhanced by student familiarity with each other.

The HyFlex model is perhaps the most flexible and for many will be the most attractive. It is also possibly one of the more difficult approaches for faculty. In this model, courses would be taught both face-to-face and online by the same instructor at the same time. Students could choose to return to campus or stay home. Those on campus could be assigned certain class slots when face-to-face is an option, allowing the schools greater control of social distancing in the classroom. This model tends to privilege synchronous learning, and to do it well often requires real-time in-class help (a TA or course assistant to manage the online students), an intentionally designed classroom and a great deal of patience from both the students and faculty.
14. A Modified Tutorial Model
Another approach that gives students and the university a great deal of flexibility is a modified tutorial model. In this model, students would take a common online lecture session. Faculty and or TAs would then meet with small groups of students in tutorials that would allow for social distancing to be employed. Unlike the HyFlex model, a modified tutorial model does not require additional in-class support to manage the technology. The disadvantage is that it asks more of a faculty member's time to be dedicated to meeting with students.
15. Fully Remote
Perhaps the most obvious option for the fall is to continue doing what we've been doing this spring. Students would be taught in a virtual environment from wherever they happen to be. Successes from this spring could be carried over to the fall, and lessons learned could be employed. Co-curricular activities would be a challenge, but student groups and many activities could be carried forward online, if only temporarily.

These models are not all distinct, and many overlap. Each brings with it nuances and opportunities for modification and creative solutions unique to a specific campus. Many will require highly adaptable faculty committed to marrying synchronous and asynchronous learning in flexible, dynamic ways.

Additionally, all of these options may not be completely feasible at any one institution, but all may turn out to be necessary thought experiments as schools plan for the unknowns of the coming academic year.

What is clear with any of these models, though, is that support for teaching and learning, advising, student (not to mention faculty and staff) health and well-being, and coordination and logistics will need to be reinforced in all of these 15 scenarios. Adopting any (or any combination) of these scenarios for the fall will also require us to reimagine how we build a supportive learning community. None of this will be easy.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be working to delve more deeply into as many of these scenarios as possible. Our goal is to synthesize these ideas and to make some recommendations in a concise digital-only book, tentatively titled The Low-Density University. We'd love to hear your feedback on scenarios we've missed or how your school is thinking about the scenarios above.

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It's difficult to imagine higher education facing a more intense set of challenges than what we are seeing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges will likely be felt for years to come, but fall 2020 will test many of the standards and structures that we have come to associate with higher education.

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Teaching during COVID-19: Why We're Fortunate

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Teaching during COVID-19: Why We're Fortunate

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View Transcript

Author:

Gardner Campbell
Associate Professor of English
Virginia Commonwealth University

Gardner Campbell: It's fascinating to think about what would have happened with this IT web landscape even 20 years ago. What did we have in the year 2000? Well, we were just barely being able to have anything like WordPress. We were barely into, well...we didn't have YouTube yet. We certainly didn't have Zoom. We didn't have Slack. We didn't have Discord. We had phpBB, sort of, which is one of my go-tos-trailing-edge technology, as Jon Udell puts it.

But no! It's important to think about how these small pieces, loosely joined, are now small and very sophisticated and very powerful pieces that can be loosely joined. And it's certainly true that people will always complain. Since I am faculty, I think I can rat us out and say one of the things faculty do with their critical thinking powers is complain, a lot. And many times those complaints are warranted. Not always. However, to think about the things we can complain about now. More or less adequate bandwidth for the work we do. These incredibly agile and full-featured tools that come into life at a click of a URL? I can hardly imagine anything easier than joining a Zoom meeting. And Zoom was very smart early on by making it a little more complicated to host a meeting but absolutely easy to join a meeting. Well, all of a sudden, the barrier to entry has been usefully differentiated, and it's very low if you simply want to be part. And once you're part, you're like, "Hmm, wonder what it's like if I host a meeting?" When we've had this terrible experience and we've had to find ourselves inventing madly, improvising, doing all these things off the cuff we've never imagined doing before, it's truly a cinematic opportunity. We're making movies on location, together. How can we think about it that way? And if we can think about it that way, I think we find the tools at our disposal to be able to realize that vision in ways that simply would not have been possible if we had been trying to do this over Usenet.

One of the things that is extremely interesting for me, at this moment, is considering just how many colors are in the web-enabled palette, just how many of these small pieces loosely joined you can bring together. It's almost like cooking, you know, you have about 10 spices, four or five go-to utensils, and, "What is it you want for dinner tonight?" You don't have to think about, "Well, I guess I had better get the fire marshal in here to help me make the pizza." You just do it. And I hope that that will inspire more faculty as we move forward to think about how they can, you know, bake their own, how they can, outside the confines of a learning management system, be creative and invent these new kinds of recipes, to do the basic thing that we're all trying to do, which is to establish communication, to be reliable in the way that we're able to think and talk together, and to be able to do something that will build on itself over time. Yeah, we...it's an unlucky moment, at a lucky time, which is another one of the great ironies.

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teaching during covid-19: why we're fortunate [video]

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Teaching during COVID-19: Why We're Fortunate [video]

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View Transcript Author: Gardner Campbell Associate Professor of English Virginia Commonwealth University Gardner Campbell: It's fascinating to think about what would have happened with this IT web landscape even 20 years ago. What did we have in the year 2000? Well, we were just barely being able to have anything like WordPress.

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Orienting Students to Online Learning: A Must for Student Success

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Orienting Students to Online Learning: A Must for Student Success

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Orientation experiences support students' transition to the first year of college, which is essential for student success. This applies equally to online learning.

Credit: Madcat_Madlove / Shutterstock.com © 2020

Overview and Key Considerations
By Jaimie Hoffman

Whether enrolling in a single online class or a fully virtual program, students need to be prepared for the academic and social learning that compose their educational journey. While some may arrive with years of online learning experience, others will require familiarization with processes, tools, expectations, and the campus community-and all will benefit from an introduction to their new academic community. Orientation experiences support students' transition to the first year of college, which is essential for student success. This support is particularly important for those students from historically marginalized populations.

Orientation for online learners should be holistic and would ideally mirror content delivered in the onsite orientation experience, since students enrolling in online courses may come to campus infrequently or possibly not at all. Student orientation helps to foster student success; research suggests that those who participate in orientation programs generally perform better than those who do not and persist to graduation at a higher rate.

Educators seeking to create a strong online orientation may grapple with similar questions:

How can we orient students to online learning?

What should be included in the orientation, and how should it be delivered?

How can we encourage students to complete the experience?

How will we know if the orientation was successful?

There are three key areas that should be considered when creating an orientation for online learners: (1) orientation learning goals and content; (2) course design features and approach; and (3) assessment and student completion requirements.

Consideration #1: Orientation Learning Goals and Content

As in any other learning experience, educators should first identify the desired learning outcomes of the student orientation. Leveraging existing onsite orientation outcomes and schedules is important to ensure that students are integrated holistically into the academic community.

Creation of the student orientation would ideally be a campus-wide collaboration to leverage expertise across divisions. The inclusion of videos from campus leaders also symbolizes commitment to all students, including those studying online. Further, leveraging the campus community to identify intended outcomes of the student orientation might uncover content areas that otherwise would not have been identified if the program was owned by only one area.

Generally speaking, the orientation should

boost students' confidence for success online,

foster a sense of community among students, faculty, and staff,

equip students with the tools necessary to be positive community members,

facilitate academic preparedness and skill-building (e.g., time management),

provide support and engagement resources, and

give students the opportunity to use the technology they will encounter in their courses.

Consideration #2: Course Design Features and Approach

Stakeholders involved in the initiative should consider multiple factors that drive course location, design features, and approach.

Course location: Since online students will complete coursework on a campus learning management system (LMS), or virtual campus, creating a student orientation course within the same virtual space fosters a seamless experience for students. For example, students cannot actually use the tools (e.g., discussion boards, engagement tools, gradebook, assignment submission) they will use in their courses if the course is located outside of the LMS.

Modality: Thinking through the orientation modality is important for the student experience. Desired outcomes and the modality of the students' curricular environment should drive the modality of the orientation. For instance, if students never have to meet synchronously for their online courses, a blended or hybrid orientation may not be effective. Alternatively, there may be a specific community-building activity that would be ideal in a synchronous session; thus, employing a series of live orientation sessions via video might be best. The course learning outcomes can also help inform what topics should be reinforced in live sessions.

Interactive Learning Objects (ILOs): Campus leaders should think through how content will be delivered in order to achieve course objectives and consider Universal Design for Learning principles. A course will not be engaging if every page involves large paragraphs of text, for example, and it is unlikely that students will retain much of the information. ILOs can foster deeper learning. For instance, employing an ILO where students have to respond to academic integrity scenarios will enable them to relate to the material better than if they simply read an informational page about academic integrity.

Facilitated vs. fully self-directed: Learning outcomes and staffing resources will likely dictate whether or not the student orientation course will be facilitated or fully self-directed. Ideally, a faculty or staff member would be able to log into discussions or ILOs to offer commentary on students' work, although this may not be sustainable.

Perpetual or created new each term: When the student orientation is created in the LMS, campus leaders will need to consider whether the course will be open perpetually or if it will be prepared anew for every forthcoming term. It is certainly less work to have a single course to which students are continually added, but this does mean that new students will see posts submitted by past students, and in some cases, past students will be able to return and engage with newer students. This could be leveraged for mentoring, but it also might be seen by students as a "canned" course versus a more customized experience created for each new cohort. While it is possible to restrict the time during which students can access the course so that they can't engage with newer students, this also means they can no longer access the content as they need it.

Consideration #3: Assessment and Student Completion Requirements

Any meaningful learning experience will end with assessing the student experience. Therefore, stakeholders should consider using the framework developed by Donald L. Kirkpatrick and James D. Kirkpatrick. They outlined four levels of evaluation: how students felt about the experience; what students learned through the course (e.g., assessing the achievement of the stated learning outcomes); how the student orientation actually impacted the students' experience once courses began; and finally, how the student orientation affected overall student success. This approach to assessing the student experience through online orientation should then be counterbalanced with how the onsite orientation is assessed (with consideration toward creating an equitable experience).

At a minimum, most campuses require attendance at the onsite orientation; therefore, some confirmation of completion is likely needed for this course. To confirm completion, campuses can leverage digital strategies such as having students upload a confirmation page as an assignment in the course (that way, students experience the process of submitting an assignment, much as they would in an online course) or creating a digital badge in the LMS.

Orienting Students to Online Learning at CSU Channel Islands
By Megan Eberhardt-Alstot, Jill Leafstedt, and Jaimie Hoffman

To illustrate these concepts, here we provide an overview of how one institution approached the creation of an orientation for online learners, along with some data on the use and impact of the course. Jill Leafstedt, associate vice provost for innovation and faculty development at CSU Channel Islands (CI), established the vision for the course; Jaimie Hoffman, an independent consultant, designed the initial version of "Learning Online 101"; and Megan Eberhardt-Alstot, learning designer at CI, lead the subsequent revisions and implementation.

CSU Channel Islands (CI) is located in Camarillo, California, and is one of 23 campuses in the California State University System. CI is a mid-sized institution with around 8,000 students, of which 97 percent are undergraduates. In 2010, CI achieved the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status, and today 51.6 percent of students are Hispanic/Latino, and 58 percent are first-generation college students. As with the national trend, a growing percentage of courses (12%) are offered online. Leafstedt identified the need to develop a resource that could support students "learning how to learn" online and reduce the time that faculty spend providing technical assistance in online courses. Key decisions were made regarding the three areas, noted above, that should be considered when creating an orientation for online learners.

Orientation Learning Goals and Content

The primary course goal was to teach students how to become successful online learners. More specifically, we hoped to boost students' confidence in learning online, equip students with the tools necessary to be positive community members, and give students the opportunity to use the technology they would encounter in their courses. While we wanted to facilitate academic preparedness by building skills such as time management, motivation, and reading basis, we also sought to keep the course completion time to under two hours. Five modules make up Learning Online 101:

Welcome and Start Here. We begin with a welcome from the university president and provide an overview of what students can expect in the course

Starting with a Positive Mindset and Reflecting on Your Readiness. This module covers ideas like motivation, growth mindset, and myths of online education. It also includes a readiness assessment so that students can determine what areas they might need to improve upon in order to be successful in learning online.

Navigating the Online Classroom. This module is designed to help students understand the ins-and-outs of using CI Learn (Canvas) and build basic competency in the digital tools (e.g., Google Apps for Education Suite and Zoom) that will most likely support their academic work and collaboration within a digital learning environment. Intentional consideration led to a focus on teaching tools that were both freely accessible to all students via their campus accounts and completely accessible via PC or mobile device.

Establishing a Foundation for Academic Success. This module reviews several time-management tips, the importance of study groups, and other useful suggestions specific to online and blended courses. Also featured in this module is a close look at how to practice "netiquette" (Internet etiquette).

Understanding Your Support System. This module reviews one of the most underutilized learning skills: knowing when and where to ask for help. In this module, students are introduced to support systems available for them throughout their time at CI.

To humanize the experience, narratives from faculty, current online students, and key staff members and administrators are woven throughout Learning Online 101. The video example below captures a faculty member providing tips for success in online and blended courses.

Course Design Features and Approach

With the content established, we then tackled the discussion of course location, design features, and other facilitation approaches.

Course Location: We decided to create the orientation course in the LMS because we wanted students to work in the same space, and with the same tools, that they would be using for their online and blended courses. We also wanted to leverage digital badges to certify completion of the course.

Modality: Currently the course is entirely asynchronous, enabling students to complete the course pm their own time. Further, we sought to make the experience as easy to complete and as accessible as possible, a key factor that has led to a high level of adoption by CI faculty.

Interactive Learning Objects (ILOs): In addition to videos that prompted students to reflect, the course provided a variety of ILOs to foster deeper engagement with content. For instance, students are prompted to take a readiness assessment for online learning to consider the areas in which they should focus during the course, and they are offered some specific exercises to build relevant skills. After learning about the "Start with Why" concept from Simon Sinek, students are encouraged to share their "why" via the Answer Garden tool, as pictured below. Finally, for the purpose of awarding digital badges, students have to earn a passing score on a knowledge check at the end of each module.

Facilitated vs. fully self-directed: This course is entirely self-directed but is monitored by Eberhardt-Alstot, who also serves as the point of contact for student support. In the "Welcome and Start Here" module, her photo and personal welcome message present an approachable human connection if students encounter any technical issues or have questions. The goal here is a positive introduction to online learning; therefore, it is essential that students receive a timely, humanized response from an empathetic voice. After all, successful completion of the course is part of building students' self-efficacy for online learning. Before the start of each term, Eberhardt-Alstot reviews both student and faculty feedback and updates content accordingly. ILOs are checked periodically throughout the term. We have a vision for more facilitated engagement, but we need the personnel to support the vision. To date, although we have awarded badges to over 800 students, fewer than ten students have sent requests for support.

Faculty Support: In addition to student success, this course responded to online faculty members' concerns about their preparedness to field students' technical needs. We intentionally developed a dissemination process that required minimal faculty time and technical knowledge. Students use the Canvas self-enroll feature to join Learning Online 101. We created an assignment that included the self-enroll link and directions with screenshots on how to locate and submit the completion badge. By placing the assignment in Canvas Commons, faculty can import the assignment into their course and assign it to students, requiring ten minutes or less of faculty time. A rationale, course preview, and directions for faculty on how to integrate the course are available on our faculty support website.

Assessment and Student Completion Requirements

While Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick suggest four levels of evaluation, we found it practical to include only two levels of assessment in Learning Online 101: what students learned through the course, and how they felt about the course.

General data and demographics: As of fall 2019, 961 students had logged into the course, while 892 continued past the first knowledge check. Of those students, a majority who completed the course evaluation were first-generation college students and had taken an online course before. Students' primary purpose for taking the course was to prepare for a fully online course; almost half (46%) took the course because they were actually enrolled in an online course. In addition, 87 percent of the students completed the steps necessary to earn a digital badge.

Learning outcomes: We sought to understand what students learned by examining performance on knowledge checks. According to completion of the knowledge checks, 92 percent of students earned a score of 80% or better.

Students' perceptions of the course: On the whole, students expressed positive feedback. A majority said that they felt prepared to take an online class, that the time it took to complete the course was reasonable, that the course met their expectations, and that the course increased their confidence for learning online. Furthermore, they indicated that the course was engaging, and they reported that they would likely recommend it to a peer. The second module, "Navigating the Online Classroom," was students' preferred module.

Students also offered words of appreciation for the experience. Below are two quotes from their feedback:

In this course, I thought that they were just going to talk about how critical it is that we manage our time when it comes to online courses, but I was really surprised and thankful that they give tools for people who might be nervous before starting the online class. The fact that even the first module talks about covering concepts like motivation, growth mindset, and myths of online education is amazing and very encouraging! To me this tells me that our school cares about our mental state of mind but also they care about our growth since the first module gives us tools to figure out what areas could be improved in order to succeed in our online class.

It was extremely helpful! I had never heard of/noticed Zoom before this!!! Also I liked being asked to consider WHY I am trying to achieve my goals. Very inspirational to be reminded of that personal perspective. The quizzes were a fair challenge, definitely had to go back and re-read a few bits I had missed. Not too easy so wasn't boring. :)

Future assessment plans: We have plans to add a third evaluation level, juxtaposing performance data from those who took online courses and successfully completed Learning Online 101 with data from those who did not. Also, we would like to follow up with the students who did not persist in the course after the first knowledge check.

Student completion requirement and incentives: Faculty were invited to use Learning Online 101 to prepare students for success in their blended or online courses. Some faculty strongly recommended completion, while others offered credit or extra credit. We used Badgr (which has a free integration with Canvas) to provide a digital badge when students successfully completed the knowledge checks and end-of-course evaluation.

Conclusion

Whether you are creating an orientation course for students who are completing fully online degrees or one for students who are new to the process of learning online, developing the course in a planned, purposeful manner is key. The course should "begin with the end in mind": you should clearly define goals around what you want students to know or be able to do at the end of the experience. And as with any initiative, assessment will allow you to discover ways in which the course design features and approach may be adjusted to foster continual improvement. A well-planned online orientation is essential for student success ahead.

Notes

Debra A. G. Robinson, Carl F. Burns, and Kevin F. Gaw, "Orientation Programs: A Foundation for Student Learning and Success," New Directions for Student Services, no. 75 (Fall 1996); Thomas Hollins, "Examining the Impact of a Comprehensive Approach to Student Orientation," Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges 14, no. 1 (2009). ↩

Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). ↩

Ralph R. Busby, Hollie L. Gammel, and Nancy K. Jeffcoat, "Grades, Graduation, and Orientation: A Longitudinal Study of How New Student Programs Relate to Grade Point Average and Graduation," Journal of College Orientation and Transition 10, no. 1 (Fall 2002); Charles A. Boudreau, and Jeffrey D. Kromrey, "A Longitudinal Study of the Retention and Academic Performance of Participants in Freshmen Orientation Course," Journal of College Student Development 35, no. 6 (November 1994). ↩

Donald L. Kirkpatrick and James D. Kirkpatrick, Evaluating Training Programs (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005). ↩

Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Portfolio, 2009). ↩

Jaimie Hoffman is Vice President for Student Affairs and Learning at Noodle Partners.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot is Learning Designer at California State University, Channel Islands.

Jill Leafstedt is Associate Vice Provost for Innovation and Faculty Development at California State University, Channel Islands.

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orienting students to online learning: a must for student success

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Orienting Students to Online Learning: A Must for Student Success

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Orientation experiences support students' transition to the first year of college, which is essential for student success. This applies equally to online learning. Whether enrolling in a single online class or a fully virtual program, students need to be prepared for the academic and social learning that compose their educational journey.

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Une méthodologie très à propos pour le design de vos cours et leur transformation dans une modalité en ligne et à distance.

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The evolution of CAST’s UDL Guidelines has been a dynamic, collaborative, and developmental process. We shared the first version of the Guidelines—Version 1.0—in 2008. Since that time, we have collected and specifically solicited feedback from the field. This feedback, along with the expanding resea…

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L'enseignement à distance devient de plus en plus incontournable, du primaire à l'université. En s'associant avec l'Université TÉLUQ pour offrir cette formation gratuite, le ministère de l'Éducation et le ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur veulent outiller les enseignants et les professeurs pour se familiariser avec les meilleures pratiques de l'enseignement à distance. Vous désirez enseigner à vos élèves ou étudiants à distance, et ce, de façon efficace? Vous voulez les accompagner adéquatement? Vous avez envie de connaître davantage les possibilités qu'apporte cette formule d'enseignement? Cette formation est pour vous.

Pour qui?

La formation est d'abord destinée au personnel enseignant des niveaux préscolaire, primaire, secondaire, collégial et universitaire, mais également aux professionnels et directions du milieu de l'éducation désirant s'initier à la formation à distance. Cette formation s'adresse donc à vous si vous réalisez des activités d'enseignement et que vous souhaitez les adapter à la formation à distance ou en exploiter son plein potentiel, aux bénéfices de vos élèves ou étudiants.

Contenu

4 microprogrammes de 3 ou 4 heures chacun

Thèmes abordés :

Accompagner les apprenants à distance

2 heures (préscolaire et primaire) ● 3 heures (secondaire, collégial et universitaire)

Communiquer de manières réactives et proactives

Intervenir sur les différents plans de soutien à l'apprentissage

Animer les interactions et faire collaborer à distance : outils et défis

Adapter un cours à la formation à distance

4 heures

Définir un cheminement pédagogique

Présenter le contenu du cours

Proposer des activités d'apprentissage

Proposer des ressources complémentaires sans noyer les apprenants

Diffuser des ressources de formation

1 heure (préscolaire et primaire) ● 4 heures (secondaire) ● 5 heures (collégial et universitaire)

Enseigner de manière synchrone en ligne : outils et méthodes

Proposer des contenus de cours à distance : outils et méthodes

Proposer des activités à distance : outils et méthodes

Ne pas s'y perdre dans la multitude d'outils technologiques

Évaluer les apprentissages à distance

3 heures

Créer des évaluations adaptées à la formation à distance

Corriger travaux et examens à distance

Utiliser les données d'usage pour suivre les étudiants et améliorer son cours

Professeure responsable

Réalisée par

Une équipe d'experts en formation à distance de l'Université TÉLUQ :

Collaborateurs externes

De nombreux collaborateurs passionnés de l'enseignement : professeurs, enseignants, technopédagogues et autres spécialistes d'établissements primaires, secondaires, collégiaux et universitaires, et d'organismes partenaires qui ont accepté de partager leur expertise. Nous les remercions chaleureusement pour leur apport précieux!

Pour connaître toutes ces personnes, visitez la page d'accueil de J'enseigne à distance.

L'Université TÉLUQ

Créée en 1972 pour rendre le savoir accessible, la TÉLUQ est la seule université francophone en Amérique du Nord à offrir tous ses programmes à distance. Chaque année, près de 20 000 personnes choisissent la flexibilité de l'Université TÉLUQ pour y faire leurs études universitaires, du 1 er au 3 e cycle.

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J'enseigne à distance | Université TÉLUQ - Formation à distance

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L'enseignement à distance devient de plus en plus incontournable, du primaire à l'université. En s'associant avec l'Université TÉLUQ pour offrir cette formation gratuite, le ministère de l'Éducation et le ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur veulent outiller les enseignants et les professeurs pour se familiariser avec les meilleures pratiques de l'enseignement à distance.

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Un blog pas comme les autres

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Les différentes actions d'ingénierie tutorale sont présentées lors de ces podcats par Jacques Rodet, ingénieur tutoral au CNFPT et spécialiste du tutorat.

Il est interrogé par Jean-Michel Carsuzaa, directeur de projet au CNFPT.

Chaque émission dure une quinzaine de minutes .

Voici les termes déjà abordés :

Le tutorat à distance

Les fonctions tutorales et des plans de support à l'apprentissage

Les profils de tuteurs

Les interventions tutorales, qu'est-ce que c'est ?

Quelles solutions et outils sont mis à disposition d'un tuteur ?

L'ingénierie tutorale , qu'est-ce que c'est ?

Accès direct aux émissions
voir aussi12 chaînes de podcasts audio sur les NTIC

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6 podcasts audio sur le tutorat à distance - L'atelier du formateur

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Les différentes actions d'ingénierie tutorale sont présentées lors de ces podcats par Jacques Rodet, ingénieur tutoral au CNFPT et spécialiste du tutorat. Il est interrogé par Jean-Michel C...

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Your screen freezes. There's a weird echo. A dozen heads stare at you. There are the work huddles, the one-on-one meetings and then, once you're done for the day, the hangouts with friends and family.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we're on video calls more than ever before - and many are finding it exhausting.

But what, exactly, is tiring us out? BBC Worklife spoke to Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead, who explores sustainable learning and development in the workplace, and Marissa Shuffler, an associate professor at Clemson University, who studies workplace wellbeing and teamwork effectiveness, to hear their views.
Is video chat harder? What's different compared to face-to-face communication?
Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat, says Petriglieri. Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy. "Our minds are together when our bodies feel we're not. That dissonance, which causes people to have conflicting feelings, is exhausting. You cannot relax into the conversation naturally," he says.

Silence is another challenge, he adds. "Silence creates a natural rhythm in a real-life conversation. However, when it happens in a video call, you became anxious about the technology." It also makes people uncomfortable. One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively: even delays of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the responder as less friendly or focused.
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An added factor, says Shuffler, is that if we are physically on camera, we are very aware of being watched. "When you're on a video conference, you know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform. Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful." It's also very hard for people not to look at their own face if they can see it on screen, or not to be conscious of how they behave in front of the camera.

Yet if video chats come with extra stressors, our Zoom fatigue can't be attributed solely to that. Our current circumstances - whether lockdown, quarantine, working from home or otherwise - are also feeding in.

A 2014 study found that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively (Credit: Getty Images)

Petriglieri believes that fact we feel forced into these calls may be a contributory factor. "The video call is our reminder of the people we have lost temporarily. It is the distress that every time you see someone online, such as your colleagues, that reminds you we should really be in the workplace together," he says. "What I'm finding is, we're all exhausted; It doesn't matter whether they are introverts or extroverts. We are experiencing the same disruption of the familiar context during the pandemic."

Then there's the fact that aspects of our lives that used to be separate - work, friends, family - are all now happening in the same space. The self-complexity theory posits that individuals have multiple aspects - context-dependent social roles, relationships, activities and goals - and we find the variety healthy, says Petriglieri. When these aspects are reduced, we become more vulnerable to negative feelings.

"Most of our social roles happen in different places, but now the context has collapsed," says Petriglieri. "Imagine if you go to a bar, and in the same bar you talk with your professors, meet your parents or date someone, isn't it weird? That's what we're doing now... We are confined in our own space, in the context of a very anxiety-provoking crisis, and our only space for interaction is a computer window."

Shuffler says a lack of downtime after we've fulfilled work and family commitments may be another factor in our tiredness, while some of us may be putting higher expectations on ourselves due to worries over the economy, furloughs and job losses. "There's also that heightened sense of 'I need to be performing at my top level in a situation'... Some of us are kind of over-performing to secure our jobs."
But when I'm Zooming my friends, for example, shouldn't that relax me?
Lots of us are doing big group chats for the first time, whether it's cooking and eating a virtual Easter dinner, attending a university catch-up or holding a birthday party for a friend. If the call is meant to be fun, why might it feel tiring?

Part of it, says Shuffler, is whether you're joining in because you want to or because you feel you ought to - like a virtual happy hour with colleagues from work. If you see it as an obligation, that means more time that you're 'on' as opposed to getting a break. A proper chat with friends will feel more social and there will be less 'Zoom fatigue' from conversations where you've had a chance to be yourself.

Big group calls can feel particularly performative, Petriglieri warns. People like watching television because you can allow your mind to wander - but a large video call "is like you're watching television and television is watching you". Large group chats can also feel depersonalising, he adds, because your power as an individual is diminished. And despite the branding, it may not feel like leisure time. "It doesn't matter whether you call it a virtual happy hour, it's a meeting, because mostly we are used to using these tools for work."
So how can we alleviate Zoom fatigue?

Both experts suggest limiting video calls to those that are necessary. Turning on the camera should be optional and in general there should be more understanding that cameras do not always have to be on throughout each meeting. Having your screen off to the side, instead of straight ahead, could also help your concentration, particularly in group meetings, says Petriglieri. It makes you feel like you're in an adjoining room, so may be less tiring.

In some cases it's worth considering if video chats are really the most efficient option. When it comes to work, Shuffler suggests shared files with clear notes can be a better option that avoids information overload. She also suggests taking time during meetings to catch up before diving into business. "Spend some time to actually check into people's wellbeing," she urges. "It's a way to reconnect us with the world, and to maintain trust and reduce fatigue and concern."

Building transition periods in between video meetings can also help refresh us - try stretching, having a drink or doing a bit of exercise, our experts say. Boundaries and transitions are important; we need to create buffers which allow us to put one identity aside and then go to another as we move between work and private personas.

And maybe, says Petriglieri, if you want to reach out, go old-school. "Write a letter to someone instead of meeting them on Zoom. Tell them you really care about them."

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Video chat is helping us stay employed and connected. But what makes it so tiring - and how can we reduce 'Zoom fatigue'?

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Vérifier la cohérence de sn enseignement en période d'enseignement en ligne urgent.

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Vérifier la cohérence de sn enseignement en période d'enseignement en ligne urgent.

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Vérifier la cohérence de son enseignement adapté pour un format à distance

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Deux concepts clés pour guider la scénarisation de vos dernières séances / activités de cours ainsi que la conception de votre examen et de ses questions

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Deux concepts clés pour guider la scénarisation de vos dernières séances / activités de cours ainsi que la conception de votre examen et de ses questions

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En cette fin de quadrimestre où il reste 4 semaines de cours à distance, de nombreux enseignants se posent les questions essentielles suivantes, regroupées en deux grandes catégories :

Comment organiser les dernières séances de cours d'une façon qui soutiennent au mieux l'apprentissage visé ? Quels contenus matière et compétences doivent absolument être travaillés ? Quelles activités de formation privilégier ?

Comment évaluer, à distance, les acquis des étudiants ? Sur quels contenus, compétences porte l'évaluation ? Par rapport à ces contenus, quel niveau de maîtrise est attendu (restitution, compréhension, application, esprit critique, synthèse ...) ? En d'autres mots, quels sont les acquis d'apprentissage de mon cours ? Quel niveau de maîtrise de la matière y est attendu ?

Premier concept clé : les acquis d'apprentissages essentiels et incontournables

Lors de ces réflexions, une question cruciale et sous-jacente à se poser est la suivante : Quels sont les apprentissages (AA) essentiels et incontournables que tout étudiant doit absolument maîtriser au terme de ce cours (le seuil de maîtrise minimal requis pour réussir ce cours), et qu'est-ce qui est de l'ordre du perfectionnement ?

Pour répondre à cette question, Wiggins et Mc Tighe [Wiggins e.a. 2005] proposent de distinguer 3 catégories d'acquis d'apprentissage :

Acquis d'apprentissage essentiels (" Enduring understanding ") : acquis incontournables non négociables que tout étudiant doit absolument maitriser au terme du cours. Il s'agit des concepts et méthodologies au cœur de la discipline enseignée, des actes techniques principaux et prioritaires ... que l'étudiant doit absolument maitriser pour la suite de son parcours de formation ou en vue des attendus indispensables (et non négociables) à l'entrée du monde socioprofessionnel. Ces acquis doivent absolument être travaillés par les étudiants à travers le dispositif de formation mis en œuvre. Ces acquis constituent le seuil de maîtrise minimal requis pour réussir ce cours. La maîtrise par les étudiants de ces AA essentiels doit absolument être évaluée. Si l'étudiant ne maîtrise pas ces acquis, il ne peut réussir ce cours et en être crédité. Un exemple concret de questions relatives à ce type d'acquis type sont les questions létales en médecine.

Acquis d'apprentissage importants, souhaitables, mais pas indispensables pour tous (" Important to know and do ") : acquis d'apprentissage qui, sans être essentiels, visent un apprentissage plus poussé. Il peut s'agir d'acquis nouveaux par rapport aux acquis centraux (essentiels), mais aussi d'acquis centraux avec un niveau de maitrise/performance plus élevé que ce qui est attendu au niveau du seuil de réussite minimal requis. Il n'est donc pas requis que tous les étudiants maitrisent tous les AA importants pour réussir le cours. Faire preuve de la maitrise d'un ou de plusieurs de ces AA lors de l'évaluation pourrait être la condition pour une réussite avec garde (ex. distinction).

Acquis d'apprentissage utiles, intéressants, mais non essentiels (" Worth being familiar with ") : acquis d'apprentissage que seuls certains étudiants atteindront.

Dans le contexte actuel de passage en ligne obligé des cours, la distinction entre ces trois catégories d'AA est d'autant plus indispensable. Pour réaliser ce " tri ", n'hésitez pas à en discuter avec vos collègues pour lesquels votre cours est un prérequis ainsi qu'avec les collègues qui ont des acquis identiques ou similaires aux vôtres travaillés dans leurs cours.
Les AA essentiels et incontournables identifiés seront votre guide pour réfléchir et concevoir vos dernières séances de cours et les activités de formation qui y sont liées (séances de TP, devoir à remettre, forum ...) ainsi que pour concevoir votre dispositif d'évaluation.
Prenons un exemple : un cours XXX ayant basculé en ligne, suivi par 300 étudiants, où deux des acquis d'apprentissages essentiels sont les suivants :

utiliser les techniques d'inférence statistique avec toute la rigueur exigée par la technique concernée

identifier la technique d'inférence statistique la plus pertinente à utiliser en regard de la question posée et de l'échantillonnage.

Le dispositif en ligne ne permettant pas de réaliser ce qui avait été prévu en présentiel, l'enseignant a déterminé que ces deux acquis essentiels sont bien tous les deux essentiels avec la même importance. Il a donc décidé d'adapter son dispositif comme suit :

9 techniques d'inférence statistique, sur les 12 prévues dans le dispositif initial en ligne, seront travaillées avec les étudiants sur ce quadrimestre, en ayant bien veillé à ce qu'au moins 2 techniques pour chacune des 4 grandes catégories de techniques soient vues. L'enseignant se dit que si les étudiants ont appris à maitriser 9 techniques, ils pourront d'eux-mêmes en apprendre d'autres. Il préfère viser un apprentissage plus en profondeur de quelques techniques qu'un apprentissage superficiel d'un nombre plus important de techniques.

En ce qui concerne l'identification de la technique d'inférence statistique la plus pertinente à utiliser en regard de la question posée et de l'échantillonnage, l'enseignant sait par expérience que cette compétence est difficile à acquérir chez les étudiants. Il décide donc de bien réserver dans les cours et séances de TP qu'il lui reste des moments pour travailler cette compétence par les étudiants. L'une des dernières séances de cours sera d'ailleurs consacrée à la correction avec les étudiants de questions d'examens relatives à cette compétence en expliquant bien aux étudiants le niveau de rigueur attendu dans la justification du choix de la technique.

Deuxième concept clé : l'alignement pédagogique

Lors de ces réflexions et conceptions, un autre concept clé pour vous guider est celui de l'alignement (Biggs and Tang, 2011 ; carnet de l'enseignant, pp 74-76) entre les acquis d'apprentissages visés par le cours, les apprentissages effectivement évalués à travers le dispositif d'évaluation et les apprentissages que les étudiants ont effectivement travaillés et développés à travers les activités de formations qui leur ont été proposées.

En regard des acquis d'apprentissage visés par votre cours et ce que vous souhaitez évaluer, les questions suivantes sont à se poser :

Toute la matière prévue initialement a-t-elle été enseignée ? Certains concepts/auteurs/notions ... ont-ils été omis ou vus de manière plus superficielle que d'habitude ?

Le passage de l'enseignement à distance a-t-il modifié la méthode d'enseignement de telle façon que cela a impacté l'apprentissage des étudiants notamment en ce qui concerne les AA plus complexes (esprit critique, analyse, synthèse). Par exemple, pour les séances d'exercices à distance où les étudiants ont moins la possibilité d'interagir, il est possible que les étudiants aient été moins bien formés.

Les réponses à ces questions sont à prendre en considération pour ajuster la liste des AA à évaluer et rédiger vos questions d'examen.
Si nous reprenons notre exemple de cours repris ci-dessus portant sur les techniques d'inférence statistiques, les techniques non vues en cours ne feront pas partie de l'examen et l'enseignant en informera les étudiants. Autre exemple, un cours YYYY où l'esprit critique (l'un des AA essentiels) a été travaillé avec les étudiants uniquement sur les chapitres dispensés en présentiel (avant le confinement), l'examen contiendra une question " esprit critique " qui portera uniquement sur la matière de ces premiers cours et les étudiants en seront informés.

Bibliographie

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ASCD.

Biggs, J. and Tang, K. 2011. Teaching for quality learning at University. 4th ed. Maidenhead: Oxford University Press.

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Deux concepts clés pour guider la scénarisation de vos dernières séances / activités de cours ainsi que la conception de votre examen et de ses questions - Louvain Learning Lab Blog

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En cette fin de quadrimestre où il reste 4 semaines de cours à distance, de nombreux enseignants se posent les questions essentielles suivantes, regroupées en deux grandes catégories : Comment organiser les dernières séances de cours d'une façon qui soutiennent au mieux l'apprentissage visé ? Quels contenus matière et compétences doivent absolument être travaillés ?

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San Francisco State University

Dr. Brian Beatty is Professor of Instructional Technologies and co-coordinator of the Instructional Design and Technology MA program in the Department of Equity, Leadership Studies and Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University. Brian's primary areas of interest and research include social interaction in online learning, flipped classroom implementation, and developing instructional design theory for Hybrid-Flexible learning environments. At SFSU, Dr. Beatty pioneered the development and evaluation of the HyFlex course design model for blended learning environments, implementing a "student-directed-hybrid" approach to better support student learning.

Previously (2012 - 2020), Brian was Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Operations at San Francisco State University (SFSU), overseeing the Academic Technology unit and coordinating the use of technology in the academic programs across the university. He worked closely with IT professionals and leaders in other units to coordinate overall information technology strategic management at SFSU. Prior to 2012, Brian was Associate Professor and Chair of the Instructional Technologies department in the Graduate College of Education at SFSU. He received his Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University Bloomington in 2002. Dr. Beatty also holds several CA single-subject teaching credentials, an M.A. in Instructional Technologies from SF State and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Dr. Beatty has more than 30 years of experience as a classroom teacher, trainer, and instructional designer at schools, businesses, and the US Navy.

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This volume provides readers with methods, case stories, and strategies related to Hybrid-Flexible (HyFlex) course design so that they may make decisions about using it themselves and even begin their own HyFlex course (re)design.

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https://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/11775.pdf
Daffin, Jr., L.W., & Jones, A.A. (2018). Comparing student performance on proctored and nonproctored exams in online psychology courses. Online Learning, 22(1), 131-145.  Hillier, M., Grant, S., & Coleman, M. (2018). Towards authentic e-Exams at scale: robust networked Moodle. Open Oceans.  Hylton, K., Levy, Y., & Dringus, L. P. (2016). Utilizing webcam-based proctoring to deter misconduct in online exams. Computers & Education, 92, 53-63.  Mitra, S., & Gofman, M. (2016). Towards Greater Integrity in Online Exams.  Williamson, Margaret H. (2018) "Online Exams: The Need for Best Practices and Overcoming Challenges," The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology: Vol. 10 : Iss. 1 , Article 2.
https://smhs.gwu.edu/impact/sites/impact/files/Firmani_OCEPs.pdf

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Cette playlist réalisée par l'Université du Wisconsin illustre 7 des 10 principes de Mayer sur la qualité d'un multimédia pédagogique.

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Computer Science: User Experience Design

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Foundational IT skills, Web Development, UX, Design

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Student-Centered Remote Teaching: Lessons Learned from Online Education

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Student-Centered Remote Teaching: Lessons Learned from Online Education

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While online and remote education may not be synonymous, today's new remote educators can benefit from the "lessons learned" by experienced online educators to provide high-quality, engaging learning experiences for their students.

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While online and remote education may not be synonymous, today's new remote educators can benefit from the "lessons learned" by experienced online educators to provide high-quality, engaging learning experiences for their students.

Credit: LOVE YOU / Shutterstock.com © 2020

As faculty have endeavored to get traditional campus-based courses up and running remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate needs of sharing course content with students, delivering lectures, and providing access to course materials were likely the top priorities. This approach makes sense, especially in the preparatory period before a class begins or when an instructor is getting ready to shift from on-campus to remote instruction. However, it's important not to stop there. Providing access to content is a great first step, but access on its own does not make for a quality learning experience. Engaging students is essential for promoting a deep understanding of course content. But how can we engage students in remote learning environments?

There has already been discussion in the higher education community about how online education and remote instruction are not synonymous. Online educators, sensitive to skepticism about the efficacy of online education, are concerned that faculty who have negative perceptions of online education will associate problems with emergency remote education with non-emergency online course design and teaching. Higher education professionals have cautioned against equating remote and online delivery methods.

While online and remote education may not be synonymous, today's new remote educators can benefit from the "lessons learned" by experienced online educators who are providing high-quality, engaging learning experiences for their students. The one "lesson learned" I see as the most significant for faculty as they begin to teach from a distance is to consider the new learning environment from a student-centered perspective.

Many online educators have found that a helpful way to think about teaching in a student-centered fashion is to focus on creating three forms of interaction for students in the online environment:

Student-content interaction, where instructors provide active learning experiences for students (meaningful learning activity plus reflection)

Student-student interaction, where instructors structure the learning community and make it clear to students how they should interact with others in the class

Student-instructor interaction, where instructors create a framework for how they will interact with students during the learning experience

These three forms of interaction don't happen spontaneously. They require planning, intention, and instructional design. Furthermore, these three types of interaction aren't prescriptive-they do not require the use of a particular type of learning activity or assessment. Through these interactions, we are reaching for broad goals that can be achieved in many different ways.

Finally, it's important to recognize that the three forms of interaction do not require a specific set of enterprise-wide educational technologies. To put a student-centered approach to teaching into action, educators need to take stock of the tools and technologies they have available and then ask themselves three questions about how to use them.

Three Questions to Consider in Student-Centered Remote Teaching

To take a student-centered approach to remote teaching, consider the tools you have at your disposal, and ask three questions about your course:

How will my students interact with the course content? Beyond reading, listening to/viewing lectures, what will students actually DO with the course content? And how can they do so in their homes?

How will my students interact with other students? Beyond completing assignments and assessments independently, how will students work together to ensure that they feel like they are part of a learning community and have the opportunity to collaborate, think critically, be intellectually challenged, and make meaning with others? And how can students work with others while they are isolated in their homes?

How will my students interact with me, their instructor? Now that you aren't in the classroom with your students, how will students be able to interact with you? How might you guide student learning while also being flexible and trying to accommodate different student needs? What assignment expectations do you need to convey? What information do you need to clarify for students?

Asking these questions can help you see the course from the student's point of view and think about remote instruction in a new way. When preparing a course for remote delivery, sharing course content online can feel overwhelming. It can be helpful to extend your thinking beyond content delivery to these three forms of student interaction.

In online course design, a lot of time and effort is invested in creating an architecture of engagement where these three forms of interaction can take place. The current health crisis has not allowed for the amount of development time any of us would have preferred, but there are some easy-to-implement instructional methods that you can use to help encourage student engagement when delivering courses remotely.

Student-Content Interaction

Student-content interaction is all about having students DO something with the course content or topic. Reading and listening to lectures will be part of many classes, but the passive receipt of information isn't sufficient to help students engage with the course and meet course learning outcomes. Instead, we should create opportunities for active learning, which is when students DO something meaningful related to the course content and then reflect on their learning.

After students complete a course reading, ask them to do a follow-up assignment. Here are a few examples:

Write a summary.

Create an annotated visual on a PowerPoint slide that shows your key take-away from the reading.

List five of your take-aways and one question you have based on the reading.

Identify what you as a reader find to be the clearest point in the reading and the muddiest point

Diagram a process.

Make an infographic.

Write an op-ed based on the content.

After students attend a synchronous lecture via web conference, ask them to complete a follow-up activity:

Participate in a "think-pair-share" activity: The instructor poses a question, asks students to jot some notes down independently to form initial thoughts, distributes students into breakout rooms to discuss, and then pulls the class back together as a group to discuss and synthesize.

Complete a poll to check comprehension.

Illustrate ideas on the web conference whiteboard.

Flip the web conference "lecture" by asking students to come prepared to discuss topics they have already read up on.

Give students the opportunity to lead a discussion.

Other learning activities will vary by discipline and level of study. Consider these examples for inspiration:

Completing kitchen lab experiments and lab reports

Doing backyard or video "field" observations and field reports

Analyzing data sets and creating data visualizations

Preparing and giving multimedia presentations, including Q&As from classmates

Creating infographics, web pages, blog posts, collages, memes, or digital images related to course content

Student-Student Interaction

When students interact with each other, they feel like they are part of a learning community, but this interaction also helps students engage in higher-order thinking that would be more challenging to accomplish if they were studying alone. Through collaboration, students brainstorm, deliberate, disagree, compromise, and achieve consensus-all ways of thinking that are difficult to do singly.

When you are remote teaching, consider employing some of the following strategies to encourage effective student-student interaction:

Discussion forums in a learning management system
Ask students to participate in a role-play or debate activity using online forums or web conference tools.

Peer review activities for writing assignments and projects

Group projects

Group presentations

Think-pair-share

Study groups

Individual projects

Ask students to create a resource guide for future students.

Ask students to design a board game based on course content.
To facilitate this project, you could suggest that students adapt or create a trivia game, board game, etc.).

Students can arrange their own meetings, or they may choose to use other video conference solutions such as Skype. They can collaborate using Google Drive, Box, or other web-based tools.

Student-Instructor Interaction

The third form of interaction is student-instructor interaction, which should involve more than just answering student questions. For fully online classes, the US Department of Education requires that instructors provide regular, substantive, and instructor-led interactions to distinguish online classes from correspondence courses. These guidelines help online instructors provide strong student-instructor interaction. Remote instructors can use these guidelines to help engage students, too.

Some examples of how to facilitate student-instructor interaction when remote teaching follow:

Participate and engage with students about the course content via discussion forums in a learning management system.

Record and post a short video to introduce a major assignment and then hold a Q&A session.

Provide detailed feedback on assignments (written and/or recorded).

Use voice-over screen recordings using tools such as Screencast-O-Matic to provide demonstrations, discussions of diagrams/graphs, slides, and illustrations.

Hold writing conferences to discuss draft assignments.

Hold open or by-appointment office hours by web conference, phone, or text message.

Create a video (with your pets, family, etc.) in your home or a safe outdoor environment to provide social presence.

While remote instruction during an emergency pandemic is not the same as carefully designed online education, remote educators can take some notes from experienced online colleagues about how to bridge the distance. Thinking of the learning experience from a student-centered perspective is one valuable take-away. There are many, many others.

An earlier version of this blog post was published on the OSU CTL blog.

Note

See, for example, A. Sasha Thackaberry, "Remote in a Time of Pandemic: Six Consideration As We Adapt to COVID-19," The Evolution, March 20, 2020; Deb Adair, "Open Letter to the QM Community," March 23, 2020; and Cynthia Golden, "Remote Teaching: The Glass Half-Full," Transforming Higher Ed (blog), EDUCAUSE Review, March 23, 2020. ↩

Note

Thanks to Clare Creighton, Dorothy Loftin, Deborah Mundorff, Meghan Naxer, and Weiwei Zhang for their contributions to this blog post.

Shannon Riggs is the Executive Director of Academic Programs and Learning Innovation at Oregon State University Ecampus.

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student-centered remote teaching: lessons learned from online education

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Student-Centered Remote Teaching: Lessons Learned from Online Education

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While online and remote education may not be synonymous, today's new remote educators can benefit from the "lessons learned" by experienced online edu

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Insights Gained from Pandemic Response [video]

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Insights Gained from Pandemic Response [video]

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Three higher ed IT leaders discuss some of the lessons they are learning as they respond to current challenges.

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Insights Gained from Pandemic Response [video]

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Three higher ed IT leaders discuss some of the lessons they are learning as they respond to current challenges.

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EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: Grading and Proctoring

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EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: Grading and Proctoring

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With the massive and abrupt move to remote teaching and learning, higher education institutions need to address course grading and exam proctoring to maintain educational continuity. This study received 312 responses.

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EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: Grading and Proctoring

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With the massive and abrupt move to remote teaching and learning, higher education institutions need to address course grading and exam proctoring to

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Rapid Recalibration During COVID-19 [audio]

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Rapid Recalibration During COVID-19 [audio]

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Observations and strategies from higher education in the face of challenges from COVID-19.

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View Transcript

Authors:
Bryan Alexander
President
Bryan Alexander Consulting

Amy Collier
Associate Provost for Digital Learning
Middlebury College

Beth McMurtrie
Sr. Writer
Chronicle of Higher Education

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE podcast. I'm Gerry Bane. The Coronavirus is preventing students and staff from meeting face to face, so learning institutions are developing alternative educational delivery methods to move the classroom online. In all of our years of strategic planning, probably few of us have asked what do we do with our courses if there's a pandemic in the middle of the semester. Yet here we are, experiencing one of the most all-encompassing shifts in higher education's history. In this podcast will feature comments from some observers and some leaders around what faculty and students are facing and how they're coping with this new paradigm.

Beth McMurtrie: I normally cover teaching and learning at The Chronicle, so I have been talking during this past few weeks to a lot of folks on the front lines.

Gerry Bayne: That's Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Beth McMurtrie: There's a wide variety of challenges there. It's fair to say that most faculty members and the folks supporting them feel underprepared or unprepared in this environment, and they're really stressed out. We know a few things. We know that most courses these days do use an LMS, but many professors only know the basics, like how to post an assignment, how to take attendance, how to post grades. And now they're having to learn how to create videos and find online content for students who don't have their textbooks with them. They have to create discussion threads or find out how to proctor exams securely, and figure out how to grade their students.

I saw one survey that showed that only about 15% of courses use video or audio files as is, so there's a really steep learning curve. And instructors have to do all of these things while they're managing childcare on their own or family issues and things like that.

Gerry Bayne: McMurtrie says that faculty is learning on the fly about many of the challenges their students are facing.

Beth McMurtrie: Low income students or students in remote areas may not have access to reliable wifi. They may have to do their schoolwork on their phones. There are some students who don't even have phones and they're having to have their schoolwork mailed to them. They may be sharing living spaces with family members or sharing laptops with siblings having to do their work, and they may be in different time zones.

So one basic thing everyone is trying to figure out right now is when do they teach their students and how. I'm hearing that a lot of instructors are opting for asynchronous learning to deal with a lot of these access challenges. But in the last couple of days I've also been seeing on places like Facebook that students are craving real face to face time online of course, with their classmates and their instructors. So I think that's a balance that people are working out now. And teaching and learning experts having to do a lot of just-in-time training sessions. What do you need to know to move online quickly? What are the basics?

Through all of that they're talking to instructors about not forgetting students with learning disabilities. One piece of advice I heard a lot is to offer instructional materials on a lot of different formats to help in that regard. People are also not sure yet what to do about trickier challenges like how do you teach a lab or a performing arts class? How do you teach a class in which students rely on equipment that they get from the college, maybe like a film class? How do you provide academic supports like tutoring? And this will come up more and more as the weeks progress, how do you give exams securely?

On a positive note, I get the sense that people are really coming together over this, sometimes across campuses and across disciplines. I've been following a couple of Facebook groups including one that The Chronicle runs, and it's impressive how quickly and widely people are sharing ideas and resources on things that are really technical or really tricky. And they're also providing emotional support as well, which seems crucial both for faculty members and for students.

Finally, I want to say that the predominant message I'm hearing is keep it simple. Now, I don't know if that's what administrators are saying to you on your campuses. I'd be curious to hear that from listeners. But the message I'm getting from a lot of online education experts about this is don't try too much, don't ask too much of your students. Let's just try to get through this together and do the best that we can.

Gerry Bayne: Bryan Alexander is President of BrianAlexanderconsulting.com. And he's also the author of a new book, Academia Next, The Futures of Higher Education. He says academia has been very swift in moving to the online paradigm.

Bryan Alexander: The process has involved colleges shutting down for a couple of days or weeks in order to give people a chance to ramp up and get online. This has put enormous, unprecedented pressure on support staff. Once online, I've been seeing a kind of two-pronged basic approach. On the one hand, people would move for synchronous communication, primarily through live video. On the other hand, asynchronous technology, primarily through the LMS.

The technology actually spread in some interesting ways. We're seeing some push for higher interaction technology that's more demanding, more challenging. Technology like virtual reality and more use of video. And as Ben has pointed out, there's also push for more intensive technology, more asynchronous technology due to faculty with limited experience, equity issues and the digital divide.

We're also seeing a push for policy changes. There's a lot of controversy right now about how to grade. Should we give students pass/fail or make it mandatory pass/fail with opt out for grade? Should there be the double A grading, which is A or A minus? We're also seeing initial calls for changing timelines now so that we may extend semesters in order or give students who are suffering from undue time pressures a chance to really finish.

Gerry Bayne: As Alexander looks towards the future, he sees many possible troublesome outcomes, but some positive points as well.

Bryan Alexander: At the very least a major financial hit to institutions worldwide in the United States, when you anticipate state governments spending much less on public institutions. And on the positive side, we're seeing the biggest boom in online teaching experience. So we're learning rapidly how to teach effectively online. In parallel to that, I think we may experience a possible backlash to online learning driven by stories of bad experiences, as well as by some faculty who didn't want to do this, confirming their ideas in practice.

On the positive side, we may see a boom in creativity as people scramble to find ways to connect more effectively with students. What I'm not hearing is much talk as students as makers. I expect to see more of that as students make more audio, more visual and more video content. Much depends on just how long Coronavirus continues its work. If in a given nation it burns through in two months or so, or if it takes much longer than that.

Gerry Bayne: Amy Collier is Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College. She says they're concentrating on three things; faculty preparation, faculty governance, and student readiness and support.

Amy Collier: We also have had an asynchronous emphasis recognizing that a lot of our students are going to places all over the world, and having different kinds of connectivity issues. And so we have really been pushing for asynchronous modes of learning in response to this, which is a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to prepare that.

When this whole thing started, we developed a range of support opportunities for faculty. We did this, my group, the Digital Learning and Inquiry group kind of provided this, coordinated it with our friends in ITS and library, and the teaching and learning center, and those opportunities included creating a website that had lots of information on it, face to face and Zoom drop-ins until we were no longer able to do face to face when the closures and suspensions happened, consultations and workshops, highly, highly attended workshops. I believe the first week we did them, we had 13 workshops, over 240 RSVPs across those workshops. That's pretty high for us with a small campus. We also have relied more and more on faculty to faculty work, having faculty work with each other, departmental meetings and things like that.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that we recognize as an institution the need for faculty governance to continue. Faculty governance is an important part of our institutional makeup. But we also had to recognize the quick nature of decision-making in this moment. You know, minute by minute things were changing. And so we established an ad hoc Academic Continuity Committee that is made up of faculty from key faculty governance committees and then several academic administrators including me.

And in that very first meeting, the group made very important decisions like the move to an optional pass/D/fail, decisions about what a synchronous schedule would look like if we were going to allow faculty to continue doing synchronous work. Course response forms. The decision there was to have course resource response forms at the end of the semester, but allow faculty to make them optional in terms of inclusion in their tenure and promotion portfolios. So that's been a really, really important committee for moving forward and getting faculty input and perspective and feedback throughout this process.

And the last thing I'll point to that both Beth and Brian highlighted was we are very aware of the challenges that our students are facing in this new mode of trying to teach and learn. We have students spread across 43 countries and 50 states. We have heard from students who don't have electricity, who don't have internet, who are housing insecure or couch surfing, who are care-taking for family members. And so we have really wanted to be prepared to respond in coordinated ways to what our students need.

And so we have established a student support team. It began with a student readiness survey for both of our campuses. We have a Monterey campus as graduate and professional programs, and an undergraduate college. Both sets of students receive the student readiness survey, and that's allowed us to coordinate support with colleagues in the ADA office, ITS, our student support services. We're working on things like how to get students internet access, how to get them hardware, how to communicate effectively with them when they're dispersed, how to help them address financial issues, and how to continue to train and prepare students for these modes of learning.

So those are three areas; the faculty preparation, the faculty governance, and the student readiness and support that I think we've really tried to emphasize this last three weeks.

Gerry Bayne: Amy Collier, Brian Alexander, and Beth McMurtrie. For more resources, support, and tools, visit the EDUCAUSE online COVID-19 resource page. You can get there by visiting educause.edu/covid-19. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. Thanks for listening.

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rapid recalibration during covid-19 [podcast]

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Rapid Recalibration During COVID-19 [podcast]

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View Transcript Authors: Bryan Alexander President Bryan Alexander Consulting Amy Collier Associate Provost for Digital Learning Middlebury College Beth McMurtrie Sr. Writer Chronicle of Higher Education Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE podcast. I'm Gerry Bane. The Coronavirus is preventing students and staff from meeting face to face, so learning institutions are developing alternative educational delivery methods to move the classroom online.

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This resource page provides educational materials for the higher education community regarding mental health and wellness.

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Rating the Usefulness of Student Success Tools

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Rating the Usefulness of Student Success Tools

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Measuring student and faculty usefulness ratings of online student success tools can be used by institutions to identify what steps are needed to achieve the broader goals of student success, such as persistence and graduation.

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Measuring student and faculty usefulness ratings of online student success tools can be used by institutions to identify what steps are needed to achieve the broader goals of student success, such as persistence and graduation.

Credit: tezzstock / Shutterstock.com © 2020

Saying that student success is a priority in higher education is like preaching to the choir. Doubly emphasizing the importance of this issue, the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues list includes Student-Centric Higher Education (#5) and Student Retention and Completion (#6). Higher education institutions are focusing on how to become more student-centric and boost student retention and completion. But what does "student success" mean to higher education institutions and their students? Here's where members of the choir might be singing slightly different notes. Some colleges and universities define and measure student success by institutional-level outcomes such as retention and graduation. Focusing solely on high-level measures, however, may not provide institutions with "just-in-time" data on students' progress toward their individual educational goals. Instead, institutions need to identify the individual factors that contribute to students' ability to stay enrolled, succeed in their courses, and ultimately don their caps and gowns. If we don't, we will have considerable data on retention, persistence, and graduation rates but little understanding of what contributes to each of those measures.

Using metrics that can be collected sooner rather than later (i.e., leading indicators) is likely a good starting point to identify students' actions that lead to persistence and graduation. But what measurable leading indicators show that students are progressing toward these outcomes? Assessing students' engagement with online student success tools is a great place to start. Certain tools, such as early alert systems, are now part of the higher education landscape and can contribute to student success, particularly among at-risk students. The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) asked students about their use of student success tools as part of its annual student technology survey.

But before we rush to measure the use of these tools, let's take a step back. The perceived usefulness of a technology is a major factor in whether it will be used. The perceived usefulness of a technology also influences students' attititudes toward technology. Identifying which tools students find useful (or not) may aid in assessing whether students are more likely to engage with available technologies that contribute to retention and graduation. If early alerts, for example, are not seen as useful, how likely is it that students will engage with them or follow up with academic support staff? Taking a look at what students and faculty find useful about these tools may offer some insight into whether the tools are valued and, ultimately, whether students and faculty will engage with them.

What Students Think

In our annual student technology survey, we asked students how frequently, if at all, they had used nine online success tools (see figure 1). Students who responded that they had used a tool were then asked to rate the usefulness of the tool they had used. The percentage of students who found these tools to be useful increased between 2017 and 2019 (see figure 1). We also found that students' rating of online success tools varied based on the type of tool. Specifically, tools that help students with the practicalities of attending college-such as tracking credit hours, mapping out degrees, and auditing progress toward a degree-were found to be the most useful. However, students assessed tools that aided in their academic performance in individual courses (e.g., early alerts or tools that suggest ways to improve performance) to be comparatively less useful.

Figure 1. Increase in the perceived usefulness of online student success tools, 2017-2019

For each of these tools that aid in academic success, between 25% and 38% of students who were aware of their availability did not use them in the past year. However, certain groups of students find these tools more useful than other groups. For example, we learned in 2019 that non-white students found tools that improve academic performance to be more useful to them than white students did. Given that non-white students are at greater risk of not graduating, the fact that they see value in these technologies is promising.

When it comes to measuring student success, gauging things like food and housing insecurity and mental health (in addition to good grades, persistence, and graduation rates) provides a more holistic view of the student experience. The inclusion of these more expansive measures is appropriate, given the increasing focus on identifying mental health issues among college students. So it's encouraging that students are giving more favorable ratings to things like self-service referral systems and social or community resources (e.g., volunteer opportunities, community events, and crisis counseling).

Usefulness ratings can be linked with institutional analytics that measure students' use of online student success tools. Institutional leaders can identify, for example, which students are more or less likely to engage with particular technologies and can look for ways to increase engagement. Some of these institutional strategies may be broad institutional tactics, such as campus-wide communication campaigns that broadcast how these technologies work and what their value is (increasing learning and academic performance, for example). Such communication campaigns should be done in tandem with asking faculty to spread the word on how these tools work and why students should engage with them. If faculty find these tools helpful, and use them, they can reinforce with their students that engaging with these technologies can aid students in achieving their academic goals.

What Faculty Think

But faculty member's endorsement is dependent, of course, on whether faculty support these technologies. Again, faculty members' support of these technologies can be assessed by measuring usefulness ratings. Even at institutions where online student success tools are not available, faculty still see the value of the tools. For example, in 2019, a majority of all faculty we surveyed who did not have access to early alerts reported that if they were able to integrate that tool into their teaching, they would be more effective instructors. This finding holds true across all faculty types-from tenured to fixed term.

We asked faculty about four tools that are specific to their needs: early alerts, suggestions for academic resources to their students, suggestions on how students could improve performance, and tools that offer guidance about courses their students could take in the future. For each of these four tools, between 15% and 27% of faculty told us that they don't have access to them, and among those who have access to each of the four tools, between 33% and 54% of faculty said they don't use them. A majority of faculty who use these four tools find them to be at least moderately useful (see figure 2).

Figure 2. Faculty ratings of student success tools

Given these faculty ratings, it may be easy to create buy-in for the integration of these success tools into faculty members' advising and teaching roles. On the other hand, if one-third or more of instructors aren't using certain tools when they are available, what does that tell us about how the usefulness of these tools is being communicated to their students? Encouragement for students to use these resources should come from all levels of the institution, not just from academic advisors or an app. Assessing faculty engagement with these tools is thus just as important as assessing student engagement with them.

And let's not forget the all-important influence of a student's social network. Research has found that if a student's peers find these tools useful, the student is likely to intend to use the technology. If a student hears from a friend that these tools can help in learning, or aid in tracking degree progress, the student may say, "I should look into using these."

Changing Perceptions and Increasing Usage

Understanding whether students or faculty find online student success tools beneficial is a practical entry point to measuring leading indicators of student success. Our research suggests that students and faculty generally find these success technologies valuable. Students deemed tools that assist them in navigating often-labyrinthine institutional systems (e.g., degree audit tools) as the most useful. Tools that aid in monitoring students' progress are rated as being the most useful to faculty. However, the tools that are most likely to measure leading indicators for persistence and graduation-that is, those that aid in academic success and learning-are found by students to be less useful. This also suggests that students may be less likely to take action after being alerted by these technologies. If these tools are not perceived as providing value, it is very likely that they will not be used or, at best, will be used grudgingly. Ensuring that these tools are pragmatic and worthwhile, and communicating that message to students, should be a priority for institutions. Working toward student success is important, and finding unique and meaningful ways to define and measure it is our starting point. And there can be more than one way to measure that success. Sometimes a choir can sing different notes, but as long as the notes are sung in harmony, the resulting melody will be amazing.

Notes

Hanover Research, "Early Alert Systems in Higher Education" (November 2014); John O'Brien, "Making the Case for Student Success Technology," Homepage (blog), EDUCAUSE Review, September 24, 2018. ↩

Dana C. Gierdowski, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2019,research report (Louisville, CO: ECAR, October 2019), 13. ↩

"Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups," National Center for Education Statistics (website), page updated February 2019. ↩

Kathe Pelletier, "Student Success: 3 Big Questions," EDUCAUSE Review 54, no. 4 (Fall 2019). ↩

Gregg Henriques, "The College Student Mental Health Crisis (Update)," Theory of Knowledge (blog), Psychology Today, November 18, 2018. ↩

The usefulness of this online success tool was measured among students only for 2018 and 2019. ↩

Joseph Galanek and Dana C. Gierdowski, ECAR Study of Faculty and Information Technology, 2019,research report (Louisville, CO: ECAR, December 2019). ↩

Ronnie Cheung and Doug Vogel, "Predicting User Acceptance of Collaborative Technologies: An Extension of the Technology Acceptance Model for E-Learning," Computers & Education 63 (April 2013). ↩

Joseph D. Galanek is a Senior Researcher at EDUCAUSE.

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rating the usefulness of student success tools

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Rating the Usefulness of Student Success Tools

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Measuring student and faculty usefulness ratings of online student success tools can be used by institutions to identify what steps are needed to achieve the broader goals of student success, such as persistence and graduation. Saying that student success is a priority in higher education is like preaching to the choir.

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Des posts en guise de conseils pour les enseignantes, du bon et beau boulot signé François Docq.

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Dans un article précédent, nous faisions le point sur une définition d'un podCast audio et l'équipement mis à disposition des enseignant·es pour se familiariser avec du matériel de qualité, mobile et simple à prendre en main. Dans cet article, nous allons nous intéreser à des pratiques pédagogiques associées à l'usage du podCast audio. Des exemples de [...]

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Conseils & Ressources Archives - Louvain Learning Lab Blog

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Dans un article précédent, nous faisions le point sur une définition d'un podCast audio et l'équipement mis à disposition des enseignant·es pour se familiariser avec du matériel de qualité, mobile et simple à prendre en main. Dans cet article, nous allons nous intéreser à des pratiques pédagogiques associées à l'usage du podCast audio.

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If (for some reason) you’re considering an abrupt move to online teaching, Stephanie Moore and Charles B. Hodges have practical advice for instructors in the short term.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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With the possible disruption to social gatherings presented by the coronavirus, there is increased discussion around planning for the use of online learning as a continuity plan for most universities and schools. While there seems to be more fervor around this idea than in the past, this is no different than other times when online has been considered as part of an instructional continuity plan. We have seen a number of resources and ideas being shared, but many of them focus more on institutional plans or are technical how-tos. Here we want to provide an instructional planning guide that individual instructors can use.

Your first tendency may be to ask what tools you can use to deliver live lectures so students don't miss a lecture. Let's take a few steps back and do some quick planning to think through a few things before you decide to do this. This guide is aimed not at the permanent movement from face-to-face to online education but at the desire to implement an interim solution for emergency remote teaching and is specifically focused on lecture-based classes with some considerations for more active learning environments.
The Basics Basic Student Needs
Students will need to access readings and course materials and a way to submit assignments and receive feedback on their work. They also will need a way to send you questions, and they will need to know when and how you will respond to them.
Basic Instructor Needs
You need to deliver your content, for lack of a better term, to your students, and to communicate with them. There are many types of necessary communication in this situation. Students need to know what to do, how you want them to do it, how to submit it to you and how to get your feedback on their work.
Meeting Those Needs
All these needs are things that can be readily handled by a learning management system, if you have one, and most universities and schools do have one these days. As a bonus, the skills you are developing in this time of need can come in handy when you resume your face-to-face class. You can continue using the LMS to distribute handouts and other course documents and for students to submit assignments, post questions and access readings. While many instructors may be exploring the use of social media (e.g. Twitter hashtags or other options), you may find it's best to stick with institutionally supported tools and infrastructures since those will have dedicated support for you and your students as well.

If you are teaching face-to-face classes, your first impulse may be to think about your lectures. You may want to record lectures, narrated PowerPoints/slides or live sessions to make them available online. It is not hard to create some videos or narrated slideshows with technology that is often readily available. Be aware that you need to make sure these materials are accessible to all students, so transcripts or captions will need to be included. Your institution may have specific solutions for these accessibility accommodations, but automatic captioning in YouTube works well with a little effort on your part to make sure it's there. Yes, this may be a little confusing for you at first, but meeting the needs of all of your learners is paramount.

Here are some quick planning items you can implement:

Create a course site in your university's or school's LMS

Load any assignments that will be due into the assignments section (or have support staff help you with this).
For online, students require very clear instructions and prompt feedback, so make sure you provide students clarity on what to submit, how and any associated handouts for an assignment. In an LMS, you can set due dates, attach files and write a description for assignments to provide students guidance.

Load any readings that students will need into resources/files (or have support staff help you).

Create a discussion/forum section dedicated to student questions for you that you will check periodically (may want to set a meeting reminder to allocate time and remind you to do so).

Create a class communication plan so students know where to go and what to expect; address questions like:

Where to send questions

How quickly will you respond to emails; how quickly will you respond to discussion posts

How to reach you with any urgent needs or questions

What sort of regular communications you will send out to the class (e.g. weekly reviews and/or updates)

Other plans you have for how you will be available to students and how you will send out regular information and updates

Most universities often have online tutorials that will guide you through many of these tasks. There is a link provided at the bottom of this article to a resource that has been created with links to all the various resources and guides created by universities.
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous
Think about whether synchronous meetings are really needed. Disruptions that are major enough to force closures, etc., can also be major enough to significantly impact people's schedules and availability. Is it really important that students be present live, at a specific time, for a lecture? Consider recording lectures they can listen to on their own time, and then set up periodic live sessions throughout the week where students can join you for virtual office hours to ask questions and get further guidance and support. This can ensure your learners have the access they need to critical content while also having opportunities for additional support. So, for this decide:

What can be recorded
Identify how you can record this. Most live meeting tools allow you to record, so you often can use Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate, Adobe Captivate or others to just open a session/room or record a talk (share your screen if you have slides to talk through), and then it will save it somewhere and you can provide that file or link. Using the tool your university or school has means it's likely integrated with the LMS for easy distribution. Support staff can help you with this, but if your support staff are overwhelmed, YouTube is also a great user's manual for many of these tools -- most products have how-to videos on YouTube or on their websites. If you want to edit your videos, you may need a different tool like Camtasia, which allows for more advanced editing and closed captioning. Some of the synchronous video tools allow for very basic editing of video.

How do you want to make yourself available to students for questions or support with more complex needs than a discussion board may provide?
We recommend virtual office hours. You may decide you want to answer any questions asynchronously or in one-on-one appointments via phone or video chat.

Student-to-Student Communication
Now, let's think about the ways in which students informally support each other in their learning and how you can make some avenues readily available for them. In face-to-face settings, if a student feels confused, they can turn to a classmate and say, "Hey, I didn't understand ... did you?" These sorts of informal social learning supports are crucial to student learning (not just socially but to comprehension and retention as well). Consider how you can integrate some ways for students to connect with each other. Here are some quick and easy solutions to implement:

Create a discussion/forum for students to pose questions for each other and provide each other support.

Provide a link to a live session that's open 24-7 for them to use. For example, Zoom rooms have links and can be open for anytime access. You could create a Zoom room for your class, post that link and tell students it's there for them to use and connect with each other as they need.

Once you have done all that, in your LMS, you can then:

Create a page with a table on it that quickly summarize for students each week -- what they'll read, any assignments due, any recorded lectures and any live sessions -- with links as necessary to these things).

Make sure your class roster is added to your class site -- typically support staff can help with this.

Download your class roster with emails to have on hand for quick reference if necessary (usually, you can save your class roster in a spreadsheet format with this information -- it takes less than one minute to do).

Communicate your plan to your students:
Do a quick walk-through of your plan and the course site for students -- this can be done either in person if you still have some in-person sessions or can be done as a recorded video you share out with your class.

Implement a transition plan with your class, if you have time -- start having your students access readings, etc., in the course site and hold some virtual office hours for class.

Connect with support staff at your university or school to help you ensure your content is accessible.

Keep in mind that online learning may be new to your students, too, so weekly summaries or regular notes keeping them up-to-date, summarizing the past week, providing guidance for the week ahead and any other important communications will help orient them as well. These can be handled as a course email or course announcements in the LMS.
Beyond the Basics
The above steps are geared toward helping you set up a functional, temporary online learning environment for your class(es). The recommendations above are not designed to take the most advantage of the online learning environment and some of the tools and other affordances. Nor does this account for various systemic and/or equity issues that may arise from a sudden shift to online, such as whether students will have reliable internet access. While some of these affordances would take more significant planning and development than you are likely wanting to invest in right now, there are others you may want to consider.
Interactive Learning
Many live meeting tools have features like breakout rooms that allow you to break your class into small groups and go from room to room to talk with each group. If your class is more engaged in active learning, you may find using this feature helpful. Some of these tools also allow you to do polling during a live class or post quiz questions. Often, these tools also have a screen-sharing feature that allows you and students to share your screen. This can be useful if students are working on projects and you want them to share and talk through them or have them give presentations. If you will be online for a time when you planned for group work or sharing, be aware of your options and plan accordingly.

Many of the resources in the link below have more about using these live online environments.
Collaboration
Part of your in-class plan may involve student collaboration on creating a project or working on a paper together. Today, even for in-class work, students are often using tools like Google Docs to work together. If you have some assignments or activities where you want students co-creating some sort of assignment or submission together, consider having them work in Google Docs, Google Sheets or some other sort of online collaborative software and allow them to submit assignments in that format.
Flexibility
Flexibility will be key to ensuring students are not put at a disadvantage by a sudden move to online. Consider implementing flexible deadlines for when anything is due and flexible methods for how students will complete an assignment or demonstrate their learning. Using asynchronous recorded talks instead of requiring synchronous meetings can provide everyone important flexibility as well. In addition, assume at least some students will use phones or tablets for accessing class and completing and submitting their work. There are times that leads to difficulty with viewing, submitting or accessing live sessions. Make sure you record any live sessions and make those recordings available or use methods that allow students to reach you by phone and email, not just by video chat. (Torrey Trust, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has put together a Google slide deck with more on UDL considerations and a host of great ideas.)

You may find that a number of students rely on the physical university infrastructure, such as computers at the library, and will not be able to access remote solutions, especially on such short notice. Be available by phone and email and actively invite students to reach you any way they can and share if they are having difficulties so you can monitor and adjust accordingly.
Access to Additional Resources
Students are probably going to need access to additional resources -- like the library -- to complete their work for your class. Identify what your library plans to do and what they have available and create a section in your course site with links to online library resources as well as links to other types of resources students may need to access at a distance.
Preparing Your Own Space
Finally, it's important for both you and for your students to get the right equipment. You may already have most of these, and you do not need costly options for any of these to be functional:

Laptop, desktop or tablet.

Headphones or earbuds -- the biggest impediment to online communications is poor audio quality, so make sure you have a headset or earbuds; this is important to eliminating audio feedback loops, background noises, and other disruptions.

Microphone -- may already be built into your device, computer, camera or as part of a separate headset.

Webcam -- may already be built into your device or computer.

Internet -- this all does require reliable internet service; a wireless hotspot on a high-speed network may also suffice.

Backdrop -- make sure what students see behind you for any live or recorded video is clean and professional.

Finally, we want to thank and recognize the myriad professional instructional designers who are doing a lot of heavy lifting during this time supporting their universities' planning and implementation processes.

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Practical advice for instructors faced with an abrupt move to online teaching (opinion)

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With the possible disruption to social gatherings presented by the coronavirus, there is increased discussion around planning for the use of online learning as a continuity plan for most universities and schools. While there seems to be more fervor around this idea than in the past, this is no different than other times when online has been considered as part of an instructional continuity plan.

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Vade-mecum pour l’évaluation à distance des étudiant·e·s

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Vade-mecum pour l’évaluation à distance des étudiant·e·s

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Ce vade-mecum propose des pistes pour la réalisation d’évaluation à distance afin de permettre aux ensei- gnant·e·s de faire des choix éclairés sur les modalités alternatives aux examens en présentiel.

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Conseils sur les modalités, outils et sur la conception des épreuves

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Comment évaluer mes étudiant·es à distance ?

Cette ressource concerne les évaluation de juin et août 2020

Consulter quand même la ressource 2020

Consulter la nouvelle version 2021

Comment évaluer mes étudiant·es à distance ?

Modalités classiques

Modalités adaptées

Alignement pédagogique

oral

ecrit

Surveillé

Travail à remettre

(in)former les étudiant.eS

criteres d'évaluation

take home exam

évaluer l'essentiel

clés pédagogiques

Version 5 du 24/6/2020Pour la session de Juin et Août de l'année académique 2019-2020

non-surveillé

Moodle

Gradescope

Mail

Teams

Moodle

Gradescope Online

WiseFlow

TestWe

outil pour concevoir l'évaluation

Moodle

Gradescope

Mail

J'aimerais me former

Cliquez, dans l'arbre, sur les modalités d'examen (branches) ou les outils (feuilles) pour lesquels vous aimeriez avoir plus d'information.Vous avez également la possibilité de cliquer, dans les racines, sur les astuces pédagogiques qui vous aideront à créer votre examen.

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evaluation-acquis-lll@uclouvain.be

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MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

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S'inscrire à nos formations

LES THEMATIQUES SUPPLEMENTAIRES QUI VOUS INTERESSENT

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MODULE PRISE EN MAIN DE TESTWE

Adaptez vos attendus à cette situation d'urgence et exceptionnelle. Ne demandez pas trop de travail, ou un travail trop complexe, aux étudiants;

Envisagez des modalités qui seront simples à mettre en œuvre pour vous et pour les étudiants;

Diminuez le temps de passation de votre évaluation et donc diminuez le nombre de questions posées (pour éviter problèmes techniques, problèmes physiologiques des étudiant·es et tenir compte du contexte spécifique de passation)

Énoncez des consignes très précises et claires, précisez le temps de passation, les modalités de rendu, les critères d'évaluation, les possibilités de collaboration et ce qui est permis ou non;

Veillez à garantir l'équité entre les étudiants;

Choisissez des modalités qui limiteront vos temps de correction sur écran;

Lors de la correction, utilisez une grille critériée ou des critères de correction. (voir le Carnet de l'enseignant page 117) ou une ressource de nos collègues de l'UNIL) pour aligner votre jugement d'évaluateur aux acquis d'apprentissages, contenu et niveau de maîtrise attendu, afin de réaliser une évaluation la plus objective et éthique possible et de faciliter la lecture des travaux / productions;

Qu'importe la modalité d'évaluation, et d'autant plus pour les questions QCM et examens sans possibilité de poser des questions aux enseignants, veillez à la formulation des questions (et des propositions de réponse pour les QCM);

Construisez des évaluations qui limiteront les opportunités de fraude (ou acceptez ce risque). Pensez notamment à poser des questions qui ne soient pas "googlable" en quelques secondes;

Anticipez les éventuels problèmes techniques et le fait qu'un étudiant soit dans l'incapacité de rendre son devoir (autre modalité de rendu, épreuve de substitution, etc.).

Clés pédagogiques

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Alignement pédagogique

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Une fois que vous avez déterminé les AA essentiels, incontournables à évaluer, une autre question importante à se poser est la suivante : Est-ce que les étudiants ont bien travaillé et développé les AA, que je souhaite évaluer, à travers le dispositif de formation en ligne que j'ai mise en place pour assurer mon cours ? A travers cette question, il s'agit de s'assurer de l'alignement (la cohérence) (carnet de l'enseignant, pp 74-76) entre le dispositif d'évaluation et ce que les étudiants ont effectivement travaillé à travers les activités de formations qui leur ont été proposées.

En regard des acquis d'apprentissage visés par votre cours et ce que vous souhaitez évaluer, les questions suivantes sont à se poser :

Toute la matière prévue initialement a été enseignée ? Certains concepts/auteurs/notions ... ont-ils été omis ou vus de manière plus superficielle que d'habitude ?

Le passage de l'enseignement à distance a-t-il modifié la méthode d'enseignement de telle façon que cela a impacté l'apprentissage des étudiants notamment en ce qui concerne les AA plus complexes (esprit critique, analyse, synthèse). Par exemple, pour les séances d'exercices à distance où les étudiants ont moins la possibilité d'interagir, il est possible que les étudiants aient été moins bien formés.

Les réponses à ces questions sont à prendre en considération pour ajuster la liste des AA à évaluer et rédiger vos questions d'examen.Un exemple : si l'esprit critique a été travaillé avec les étudiants uniquement sur les chapitres dispensés en présentiel (avant le confinement), l'examen contiendra une question " esprit critique " qui portera uniquement sur la matière de ces premiers cours et les étudiants en seront informés. Autre exemple : on veillera à ne pas poser une question d'exercice qui demande à l'étudiant de mobiliser des concepts vus dans différents chapitres si ce type d'exercice n'a pas été travaillé avec les étudiants en séances de TP ou au cours.
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Indicateurs

Les indicateurs sont des éléments observables (preuves, indices, ...) qui qualifient le niveau de maitrise du critère. Ces indicateurs doivent être discriminants (pour éviter le recouvrement entre deux niveaux pour un même critère).

Critères

Niveaux de maitrise

Exemple de grille critériée

Grille critériée adaptée de Douady (2012)

Lorsque vous allez corriger les évaluations des étudiant·es, il est essentiel d'éviter l'arbitraire. Il est en effet important qu'entre deux copies avec des réponses identiques mais corrigées à 2h d'intervalle, les étudiant·es obtiennent sensiblement la même note, il est également important que si vous travaillez à plusieurs, la note de l'étudiant·e ne soit pas influencée par le correcteur ou la correctrice. De plus, il est indispensable que la note finale obtenue par l'étudiant·e reflète l'adéquation entre sa production et vos attendus (annoncés préalablement à votre auditoire et en lien avec votre alignement pédagogique).

Concrètement? Voici le schéma ci-contre pour un exemple de grille. N'hésitez pas aussi à consulter le Carnet de l'enseignant, (page 117), une ressource de nos collègues de l'UNIL, ainsi que d'autres ressources. Pour permettre à vos étudiant·es de s'auto-évaluer et d'adapter leurs stratégies d'apprentissage avant leur évaluation, présentez leur les critères d'évaluation que vous allez appliquer et pour aller plus loin, n'hésitez pas à discuter/compléter avec eux les indicateurs de votre grille sur base des critères présentés. Vous souhaitez aller plus loin dans la création de grilles critériées?

Webinaire sur les grilles criteriees à venir

Les indicateurs sont des éléments observables (preuves, indices, ...) qui qualifient le niveau de maitrise du critère. Ces indicateurs doivent être discriminants (pour éviter le recouvrement entre deux niveaux pour un même critère).

Les indicateurs sont des éléments observables (preuves, indices, ...) qui qualifient le niveau de maitrise du critère. Ces indicateurs doivent être discriminants (pour éviter le recouvrement entre deux niveaux pour un même critère).

Les critères sont les dimensions au regard desquelles une production ou une prestation sera évaluée. Les critères sont définis en cohérence avec les Acquis d'Apprentissage visés dans le cours (ce que l'étudiant·e doit être capable de faire à l'issue du cours).

Une échelle des niveaux de maitrise des critères va permettre de distinguer la maitrise minimale (seuil de réussite), partielle, maximale, aucune ... Les niveaux de maîtrise doivent être

en nombre limité (de 3 à 5): pour que leur détermination se fasse sans hésitation

inclusifs: l'atteinte d'un niveau présuppose la réussite des niveaux précédents

Petit conseil : démarrer du niveau de maîtrise minimal (seuil de réussite à 10/20 et déterminer ensuite les seuils inférieurs et supérieurs)
A distance ou en présence, en synchrone ou en asynchrone, il est essentiel que vos étudiant·es puissent être informés et formés pour leur évaluation. Pourquoi ? Pour leur permettre de se préparer, de développer une meilleure compréhension de vos attendus, de s'auto-évaluer et d'ajuster leur manière d'appréhender la matière. Surtout n'oubliez pas l'alignement entre votre évaluation, vos acquis d'apprentissage et votre dispositif d'enseignement 😊 (voir Carnet de l'enseignant p.60) Pour préparer techniquement les étudiant·es

Pour les logiciels fournissant du proctoring TestWe et Wiseflow (examens à distance surveillés), un examen blanc sera organisé a au sein facultés.

Si vous choisissez un autre outil (moodle devoir, moodle test, gradescope online, teams), il convient d'expliquer à vos étudiants, durant une séance de cours, ce qu'ils devront faire concrètement pour assurer la maîtrise de l'outil (tutoriel, explication en séance par exemple).

Pour préparer pédagogiquement les étudiant·es
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Webinaire sur (in)former les étudiant·es

Navigation libre ou séquentielle dans les examens en ligne Quelques conseils pédagogiques - Version du 22 mai 2020 Navigation libre (l'étudiant·e peut revenir autant de fois qu'il ou elle le souhaite aux questions antérieures) La navigation libre permet aux étudiant·es de visualiser l'ensemble des questions pour permettre

Informer vos étudiant·es qu'ils ou elles pourront revenir en arrière dans leur évaluation, cela les rassurera et leur permettra de gérer leur temps et de mettre en place l'organisation qui leur convient le mieux pour la passation de leur évaluation. Navigation séquentielle La navigation séquentielle n'autorise pas les retours en arrière après réponse à une question. Lorsque les étudiant·es décident de passer à une question suivante, il n'y a pas de correction possible sur les réponses données préalablement. Cela signifie aussi que les étudiant·es n'ont pas la possibilité de balayer l'ensemble des questions de l'examen. Plusieurs conséquences à cette modalité :Dès lors il est important :

evaluer l'essentiel

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Avant de construire votre évaluation, et de rédiger les questions, il est essentiel au préalable de bien définir sur quoi doit porter votre évaluation. Qu'est-ce que je souhaite évaluer ? Sur quels contenus, compétences porte l'évaluation ? Par rapport à ces contenus, quel niveau de maîtrise est attendu (restitution, compréhension, application, esprit critique, synthèse ...) ? En d'autres mots, quels sont les acquis d'apprentissage de mon cours ? Quel niveau de maîtrise de la matière y est attendu ? Lors de cette réflexion, une question cruciale à se poser est la suivante : quels sont les apprentissages (AA) essentiels et incontournables, le seuil de maîtrise minimal requis pour réussir ce cours, et qu'est-ce qui est de l'ordre du perfectionnement ?

Dans le contexte actuel de passage en ligne obligé des cours, la distinction entre ces trois catégories d'AA est d'autant plus indispensable. Pour réaliser ce " tri " :

N'hésitez pas à en discuter avec vos collègues pour lesquels votre cours est un prérequis par exemple.

Pensez également à ce qui a déjà été évalué en évaluation continue (travail à remettre, quiz sur moodle ...), si l'un des acquis essentiels a déjà été évalué, est-il encore nécessaire de l'évaluer une deuxième fois ?

Autres questions essentielles à se poser :

Est-ce que les étudiants ont bien travaillé et développé les AA, que je souhaite évaluer, à travers le dispositif de formation en ligne adapté que j'ai mise en place pour assurer mon cours ?

Pour les AA essentiels, quels sont les critères d'évaluation qui me permettront de juger de l'atteinte du seuil minimal de maîtrise de ces AA.

Dans cette vidéo vous trouverez une idée d'outil pour vous aider à concevoir votre évaluation dans sa globalité et vous assurez que vous balayez l'ensemble de votre matière.

outil pour concevoir l'évaluation

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travail à remettre

Travail autonome à remettre, préparé en session ou hors session, individuel ou de groupe

Types : fiche de lecture, synthèse, analyse de texte, dissertation, écrit réflexif, exercices, portfolio, études de cas, problèmes, mise en situation, projet...

Contrainte sur l'échéance de la remise du travail " au plus tard le ... "

Prévoir du temps pour les montées en charge sur les plateformes, des minutes supplémentaires pour les remises afin de tenir compte des éventuels soucis techniques.

Modalités à privilégier :

Comparer ces modalités pour faire mon choix

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injection des points dans osis

Etude bibliographique

Recherche et analyse de données

correction

Peu d'étudiants

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Prise en main facile

Lien manuel

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigés

Moodle - devoir

Prise en main facile

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigésCorrection en ligne possible avec grille d'évaluation

Système anti-plagiat disponible

Pas de limite

Uniquement si vous maitrisez déjà Gradescope

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Correction en ligne (avec correction transversale des questions) Possibilité de définir des critères et possibilité d'adapter les critères en cours de correction avec ajustement propagée automatiquement Multi-correcteur possible Tableau statistique global sur l'ensemble de l'examen

Aucun

Aucun

# précisé prochainement

Gradescope soumission par l'étudiantSi soumission de groupe : "Group Assignment"

Take home exam

Soumission par l'étudiant dans Gradescope

Examen à livre ouvert (take home) effectué dans un laps de temps défini, avec remise de l'épreuve numérisée en fin de délai

Modalités à privilégier :

Comparer tous les outils d'évaluation

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

Conseils pédagogiques

Comparer ces modalités pour faire mon choix

toutes les formes d'évaluation

Take home exam

Soumission par l'étudiant dans Gradescope

Examen à livre ouvert (take home) effectué dans un laps de temps défini, avec remise de l'épreuve numérisée en fin de délai

Modalités à privilégier :

Comparer tous les outils d'évaluation

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

Comparer ces modalités pour faire mon choix

Conseils pédagogiques

toutes les formes d'évaluation

Types de questions

Take home exam

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Peu d'étudiants

Prise en main facile

Mail

Lien manuel

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigés

# précisions prochainement

Prise en main facile

Moodle - devoir

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigésCorrection en ligne possible via grille d'évaluation

Système anti-plagiat disponible

Pas de limite

Uniquement si vous maitrisez déjà Gradescope

Gradescope soumission par l'étudiant

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Correction en ligne (avec correction transversale des questions) Possibilité de définir des critères et possibilité d'adapter les critères en cours de correction avec ajustement propagée automatiquement Multi-correcteur possible Tableau statistique global sur l'ensemble de l'examen

Aucun

Aucun

examen oral

Examen oral à livre ouvert

Conférence sur Teams

Modalités à privilégier :

Voir les caractéristiques de l'outil

Comparer tous les outils d'évaluation

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

Pas plus de 4 étudiants simultanément

Préparation éventuelle de la réponse communiquée à l'enseignant·e par partage d'écran dans Teams

Conseils pédagogiques

toutes les formes d'évaluation

Plusieurs scénarios sont possibles. 3 scénarios sont documentés pas à pas du plus simple ou plus complexe.

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Prise en main facile

Teams

Lien manuel

En direct

Limite la fraude de par le dispositif

examen oral

remarque

Possibilité de faire l'oral (Teams) sur base d'un travail remis au préalable Possibilité d'un diagnostic plus précis : démarche de pensée, profondeur des connaissances et adaptation en temps réel p/r aux réponses données par l'étudiant

examen écrit non-surveillé

Plage horaire bien définie et identique pour tous les étudiant·es (par exemple tel jour de 10h à 12h00, prévoir du temps pour les montées en charge sur les plateforme, des minutes supplémentairespour les remises pour tenir compte des éventuels soucis technique)

Sans surveillance (à livre ouvert)

Examen en ligne dans un environnement dédié (questions en ligne)

Modalités à privilégier :

Comparer ces modalités pour faire mon choix

Comparer tous les outils d'évaluation

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

Test en ligne sous Moodle

Test en ligne dans Gradescope online (nouvelle fonctionnalité : online assessment) - uniquement pour les questions ouvertes

Conseils pédagogiques

toutes les formes d'évaluation

Pour tenir compte du contexte spécifique (les étudiant·es ne sont pas dans des conditions idéales de passation) :- Réduisez le temps de passation (pour tenir compte des besoins de concentration accrus dans une évaluation en ligne, des besoins physiologiques des étudiant·es et aussi réduire les risques de soucis techniques)- Adaptez le nombre de questions de votre évaluation pour que le temps réduit permette leur réalisation et pour que l'évaluation ne porte que sur les contenus et compétences qui ont été effectivement travaillés par les étudiants durant le quadrimestre.Informez vos étudiant·es quant à la navigation possible ou non entre les différentes questions (navigation libre ou navigation séquentielle)

Navigation libre ou séquentielle dans les examens en ligne Quelques conseils pédagogiques - Version du 22 mai 2020 Navigation libre (l'étudiant·e peut revenir autant de fois qu'il ou elle le souhaite aux questions antérieures) La navigation libre permet aux étudiant·es de visualiser l'ensemble des questions pour permettre

Informer vos étudiant·es qu'ils ou elles pourront revenir en arrière dans leur évaluation, cela les rassurera et leur permettra de gérer leur temps et de mettre en place l'organisation qui leur convient le mieux pour la passation de leur évaluation. Navigation séquentielle La navigation séquentielle n'autorise pas les retours en arrière après réponse à une question. Lorsque les étudiant·es décident de passer à une question suivante, il n'y a pas de correction possible sur les réponses données préalablement. Cela signifie aussi que les étudiant·es n'ont pas la possibilité de balayer l'ensemble des questions de l'examen. Plusieurs conséquences à cette modalité :Dès lors il est important :!! Moodle permet d'éviter cette problématique en créant une banque de questions divisées en sous-catégories. Vous pouvez par exemple créer des catégories spécifiques aux différents niveaux de maîtrise des acquis d'apprentissage et faire en sorte que les questions soient tirées aléatoirement au sein de ces sous-catégories, en respectant une progression dans la complexité pour chaque étudiant·e.

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Choix unique, Choix multiple, Réponse courte, Réponse longue (essai, dissertation, argumentaire, esprit critique, synthèse), Réponse calculée avec jeux de données, Réponse par cliqué sur image, Recommandé pour mixer questions ouvertes et QCM

suppose d'échelonner les départs pour les grands groupes (+300),précisionsprochainement

Prise en main demande du temps et de l'expérience

Moodle - test

Lien informatique via fichier excel produit par l'outil

Automatique pour les questions fermées Questions ouvertes : correction manuelle par remise d'une note uniquement (pas de possibilité de grille de critères)

Pas de limite

Conseillé si vous maitrisez déjà Gradescope prise en main demandant un temps restreint

Gradescope Online

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Correction en ligne (avec correction transversale des questions) Possibilité de définir des critères et possibilité d'adapter les critères en cours de correction avec ajustement propagée automatiquement Multi-correcteur possible Tableau statistique global sur l'ensemble de l'examen

Tirage aléatoire de questions,Mélange de questions, Mélange des réponses, Durée limitable pour le test,MAIS copie des questions possible

Aucun

examen écrit non-surveillé

remarques

Nécessite d'investir sur la conception de l'examen et le type de questions pour pallier l'absence de surveillance (éviter la fraude)Privilégier la création d'un nouveau test (plutôt que l'utilisation d'une banque de questions alimentée depuis longtempsNécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté)

Questions ouvertes à réponses longues : essai, dissertation, argumentaire, esprit critique, synthèse

examen écrit surveillé

Examen en ligne dans un environnement dédié (questions en ligne) isolant l'ordinateur utilisé par l'étudiant·e (lock down session = 'confinement' de l'ordinateur de l'étudiant·e).

Modalités à privilégier :

Comparer ces modalités pour faire mon choix

Comparer tous les outils d'évaluation

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

Conseils pédagogiques

Plateforme TestWe (https://testwe.eu)

Plateforme Wiseflow (https://europe.wiseflow.net/)

Par défaut, la plateforme utilisée sera TestWe
toutes les formes d'évaluation

Pour tenir compte du contexte spécifique (les étudiant·es) ne sont pas dans des conditions idéales de passation :- Réduisez le temps de passation (pour tenir compte des besoins physiologiques et aussi réduire les risques de soucis techniques)- Adaptez le nombre de questions de votre évaluation pour que le temps réduit permette leur réalisation- Informez vos étudiant·es quant à la navigation possible ou non entre les différentes questions (navigation libre ou navigation séquentielle)

Navigation libre ou séquentielle dans les examens en ligne Quelques conseils pédagogiques - Version du 22 mai 2020 Navigation libre (l'étudiant·e peut revenir autant de fois qu'il ou elle le souhaite aux questions antérieures) La navigation libre permet aux étudiant·es de visualiser l'ensemble des questions pour permettre

Informer vos étudiant·es qu'ils ou elles pourront revenir en arrière dans leur évaluation, cela les rassurera et leur permettra de gérer leur temps et de mettre en place l'organisation qui leur convient le mieux pour la passation de leur évaluation. Navigation séquentielle La navigation séquentielle n'autorise pas les retours en arrière après réponse à une question. Lorsque les étudiant·es décident de passer à une question suivante, il n'y a pas de correction possible sur les réponses données préalablement. Cela signifie aussi que les étudiant·es n'ont pas la possibilité de balayer l'ensemble des questions de l'examen. Plusieurs conséquences à cette modalité :Dès lors il est important :

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Choix unique Choix multiple Réponse courte Réponse longue : essai, dissertation

A priori, pas de limitation

Prise en main aisée (intuitive)

TestWe

Lien informatique via fichier excel produit par l'outil

Automatique pour les questions fermées Questions ouvertes : correction en ligne, avec critères, multi-correcteurs possible Tableau statistique global

Prise en main plus complexe

Wiseflow

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Automatique pour les questions fermées Questions ouvertes : correction en ligne, avec critères, multi-correcteurs possible Tableau statistique global

Proctoring Test de similarité des réponses sur les réponses ouvertes

remarques

Nouveau système : formation par webinaire par le fournisseur (en français) Nécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté) car pas de possibilité de poser des questions de clarification pendant par les étudiants l'examen

Choix unique Choix multiple Classification Pairage Pointer sur image Réponse courte Réponse longue : essai, dissertation Question avec annexe (ex. développement mathématique : à la main, dessin, schéma ...)

examen écrit surveillé

A priori, pas de limitation

Proctoring

INFORMATIONS SUPPLEMENTAIRES ET PRISE EN MAIN

outil gradescope (soumission)

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Problem solving avec raisonnement explicité (pas de réponse unique)ArgumentaireEsprit critiqueEssaiEtude de cas Etude bibliographique Recherche et analyse de données

Pas de limite

Uniquement si vous maitrisez déjà Gradescope

Gradescope soumission par l'étudiantSi soumission de groupe : "Group Assignment"

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Correction en ligne (avec correction transversale des questions) Possibilité de définir des critères et possibilité d'adapter les critères en cours de correction avec ajustement propagée automatiquement Multi-correcteur possible Tableau statistique global sur l'ensemble de l'examen

Aucun

tous les outils d'évaluation

Examens à distance UCLouvain - Info et aide

Des bonnes pratiques et des tutoriels pour la prise en main de Gradescope en autonomie

outil gradescope - online

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Pas de limite

Uniquement si vous maitrisez déjà Gradescope

Gradescope Online

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Correction en ligne (avec correction transversale des questions) Possibilité de définir des critères et possibilité d'adapter les critères en cours de correction avec ajustement propagée automatiquement Multi-correcteur possible Tableau statistique global sur l'ensemble de l'examen

Aucun

remarques

Nécessite d'investir sur la conception de l'examen et le type de questions pour pallier l'absence de surveillance (éviter la fraude)Nécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté) car pas de possibilité de poser des questions de clarification pendant l'examen

Questions ouvertes à réponses longue : essay, dissertation, argumentaire, esprit critique, synthèse

tous les outils d'évaluation

Examens à distance UCLouvain - Info et aide

Concevoir et corriger mon examen avec Gradescope Online

outil Devoir dans moodle

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Problem solving avec raisonnement explicité (pas de réponse unique)ArgumentaireEsprit critiqueEssaiEtude de cas Etude bibliographique Recherche et analyse de données

Peu d'étudiant·es

Prise en main facile

Moodle - devoir

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigésCorrection en ligne possible mais compliquée (via grille d'évaluation)

Système anti-plagiat disponible

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Webinaire à venir

http://bit.ly/moodleucl-devoir

tous les outils d'évaluation

outil Test dans moodle

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Choix unique, Choix multiple, Réponse courte, Réponse longue (essai, dissertation, argumentaire, esprit critique, synthèse), Réponse calculée avec jeux de données, Réponse par cliqué sur image, Recommandé pour mixer questions ouvertes et QCM

Prise en main demande du temps et de l'expérience

Moodle - test

Lien informatique via fichier excel produit par l'outil

remarques

Déconseillé pour les énoncés avec médias ou fichiers lourds car temps de chargement long pris sur le temps d'examenNécessite d'investir sur la conception de l'examen et des questions pour pallier l'absence de surveillance Nécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté) car pas de possibilité de poser des questions de clarification

Webinaire à venir

suppose une réservation pour éviter les surcharges et d'échelonner les départs pour les grands groupes (+?00),précisionsprochainement

Tirage aléatoire de questions,Mélange de questions, Mélange des réponses, Durée limitable pour le test,MAIS copie des questions possible

Correction automatique pour les questions fermées Correction manuelle des questions ouvertes par remise d'une note et d'un commentairePossibilité d'affichage de consignes pour les évaluateurs mais pas de grille de critères explicite

http://bit.ly/moodleucl-test-examen

tous les outils d'évaluation

outil WiseFlow

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

remarques

Prise en main plus complexe

Lien informatique via fichier Excel produit par l'outil

Automatique pour les questions fermées Questions ouvertes : correction en ligne, avec critères, multi-correcteurs possible Tableau statistique global

ProctoringProctoring Test de similarité des réponses sur les réponses ouvertes

Nouveau système : formation par webinaire par le fournisseur (en français) Nécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté) car pas de possibilité de poser des questions de clarification pendant par les étudiants l'examen

Choix unique Choix multiple Classification Pairage Pointer sur image Réponse courte Réponse longue : essai, dissertation Question avec annexe (ex. développement mathématique : à la main, dessin, schéma)

A priori, pas de limitation

Wiseflow

https://europe.wiseflow.net/

Webinaire à venir

tous les outils d'évaluation

outil TestWe

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Choix unique Choix multiple Réponse courte Réponse longue : essai, dissertation

A priori, pas de limitation

Prise en main aisée (intuitive)

TestWe

Lien informatique via fichier excel produit par l'outil

Automatique pour les questions fermées Questions ouvertes : correction en ligne, avec critères, multi-correcteurs possible Tableau statistique global

remarques

Nouveau système : formation par webinaire par le fournisseur (en français) Nécessite d'investir sur la rédaction (clarté) car pas de possibilité de poser des questions de clarification pendant par les étudiants l'examen

Proctoring

IInscriptions aux formations TestWe

https://testwe.eu

Moodle Examens à distance (plateformes institutionnelles)

tous les outils d'évaluation

outil Teams

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

correction

Individuel (avec ou sans préparation)Max 4 étudiants avec préparation on-lineA exploiter pour une petite cohorte

Prise en main facile

Teams

Lien manuel

En direct

Limite la fraude de par le dispositif

remarque

Possibilité de faire l'oral (Teams) sur base d'un travail remis au préalable Possibilité d'un diagnostic plus précis : démarche de pensée, profondeur des connaissances et adaptation en temps réel p/r aux réponses données par l'étudiant

Formez-vous

Lien et tutoriels

Webinaire à venir

http

tous les outils d'évaluation

outil Mail

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

Types de questions

nombre d'étudiants

complexité de prise en main technologique de l'outil

outil

Système antifraude

injection des points dans osis

Etude bibliographique

Recherche et analyse de données

correction

Peu d'étudiants

Prise en main facile

Mail

Lien manuel

Devoirs à imprimer pour être corrigés

Aucun

tous les outils d'évaluation

tous les conseils pédagogiques

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

toutes les formes d'évaluation

cles pédagogiques

evaluer l'essentiel

alignement pédagogique

critères d'evaluation

(in)former les étudiants

outil pour concevoir l'evaluation

tous les outils d'évaluation

tous les conseils pédagogiques

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

différentes formes d'évaluation

travail à remettre

Take home exam

examen oral

examen écrit non surveillé

examen écrit surveillé

tous les outils d'évaluation

tous les conseils pédagogiques

MOODLE DE PRISE EN MAIN TECHNIQUE

différents outils d'évaluation

toutes les formes d'évaluation

gradescope online

moodle (soumission de devoir)

moodle (test)

wiseflow

testwe

teams

mail

Gradescope (soumission de devoir)

Comparer tous les outils

Suivez ce lien pour télécharger un tableau comparatif.

https://moodleucl.uclouvain.be/course/view.php?id=12631

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Comment évaluer mes étudiant·es à distance ? Cette ressource concerne les évaluation de juin et août 2020 Consulter quand même la ressource 2020 Consulter la nouvelle version 2021 Comment évaluer mes étudiant·es à distance ?

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Coronavirus: How should US higher education plan for an uncertain future?

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Coronavirus: How should US higher education plan for an uncertain future?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coronavirus: How should US higher education plan for an uncertain future?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In unprecedented times and with American campuses largely empty of students, leaders in US higher education need to shift their thinking to what happens next.

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What shift to online teaching could mean for the future of HE

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What shift to online teaching could mean for the future of HE

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What the Shift to Virtual Learning Could Mean for the Future of Higher Ed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The coronavirus pandemic is forcing global experimentation with remote teaching. There are many indicators that this crisis is going to transform many aspects of life. Education could be one of them if remote teaching proves to be a success. But how will we know if it is? As this crisis-driven exper…

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Adaptation de l'Evaluation des Enseignements par les Etudiants

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Adaptation de l'Evaluation des Enseignements par les Etudiants

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The onset of COVID-19 has turned higher education (like the rest of the world) upside down, forcing colleges, their staffs and their students to adapt on the fly. Sometimes that entails doing many "normal" things in new and often unaccustomed ways, like delivering mental health services virtually, or holding online commencements.

Other times it means more colleges taking steps that some peers had taken previously, such as temporarily suspending the use of standardized tests in admissions.

The realm of teaching and learning, this column's domain, has been dramatically transformed. The most obvious example is this spring's big shift of all instruction into remote or virtual formats, which was the topic of the last few iterations of this column.

But that's far from the only aspect of the learning process that has undergone significant change in the wake of the novel coronavirus. My Inside Higher Ed colleagues, for instance, have documented the spreading embrace of pass/fail grading to give students more flexibility and reduce their anxiety during this nerve-racking time.

Students aren't the only ones feeling anxious. The closing of physical classrooms has forced the majority of instructors who've never taught anything but a face-to-face course to do so under less-than-ideal circumstances, to say the least. In the shift to remote instruction, many professors are themselves using entirely new tools and pedagogical techniques -- almost certainly with varying degrees of success.

That reality has led some colleges to decide -- and some organizations and commentators to recommend -- that institutions alter their approach to the student evaluations that many use to assess professors' performance. Numerous colleges and universities are allowing instructors to opt out of collecting student ratings of their teaching for the winter and spring terms, while others have said they will continue to collect the evaluations during this time but won't consider them in assessing faculty performance.

How are colleges approaching their use of student reviews during the coronavirus crisis -- and how should they be?

Will their approach during this unusual time change how they view (and use) student evaluations of teaching going forward? Will this accelerate the momentum against how they are used?

Read on.

***

Even BC (before coronavirus), skepticism about the value of student evaluations of teaching was mounting. Two years ago, the University of Southern California stopped using the ratings in tenure, promotion or other high-stakes personnel decisions, as Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty reported, citing mounting evidence of bias in student reviews of instructors and the lack of correlation between student ratings and learning outcomes.
Selection of Recent Changes
to Faculty Evaluation Policies

Dalhousie University: Student
ratings "entirely formative," no
results provided to administrators.

DePaul University: Continuing
with evaluations as planned.
Provost: "I make a commitment
to you" that spring 2020 course
reviews "will not be held against
you in any review, or promotion
and tenure decisions."

U of California, Irvine: Evaluations
"excluded from future review files
unless" faculty member chooses
to include them.

U of Georgia: Teaching and
learning center officials "strongly
recommend" that instructors not
engage in "typical course
evaluations."

Since then, the arguments against overdependence on student reviews have grown. Last year 18 scholarly associations urged colleges and universities to stop using the evaluations as the primary way of judging teaching effectiveness in personnel decisions. And in February a new study made the case that even "good" student evaluations of teaching -- those that aren't biased, and that are correlated -- are not effective in differentiating between better and worse instructors.

And yet student evaluations are ubiquitous in higher education. "Because these instruments are cheap, easy to implement, and provide a simple way to gather information, they are the most common method used to evaluate faculty teaching for hiring, tenure, promotion, contract renewal and merit raises," the American Sociological Association and other groups said in their statement last year.

Even colleges that lean heavily on student ratings sometimes exempt the use of (or dependence on) student ratings in extreme circumstances, such as when a professor becomes ill during a course, or when an instructor makes a major modification in a course that might diminish the significance of students' responses.

So what should happen in a moment like this one when just about every instructor is facing extreme circumstances -- teaching in the middle of pandemic, having to adopt a significantly (if not entirely) new way of teaching in a new mode of instruction?

"Faculty also need to be judged on a pass/fail basis," David M. Perry, senior academic adviser for the University of Minnesota's history department, wrote in a CNN op-ed last month recommending that colleges ease their grading policies for students. "Online teaching is uniquely hard and cannot be mastered as a skill in a couple of hours or days. Student evaluations -- which for pre-tenure or pre-promotion faculty are vitally important to their career advancement -- will be useless in this new arrangement."

The American Association of University Professors issued guidelines last month reiterating that decisions about how to assess instructional quality are the faculty's domain, and that "under these extraordinary circumstances, the faculty may wish to consider whether temporary adjustments in faculty evaluation, including suspending the administration of student evaluations, may be appropriate."

Joshua Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi and author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, endorsed that strong anti-ratings stance in a recent blog post entitled "Cancel the Teaching Evaluations Too!"

"While much of the conversation in higher ed at this time has rightly focused on students -- because of the major disruption caused by the coronavirus, the emotional and psychological turmoil brought on by the crisis, and the sudden transition to a new learning environment -- faculty are facing all of this too. Universities should grant faculty the same grace they are extending to students and administrators should not evaluate their teaching in the same way they would in other semesters."

Eyler laid out several possible approaches that colleges might take to rethink the use of student evaluations during a time when "they are being asked to do so much with tools, parameters, and environments that are -- in many cases -- unfamiliar."

The first, keeping the status quo by collecting reviews of individual faculty members and continuing to use them to judge professors' teaching, he openly rejected as "unjustifiable." A second, continuing to collect the ratings but either issuing a blanket declaration not to use them in faculty evaluations or giving professors a choice of whether to include them in future reviews, "look[s] reasonable on the surface" but "share[s] a common flaw," he argued.

That flaw is that once the data are collected, there's no way to ensure that they won't ultimately be used to evaluate faculty members for tenure or promotion, even if administrators currently commit that they won't.

"As a person, I'm optimistic to a fault, and I believe that everyone will act in good faith," Eyler said in an interview. "But as someone involved in decision making, I can't create policy based on that assumption. In an ideal world, we would collect this information and let faculty choose how it's used. But practically and realistically, we want to protect those faculty who are most vulnerable" -- adjuncts, instructors early on the tenure track, etc.

Another possibility might be to create a new student evaluation precisely for this moment, but that is impractical given the compressed timeline, Eyler wrote.

The last option -- "do not collect SETs during COVID-affected semesters" -- he described as "the most equitable model." This is the option with the least possibility for misuse (because there will not be anything to misuse) and it is the only one that truly levels the playing field."

Not collecting information about individual faculty members through student evaluations would forfeit information that could help instructors understand how they served their students during this strange and uncomfortable time, and "what they can improve upon for themselves." But in Eyler's view, that's a small price to pay for avoiding any unfair impact on professors' careers.
A Partial Counterpoint
Thomas J. Tobin shares many of the oft-voiced concerns about the use of student evaluations -- so much so that he declines to use that standard term to describe them.

"We call them 'student ratings,' not 'student evaluations,' because students are not qualified to evaluate their professors on almost anything," says Tobin, program area director for distance teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (Asking students whether a professor assigned them the "appropriate" amount of work is silly, he suggests; how do students know how much work is pedagogically appropriate, he says.)

Tobin believes that student ratings have a role in a well-rounded evaluation of instructors by other professional educators, along with observations by peers of an instructor's teaching and administrative perceptions of his or her instructional skills.

But because most institutions "usually don't have enough people and time to be able to perform multivariate evaluation of professors," Tobin says, most depend way too much on student ratings. As a result, he adds, "the current system of use of student ratings is deeply flawed."

Yet he doesn't suggest throwing a flawed system out in a time like this, for a variety of reasons.

"Under any circumstances, but especially under emergency circumstances, we should strive to do as much as possible in the exact same way we always did," to provide students with "as much familiarity as possible," Tobin says. It will be useful to have "apples-to-apples comparisons" of students' experiences in the Remote Learning 1.0 courses that most institutions stood up on the fly this spring.

While he recognizes Eyler's concern about possible misuse of the information, he notes that most colleges and universities already have mechanisms in place for "collecting but not counting student ratings data." Professors can apply for what's often called a "provost's letter" when they try out something new or get sick, which will keep the data from being used against them.

For Tobin, ultimately, the potential harm to a vulnerable instructor that Eyler worries about must be balanced against the "aggregate benefit" of the "unique window" that student ratings offer into students' experiences of their courses at this unusual time.

"We can get insights about students' well-being, about how students as a group and as small subgroups experience this shift, so we can make informed shifts in our remote instruction," Tobin says. "This is the kind of information we absolutely need, maybe more than ever in a time of emergency."

Eyler agrees that colleges should be collecting information about students' learning experiences during the coronavirus -- "about hiccups along the way," impediments students found to their ability to learn, and the like. In fact, Mississippi's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is producing just such a survey now to distribute to students and faculty members alike.

"If institutions aren't collecting that [information], they should, but it doesn't need to be -- really shouldn't be -- done through an individual faculty member's evaluation," he said.

***

Despite their differences, Tobin and Eyler end up in roughly the same place when they're asked how the current moment might affect the overall debate about the role of teaching evaluations.

"In times like this, I'd like to think we'd focus on what's essential, and be asking, 'What does this actually do for us? What's actually valid?'" Tobin said. "There's an opportunity to rethink what we're doing."

Says Eyler, "What I hope happens is that it forces a spotlight on the process itself, and that we ask really important and hard questions about how we use them. Yes, you can get some valuable information from them, but they should be one piece of a larger puzzle. If places get by this semester without evaluations, they will have to find other pieces to look at [to evaluate instructors]. Maybe that will help us establish at least the foundation of a new kind of [faculty evaluation] process."

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Many colleges are abandoning or downgrading student evaluations during coronavirus crisis. Will that stick?

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The onset of COVID-19 has turned higher education (like the rest of the world) upside down, forcing colleges, their staffs and their students to adapt on the fly. Sometimes that entails doing many "normal" things in new and often unaccustomed ways, like delivering mental health services virtually, or holding online commencements.

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Recommandations UCL pour soutenir l'enseignement

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Recommandations UCL pour soutenir l'enseignement

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Hearing from students, faculty, and staff about their experiences and pain points with the sudden shift to remote learning and working can help identify adjustments that will benefit the campus community. Institutions can start with these questions to survey their users.

Credit: 4zevar / Shutterstock.com © 2020

As institutions rapidly adopt fully remote teaching, learning, and working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, they might want to begin evaluating student, faculty, and staff experiences. Short online surveys of end users can be useful tools for gathering quick and constructive feedback.

To save time for our community, the EDUCAUSE team of researchers and data experts has compiled short lists of survey questions IT professionals can adapt and deploy to students, faculty, and staff at their institution to begin gathering feedback on their remote services and identify areas of success and growth for the road ahead. Using the links below, anyone can download these questions and access a Google Forms template to begin disseminating these questions and gathering feedback at your institution today.

To help serve all of higher education, we encourage institutions using these templates to submit summaries of their results to EDUCAUSE, though this is not required. EDUCAUSE research staff might use the data, in aggregated form across all participating institutions, to develop resources that inform and benefit the general EDUCAUSE membership. If you'd like to contribute your results, email us for instructions on how to share your data securely.

Student-Centered Questions

Which of the following technological issues have been a challenge for you since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

Instructor discomfort or lack of familiarity with required technologies or applications

My own discomfort or lack of familiarity with required technologies or applications

Unclear expectations around which technologies and applications I am required to use

My access to reliable communication software/tools (e.g., Zoom, Skype, Google)

My access to reliable internet/service

My access to a reliable digital device (e.g., laptop, mobile device)

My access to specialized software (e.g., Adobe products, statistical packages)

My access to library resources

Adequate digital replacements for face-to-face collaboration tools (e.g., whiteboards)

Other (please specify): ______________________

Which of the following learning/educational issues have been a challenge for you since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

Finding time to participate in synchronous classes (e.g., live-streaming lectures or video conferencing at a set time)

Unclear expectations around course/assignment requirements

Competing class meetings and schedules

Personal preference for face-to-face learning

Course lessons or activities that haven't translated well to a remote environment

Difficulty focusing or paying attention to remote instruction or activities

Instructor availability/responsiveness

Personal motivation/desire to complete coursework

Other (please specify): ______________________

Which of the following student support services have been challenging to access since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

Internships or practicum placements

Health services

Mental health services

Emergency financial aid

Housing/food services

Career services

Financial services

Advising services

What are your biggest concerns with the transition to remote learning so far? (Check all that apply.)

Grades/performing well in class

Completing my internship or practicum requirements

Changes to grading structures (e.g., pass/fail, credit/no-credit)

Not being able to see classmates

Not being able to communicate with instructors

Possible delays in graduating/completing my program

Missing out on extracurricular/on-campus activities

Online privacy, protection of my personal data

Security/privacy in taking online exams

Housing security

Food security

Other (please specify): __________________________

Which of the following technical accessibility issues have been challenging for you since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

I do not require accessibility accommodations.

Availability of live captioning on video conferencing

Availability of closed captioning

Access to ASL interpreters

Integrating captioning into Zoom

Availability of Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services

Test proctoring

Time on tests

File converting

Access to assistive technology hardware

Other (please specify): ________________________

Which of the following teaching-related accessibility issues have been challenging for you since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

I do not require accessibility accommodations.

Instructors only holding synchronous classes (e.g., live-streaming lectures or video conferencing at a set time)

Timed tests

Instructors not using LMS

Instructors not using a tool that is supported by the institution

Instructors using a tool that is not supported by the institution

Other (please specify): _____________________________

Faculty-Centered Questions

Which of the following technological issues have been a challenge for you since the transition to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

Student discomfort or lack of familiarity with required technologies or applications

My own discomfort or lack of familiarity with required technologies or applications

My access to reliable communication software/tools (e.g., Zoom, Skype, Google)

My access to reliable internet/service

My access to a reliable digital device (e.g., laptop, mobile device)

My access to specialized software (e.g., Adobe products, statistical packages)

My access to library resources

Adequate digital replacements for face-to-face collaboration tools (e.g., whiteboards)

How would you say your students have adapted to remote learning, from your experiences and observations as an instructor?

My students seem to be struggling a great deal with adapting to remote learning.

My students seem to be struggling somewhat with adapting to remote learning.

My students seem to be adapting reasonably well to remote learning.

My students seem to be adapting extremely well to remote learning.

Which of the following have been challenging for you in adapting course design and/or assignments to remote learning? (Check all that apply.)

I am not familiar or comfortable with online applications/tools.

I have limited knowledge of options for online course delivery.

I have limited personal time or energy to effectively adapt.

My personal preference is for face-to-face learning.

Course lessons or activities haven't translated well to a remote environment.

I am uncertain about how to best assess student learning in this environment.

Students have not been adequately available/responsive.

Other (please specify): _____________________________

What are your biggest concerns with the transition to remote learning so far? (Check all that apply.)

Diminished student learning

Changes to grading structures (e.g., pass/fail, credit/no-credit)

Not being able to communicate with my students

Online privacy, protection of student data

Online privacy, protection of my personal data

Evaluations of my teaching effectiveness

Impacts to tenure eligibility

Security/privacy in proctoring online exams

Other (please specify): __________________________

Staff-Centered Questions

What supplies or services do you need your institution to provide to allow you to carry out your work remotely? (Check all that apply.)

Laptop/desktop

Copier/scanner/printer

Communication equipment (headset, microphone, camera)

Access to a meeting/communication application (e.g., Zoom, Skype)

Access to or reimbursement for internet/hotspot

Additional monitors

Other (please specify): _____________________________

What information from leadership (e.g., system office, departmental, central administration) would be most helpful to you in carrying out your work? (Check all that apply.)

Expectations for remote work hours and schedules

Flexible work schedules to accommodate needs for dependent care

Changes to paid sick time for staff who are ill

Necessary adjustments to work goals and timelines

Regular updates on status and plans for COVID-19 responses

Other (please specify): _____________________________

Which of the following technological issues have been a challenge for you since the transition to remote work? (Check all that apply.)

Access to reliable internet service

Access to reliable telephone service

Access to a reliable device (laptop, mobile device)

Downloading/running my normal work-related software or application(s)

Lack of familiarity or comfort using remote technologies/applications (e.g., Zoom, Skype, Google)

Other (please specify): _____________________________

Are you able to maintain necessary connections with colleagues?

Yes

No

If not, what would help? [open-ended response]

For All Audiences (Faculty, Staff, Students)

If we could solve one problem for you, what would that be? [open-ended response]

Links to Survey Resources

Access a Google Form of these survey questions. To use the Google Form template, sign into Google, click the link to the form, and choose the "Make a copy" option to save a copy of the form to your own Google Drive. Use as is, or edit and distribute the form to meet your particular institutional needs.

Download a Word file of these survey questions.

EDUCAUSE will continue to monitor higher education and technology related issues during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For additional resources, please visit the EDUCAUSE COVID-19 web page.

For more information and analysis about higher education IT research and data, please visit the EDUCAUSE Review Data Bytes blog as well as the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research.

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educause diy survey kit: remote work and learning experiences

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EDUCAUSE DIY Survey Kit: Remote Work and Learning Experiences

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Hearing from students, faculty, and staff about their experiences and pain points with the sudden shift to remote learning and working can help identify adjustments that will benefit the campus community. Institutions can start with these questions to survey their users.

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Conseils pour les aspects humains du télétravail

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Conseils pour les aspects humains du télétravail

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For some, working from home is already an established and welcome way of life, whilst for others a sudden and enforced period of homeworking can feel like a daunting disruption to normality.

With the current coronavirus situation, homeworking finds itself in the news again.

Guidance for for members around planning for coronavirus (COVID-19).

Technology is clearly the enabler here but, amongst the encouragement for folks to suddenly be video conferencing, virtually meeting and remotely collaborating with confidence, it is worth pausing to think about the human element here. For no matter how seamless and connected technology can enable us to be, it alone can't magically help us all make the transition to happy homeworkers.

Tips for homeworking (speaking from experience)

Having been a permanent homeworker since 2006 and having managed a team of fellow homeworkers since 2015, I've been reflecting on what seems to work well (and what doesn't). To a large degree it's about finding what works best for you. And you will only discover that through trial and error.

1. Set some rules

I'm a creature of habit when it comes to my working day. I like to start at the same time and, where possible, take my breaks at the same time. This provides a structure that avoids the need to blur work time and home time.

Some like to leave the house in the morning, go to the shops or walk the dog, and then return home to start the working day. Others carry out a symbolic act such as putting on 'work' clothes or simply closing the door behind them when they enter the homeworking area. This creates a clear signal that the working day has started. My working day starts by making a cup of tea in my 'work mug' before heading off to my desk...

Rules at the end of the day are also important. If you can close the working day when you close your laptop, great. But if you can't and find yourself checking emails well into the evening, at least have a cut-off point (no devices after 8pm, for example) or establish device-free zones in the house to maintain balance.

I'm a creature of habit when it comes to my working day [...] This provides a structure that avoids the need to blur work time and home time.

2. Embrace interruptions (to a degree!)

When I first started working from home, I revelled in the relative peace and tranquillity. The lack of interruption. The opportunity to really get your head down and stuck in to something substantial.

I discovered that although I seemed to be super-productive in the mornings, by early to mid-afternoon I would suddenly grind to a mental halt, seemingly incapable of concentrating on anything but the simplest of tasks.

It didn't take long to realise that the lack of interruption was to blame. For as we all know, in the average office environment people are forever popping over to ask a quick question, or even just to pass the time of day. And, as well as serving an important social function, such mini-interruptions kept my mind sharper for longer. Once I started viewing my working day as a marathon, not a sprint, I started to actively embrace opportunities to break it up.

The odd ten minutes spent unloading the dishwasher, putting the washing on the line or tidying the lounge seems to make all the difference to staying productive through to the end of the working day.

Once I started viewing my working day as a marathon, not a sprint, I started to actively embrace opportunities to break it up

3. Don't be shy

In an office, many conversations begin through happenstance. Bumping into the right person at the right time. Overhearing your name mentioned in someone else's conversation. Discovering an unrealised overlap between your work and someone else's whilst waiting for the kettle to boil leading to fruitful collaborations.

This kind of serendipity is much harder to realise when working remotely. You have to make a concerted effort. Tune into it, seek it out and then actually do something to make it happen. Whether its writing the email, picking up the phone, or pinging the instant message. Unless you do so the connection is far less likely to be made.

I've also discovered that your webcam is your friend. Sure, you can talk to someone just as well with your camera turned off, but it's so much more social, more 'human', to turn it on and to be able to see the person you are talking to. Believe me, if you do end up working from home for any length of time, seeing a friendly smile from a colleague can make a huge difference to your day.

If you do end up working from home for any length of time, seeing a friendly smile from a colleague can make a huge difference to your day

4. Retain the ties that bind

Emails are too formal (and too numerous). An unscheduled phone or skype call can feel an imposition. But a quick 'hi, are you free' nudge on Skype or Teams often feels just right. It's the remote equivalent of the knock on a colleague's office door with a 'do you have five?' plea. Sometimes the question can be asked and answered in the exchange of a few quick messages, other times it seems to lead quickly and naturally to an agreement to 'have a quick chat'.

In addition, Yammer, Slack and similar platforms provide an opportunity to create social groups around specific interests, or even just places to share experiences or vent frustrations around working from home.

A quick 'hi, are you free' nudge on Skype or Teams often feels just right

5. Ask for help, don't wait for it

We are often all too good at hiding our feelings, stresses and worries from those around us, even when we see our colleagues face-to-face. Working at home, often alone for long periods of the day, can both exacerbate feelings of isolation and anxiety and make them even easier to conceal.

Don't wait, ping that message to your colleague!

Working at home [...] can [...] exacerbate feelings of isolation and anxiety

6. Trust your team

Perhaps I've just been lucky, but I've never found managing a home-based team a problem. It may have been different if I had felt the need to endlessly check in with what they were up to at any given moment, or spent my time obsessing over them starting late, leaving early or having two hour lunch breaks every day. I never did. I trusted - and still trust - the team to know what is required of them and to manage their time accordingly.

Checking in regularly with my direct reports is vital, as is the time we spend together each week as a whole team and in sub-teams. Clarity on goals and workload is important and so I operate a 'virtual open door' policy.

Yes, my diary is punctuated with meetings, but beyond those I try not to block out large portions of my calendar to work on particular tasks. Doing so can give the impression to others that I am 'busy' and shouldn't be disturbed. Whereas I would far rather face the odd interruption and know that the team feel I am there if they need me.

Clarity on goals and workload is important and so I operate a 'virtual open door' policy.

Find what works for you - homeworking trial and error

I mentioned at the beginning that finding what works for you is important. One way of doing this can be through spending a couple of minutes at the end of the working day asking yourself the following three questions:

What worked well today?

What didn't?

What might I try tomorrow?

Then, a simple rule of thumb can be applied:
Do more of what is working for you and actively change that which is not.
I hope this gives you a few ideas for things to try, and good luck!

About the author

Head of advice, Jisc

I currently head up Jisc's advice team, incorporating subject and community specialists.

We cover everything from creating self-service advice and guidance and running public training courses to developing communities of practice and providing direct support to our customers. All of which combine to deliver practical, effective and innovative solutions to universities and colleges.

It is my role to ensure the effective operation of the team, to make sure that it is closely embedded with the rest of Jisc and that we are delivering solutions to our customers that make a genuine and demonstrable difference.

0203 819 8263

steve.bailey@jisc.ac.uk

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Don't forget the human side of homeworking

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For some, working from home is already an established and welcome way of life, whilst for others a sudden and enforced period of homeworking can feel like a daunting disruption to normality. With the current coronavirus situation, homeworking finds itself in the news again. Guidance for for members around planning for coronavirus (COVID-19).

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Why use a webinar?

Learners are familiar with digital technologies in their everyday lives and are using them to support their studies. In recognising this, institutions are engaging with digital tools to provide an essential part of learner support. The types of activity that are unique to digital, combined with specific webinar features make this technology a good fit for educational purposes.

Teaching and learning

The online nature of webinars and their typical functionality offers a number of opportunities:

Enhancement of limited teaching time by providing to a wider and more dispersed audience

A flexible feature set that incorporates mixed media such as images, video, web and audio for use in presentation, discussion or support

Supports remote teaching sessions

Improves access to support for staff, students or your learning community via face-to-face settings (eg 'drop-in' or scheduled appointments)

Facilitates individual or group activity

General usage within education

Communication with many participants at once - potentially constrained by network availability and bandwidth, but not limited by physical spaces

Provide briefings where meeting face-to-face is costly in terms of time and travel

Conferences and events: eg Jisc Digifest 2015 conference - a week of live online sessions and discussion

Interviewing: as part of a research project

Meetings

Common features

Webinar applications vary in the features they offer, but most facilitate:

Recording either the entire session including all interactions or just the audio/video, for later distribution and re-use

Walkthrough tools such as screen-sharing or application sharing allowing the presenter to show-and-tell using any application they view to be shared with participants (this feature may be particularly useful for providing feedback on a task)

Communication tools e.g. text-chat, audio, voting tools and drawing tools enabling the group to ask questions, get immediate feedback, share comments and/or send private messages to individual participants

Video allowing the presenter(s) to be seen via a webcam for live delivery/broadcast

Pre-recorded video to be shown

Audio and multiple presenters can take turns using audio and open the audio to participants who wish to contribute

Case study: Abingdon and Witney College

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Why use a webinar?Learners are familiar with digital technologies in their everyday lives and are using them to support their studies. In recognising this, institutions are engaging with digital tools to provide an essential part of learner support.

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Delivering lectures online and running webinars

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Delivering lectures online and running webinars

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What are webinars?

A webinar is short for web-based seminar. A webinar is a presentation, lecture, workshop, or seminar that is transmitted over the web, instead of in person.

As a result each member of the webinar, from the presenter to the attendees, can be at a different location providing they have an internet connection.

This means you can present from your desk, your home or anywhere while your attendees can watch on their computers, tablets or even smartphones.

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How to run lectures, workshops, seminars and meetings online whilst still allowing audience interaction.

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Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

How To Be A Successful Webinar Host

Connecting with your audience through a webinar goes beyond the capabilities of social media, your website, or your professional blog. It breathes life into your eLearning content, it generates trust between you and your attendees, and it offers you the opportunity to create new connections and form prosperous professional relationships. Needless to say, being the host of your own webinar means that you have complete control over its flow and outcome.

But is this something you can do? Would you be able to deliver engaging eLearning content and interact with your audience at the same time? Could you stimulate their curiosity, inspire them, and maintain their interest up to the last minute? Of course you could. In this article, I will share 7 tips on how to be a successful webinar host so that you can be sure that you feel relaxed and highly professional while you deliver a flawless, entertaining, and stimulating webinar.

Pay attention to the sound.
Audio is undoubtedly the most important element of your webinar. To make sure that everything goes smoothly, keep in mind the following tips:

Choose the right location.
Find a quiet or, even better, a sound proof room to record. Furthermore, consider not using a wireless internet connection; instead use a land line, to avoid technical problems.

Have a technical assistant.
Speaking of technical problems, keep in mind that during your webinar you need to be focused on delivering your content. Have an assistant who knows how to handle technical issues, if they occur, in real time.

Use the right microphone.
Don't rely on the built-in microphones in your laptop or desktop computer; use external mics. If your webinar includes multiple speakers, equip yourself with a high quality speakerphone.

Practice, practice, practice.
Don't underestimate the power of practicing multiple times before going live; practice makes perfect. To make sure that your voice overs are effective, you will need to make sure that you remove every "uhm" and "err" from your vocabulary, and practicing will help you gain more speaker confidence. Ask for feedback as often as possible. Have someone to listen to you and offer you their honest opinion. Ask them to share one thing you did well and one you can improve. Is your vocal pace ok? Are you speaking clearly? How about your tone? Is it friendly or too serious and flat? Ask them to listen again and again while timing you, to make sure that you don't end up having to rush through your last slides. Furthermore, consider recording yourself and reviewing the footage to see what is working and what is not.

Start with a story.
What is the best way to introduce yourself? Certainly not reading a long bio or a slide that lists your agenda; these are ways to rather ensure that you lose your listeners' interest. Narrate a story; sharing your story and explaining what brought you there will establish trust and develop an emotional connection between you and your audience. Just remember to keep your story brief, personalize it with a few suspense elements, and conclude with a strong ending. A great trick is to also smile while you're telling your story, as it helps elevate your voice; your listeners will be able to feel your enthusiasm about the online deliverable.

Grab and hold your audience's attention.
The average attention span of a typical audience is about 10 minutes. Webinar audiences are worse; you are competing for their attention with their computer screens, their always open social media accounts, and their email inboxes. This is why it is important to not only grab their attention, but also hold it. Limit the text in your slides and avoid overloading them with bullet points. Instead, get your audience involved with an interesting mix of interactive questions, mini challenges and tasks, rich images, compelling videos, and even .

Maintain a conversational tone.
Remember that you are talking to real people, not to a machine. Personalize your webinar by:

Imagining that you're speaking to a friend or colleague.
If you have, say, 150 attendees listening, you are actually having 150 one-to-one conversations. This may sound overwhelming, so try to visualize a friendly face you are talking to.

Breaking your presentation up by using Q&A.
Q&As are a great way to maintain interactivity. No one wants to listen to one person talking endlessly, no matter how smooth is their voice.

Addressing your audience by using "you" in your sentences.
Don't say "Today I'm going to be sharing..."; instead say "Today you will learn...". Don't ask "Does anyone out there have a question?"; instead ask "Would you want to ask me something?". Utilizing the word "you" makes your audience feel more .

Using humor.
Don't be afraid to throw in a funny comment; just be sure that your is politically correct and relevant.

Use interesting real facts and examples to support your message.
Hearing real life experiences and thinking of how to apply the same solutions to one's life is one of the most effective ways to learn. Filling your webinars with multiple boring graphs and figures will not captivate your audience; using real world scenarios, case studies, and examples will. Real success stories, research, and beautiful infographics that back up information are great ways to support your message and help it get across. Explain why certain strategies work and others don't using real facts and make sure that your audience will want to remember everything you are talking about.

Remember that your voice is the connection.
Of course you will need to make pauses while you're talking. Use them, but keep them short; don't allow more than 2 or 3 seconds of silence, otherwise your audience might think that they have lost their sound. And if you are to be silent, let your listeners know. For instance, when you want to give them some time to read something, tell them "I will now let you read a few lines about...".

Create the most engaging eLearning Webinars with the Right Vendor

Find, choose and compare the top eLearning Content Development Companies for Webinars!

Webinars are here to stay. Follow these tips on how to be a successful webinar host and be sure that not only you have complete control over this indispensable eLearning tool, but also your audience keeps coming back for more.

Now that you know how to be a successful webinar host, you may be interested in learning more about eLearning narration. Read the article 7 eLearning Script Writing Tips To Perfect Your eLearning Course Narrative and discover some invaluable tips that can help you create an eLearning course narrative that is powerful and polished.

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Top 7 Tips To Be A Successful Webinar Host

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Wondering how to host a webinar? Take a look at our 7 tips to become a successful host and captivate your attendees.

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dejonghed07

As an Instructional Designer at Macomb Community College, I design, develop and facilitate online and on-ground workshops including online faculty certification and Canvas certification. I also support faculty in repurposing courses from an on-ground to an online learning environment, recommend course improvement ideas, and support faculty in using technology to facilitate learning. I obtained an Ed.S. and M.Ed. in Instructional Technology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and a B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in Dearborn, Michigan.

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Measuring student achievement of course outcomes through a variety of assessments accommodates diverse learners, promotes critical thinking and encourages academic honesty (and helps meet QM Standard 3.4). In traditional assessments, such as quizzes and tests, students select responses from the opt...

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Etudes Educause sur besoins étudiants en situation Covid

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Etudes Educause sur besoins étudiants en situation Covid

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EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: Help for Students

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, students are facing a variety of challenges in their transition to fully remote access, not only for learning but also f

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Site de Jacque Rodet pour le tutorat à distance

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Site de Jacque Rodet pour le tutorat à distance

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un article repris du blog Tad (tutorat à distance) de Jacques Rodet, une publication sous licence CC by nc nd Introduction Il est bien difficile d'échapper à l'actualité que Chat GPT a suscitée.

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The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning

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The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning

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Online learning has been studied and well documented for decades but when it will come to evaluate our reaction to the Covid-19 crisis, let’s keep in mind that what will need to be assessed will be « Emergency remote teaching ». We are responding to an emergency situation and therefore promoting choices that we would not necesseraly promote if we had time. Designing and implementing online or blended learning takes months to be done properly.

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Well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. Colleges and universities working to maintain instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic should understand those differences when evaluating this emergency remote teaching.

Credit: frankie's / Shutterstock.com © 2020

Due to the threat of COVID-19, colleges and universities are facing decisions about how to continue teaching and learning while keeping their faculty, staff, and students safe from a public health emergency that is moving fast and not well understood. Many institutions have opted to cancel all face-to-face classes, including labs and other learning experiences, and have mandated that faculty move their courses online to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. The list of institutions of higher education making this decision has been growing each day. Institutions of all sizes and types-state colleges and universities, Ivy League institutions, community colleges, and others-are moving their classes online. Bryan Alexander has curated the status of hundreds of institutions.

Moving instruction online can enable the flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere, anytime, but the speed with which this move to online instruction is expected to happen is unprecedented and staggering. Although campus support personnel and teams are usually available to help faculty members learn about and implement online learning, these teams typically support a small pool of faculty interested in teaching online. In the present situation, these individuals and teams will not be able to offer the same level of support to all faculty in such a narrow preparation window. Faculty might feel like instructional MacGyvers, having to improvise quick solutions in less-than-ideal circumstances. No matter how clever a solution might be-and some very clever solutions are emerging-many instructors will understandably find this process stressful.

The temptation to compare online learning to face-to-face instruction in these circumstances will be great. In fact, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has already called for a "grand experiment" doing exactly that. This is a highly problematic suggestion, however. First and foremost, the politics of any such debate must be acknowledged. "Online learning" will become a politicized term that can take on any number of meanings depending on the argument someone wants to advance. In talking about lessons learned when institutions moved classes online during a shutdown in South Africa, Laura Czerniewicz starts with this very lesson and what happened around the construct of "blended learning" at the time. The idea of blended learning was drawn into political agendas without paying sufficient attention to the fact that institutions would make different decisions and invest differently, resulting in widely varying solutions and results from one institution to another. With some of that hindsight as wisdom, we seek to advance some careful distinctions that we hope can inform the evaluations and reflections that will surely result from this mass move by colleges and universities.

Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.

Researchers in educational technology, specifically in the subdiscipline of online and distance learning, have carefully defined terms over the years to distinguish between the highly variable design solutions that have been developed and implemented: distance learning, distributed learning, blended learning, online learning, mobile learning, and others. Yet an understanding of the important differences has mostly not diffused beyond the insular world of educational technology and instructional design researchers and professionals. Here, we want to offer an important discussion around the terminology and formally propose a specific term for the type of instruction being delivered in these pressing circumstances: emergency remote teaching.

Many active members of the academic community, including some of us, have been hotly debating the terminology in social media, and "emergency remote teaching" has emerged as a common alternative term used by online education researchers and professional practitioners to draw a clear contrast with what many of us know as high-quality online education. Some readers may take issue with the use of the term "teaching" over choices such as "learning" or "instruction." Rather than debating all of the details of those concepts, we selected "teaching" because of its simple definitions-"the act, practice, or profession of a teacher" and "the concerted sharing of knowledge and experience,"-along with the fact that the first tasks undertaken during emergency changes in delivery mode are those of a teacher/instructor/professor.

Effective Online Education

Online education, including online teaching and learning, has been studied for decades. Numerous research studies, theories, models, standards, and evaluation criteria focus on quality online learning, online teaching, and online course design. What we know from research is that effective online learning results from careful instructional design and planning, using a systematic model for design and development. The design process and the careful consideration of different design decisions have an impact on the quality of the instruction. And it is this careful design process that will be absent in most cases in these emergency shifts.

One of the most comprehensive summaries of research on online learning comes from the book Learning Online: What Research Tells Us about Whether, When and How. The authors identify nine dimensions, each of which has numerous options, highlighting the complexity of the design and decision-making process. The nine dimensions are modality, pacing, student-instructor ratio, pedagogy, instructor role online, student role online, online communication synchrony, role of online assessments, and source of feedback (see "Online learning design options").

Online learning design options (moderating variables)

Within each of these dimensions, there are options. Complicating matters, not all of the options are equally effective. For example, decisions around class size will greatly constrain what strategies you can use. Practice and feedback, for example, are well established in the literature, but it's harder to implement this as class size grows, eventually reaching a point where it's just not possible for an instructor to provide quality feedback. In the case of synchrony, what you choose will really depend on your learners' characteristics and what best meets their needs (adult learners require more flexibility, so asynchronous is usually best, perhaps with optional synchronous sessions, whereas younger learners benefit from the structure of required synchronous sessions).

Research on types of interaction-which includes student-content, student-student, and student-instructor-is one of the more robust bodies of research in online learning. In short, it shows that the presence of each of these types of interaction, when meaningfully integrated, increases the learning outcomes. Thus, careful planning for online learning includes not just identifying the content to cover but also carefully tending to how you're going to support different types of interactions that are important to the learning process. This approach recognizes learning as both a social and a cognitive process, not merely a matter of information transmission.

Those who have built online programs over the years will attest that effective online learning aims to be a learning community and supports learners not just instructionally but with co-curricular engagement and other social supports. Consider how much infrastructure exists around face-to-face education that supports student success: library resources, housing, career services, health services, and so on. Face-to-face education isn't successful because lecturing is good. Lectures are one instructional aspect of an overall ecosystem specifically designed to support learners with formal, informal, and social resources. Ultimately, effective online education requires an investment in an ecosystem of learner supports, which take time to identify and build. Relative to other options, simple online content delivery can be quick and inexpensive, but confusing that with robust online education is akin to confusing lectures with the totality of residential education.

Typical planning, preparation, and development time for a fully online university course is six to nine months before the course is delivered. Faculty are usually more comfortable teaching online by the second or third iteration of their online courses. It will be impossible for every faculty member to suddenly become an expert in online teaching and learning in this current situation, in which lead times range from a single day to a few weeks. While there are resources to which faculty can turn for assistance, the scale of change currently being required on many campuses will stress the systems that provide those resources and most likely will surpass their capacities. Let's face it: many of the online learning experiences that instructors will be able to offer their students will not be fully featured or necessarily well planned, and there's a high probability for suboptimal implementation. We need to recognize that everyone will be doing the best they can, trying to take just the essentials with them as they make a mad dash during the emergency. Thus, the distinction is important between the normal, everyday type of effective online instruction and that which we are doing in a hurry with bare minimum resources and scant time: emergency remote teaching.

Emergency Remote Teaching

In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and that will return to that format once the crisis or emergency has abated. The primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis. When we understand ERT in this manner, we can start to divorce it from "online learning." There are many examples of other countries responding to school and university closures in a time of crisis by implementing models such as mobile learning, radio, blended learning, or other solutions that are contextually more feasible. For example, in a study on education's role in fragility and emergency situations, the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies examined four case studies. One of those cases was Afghanistan, where education was disrupted by conflict and violence and schools themselves were targets, sometimes because girls were trying to access education. In order to take children off the streets and keep them safe, radio education and DVDs were used to maintain and expand educational access and also were aimed at promoting education for girls.

What becomes apparent as we examine examples of educational planning in crises is that these situations require creative problem solving. We have to be able to think outside standard boxes to generate various possible solutions that help meet the new needs for our learners and communities. In some cases, it might even help us generate some new solutions to intractable problems, such as the dangers girls faced trying to access education in Afghanistan. Thus, it may be tempting to think about ERT as a bare-bones approach to standard instruction. In reality, it is a way of thinking about delivery modes, methods, and media, specifically as they map to rapidly changing needs and limitations in resources, such as faculty support and training.

In the present situation, the campus support teams that are usually available to help faculty members learn about and implement online learning will not be able to offer the same level of support to all faculty who need it. Faculty support teams play a critical role in the learning experiences of students by helping faculty members develop face-to-face or online learning experiences. Current support models might include full-course design support, professional development opportunities, content development, learning management system training and support, and multimedia creation in partnership with faculty experts. Faculty who seek support typically have varying levels of digital fluency and are often accustomed to one-on-one support when experimenting with online tools. The shift to ERT requires that faculty take more control of the course design, development, and implementation process. With the expectation of rapid development of online teaching and learning events and the large number of faculty in need of support, faculty development and support teams must find ways to meet the institutional need to provide instructional continuity while helping faculty develop skills to work and teach in an online environment. As such, institutions must rethink the way instructional support units do their work, at least during a crisis.

The rapid approach necessary for ERT may diminish the quality of the courses delivered. A full-course development project can take months when done properly. The need to "just get it online" is in direct contradiction to the time and effort normally dedicated to developing a quality course. Online courses created in this way should not be mistaken for long-term solutions but accepted as a temporary solution to an immediate problem. Especially concerning is the degree to which the accessibility of learning materials might not be addressed during ERT. This is but one reason that universal design for learning (UDL) should be part of all discussions around teaching and learning. UDL principles focus on the design of learning environments that are flexible, inclusive, and student-centered to ensure that all students can access and learn from the course materials, activities, and assignments.

Evaluating Emergency Remote Teaching

Institutions will certainly want to conduct evaluations of their ERT efforts, but what should they evaluate? First, let's consider what not to evaluate. A common misconception is that comparing a face-to-face course with an online version of the course constitutes a useful evaluation. This type of assessment, known as a media comparison study, provides no real value, for at least three reasons:

First, any medium is simply a way to deliver information, and one medium is not inherently better or worse than any other medium. Second, we need to better understand different media and the way people learn with different media to design effective studies. And, third, there are too many confounding variables in even the best media comparison study for the results to be valid and meaningful.

Researchers who conduct media comparison studies are looking at "the whole unique medium and [giving] little thought to each one's attributes and characteristics, to learner needs, or to psychological learning theories."

Other approaches to evaluation can be useful in this move to ERT. The success of distance and online learning experiences can be measured in a variety of ways, depending on how "success" is defined from a given stakeholder's perspective. From the faculty point of view, student learning outcomes would be of primary interest. Did learners achieve the intended knowledge, skills, and/or attitudes that were the focus of the instructional experience? Attitudinal outcomes are also possibly of interest, for students and for faculty. For students, issues such as interest, motivation, and engagement are directly connected to learner success and so would be possible evaluation foci. For faculty, attitudes toward online instruction and all that it entails can affect the perception of success.

Programmatic outcomes such as course and program completion rates, market reach, faculty time investments, impacts on promotion and tenure processes-all of these are relevant issues related to the offering of distance courses and programs. Finally, implementation resources and strategies are possible areas of evaluation inquiry, such as the reliability of selected technological delivery systems, the provision of and access to learner support systems, support for faculty professional development for online teaching pedagogies and tools, policy and governance issues related to distance program development, and quality assurance. All of these factors can influence the effectiveness of distance and online learning experiences and can serve to inform learning experience design and program development and implementation. These recommended areas of evaluation are for well-planned distance or online learning efforts and may not be appropriate in the case of ERT. Evaluating ERT will require broader questions, especially during initial implementations.

Next, let us recommend where you should focus your evaluation related to ERT efforts. The language of the CIPP model will be used for structure. CIPP is an acronym representing context, inputs, process, and products (see table 1).

Table 1. CIPP evaluation terms

"Assess needs, problems, assets, and opportunities, as well as relevant contextual conditions and dynamics"

"Assess a program's strategy, action plan, staffing arrangements, and budget for feasibility and potential cost-effectiveness to meet targeted needs and achieve goals."

"Monitor, document, assess, and report on the implementation of plans."

"Identify and assess costs and outcomes-intended and unintended, short term and long term."

In the case of ERT, institutions might want to consider evaluation questions such as the following:

Given the need to shift to remote instruction, what internal and external resources were necessary in supporting this transition? What aspects of the context (institutional, social, governmental) affected the feasibility and effectiveness of the transition? (context)

How did the university interactions with students, families, personnel, and local and government stakeholders impact perceived responsiveness to the shift to ERT? (context)

Was the technology infrastructure sufficient to handle the needs of ERT? (input)

Did the campus support staff have sufficient capacity to handle the needs of ERT? (input)

Was our ongoing faculty professional development sufficient to enable ERT? How can we enhance opportunities for immediate and flexible learning demands related to alternative approaches to instruction and learning? (input)

Where did faculty, students, support personnel, and administrators struggle the most with ERT? How can we adapt our processes to respond to such operational challenges in the future? (process)

What were the programmatic outcomes of the ERT initiative (i.e., course completion rates, aggregated grade analyses, etc.)? How can challenges related to these outcomes be addressed in support of the students and faculty impacted by these issues? (product)

How can feedback from learners, faculty, and campus support teams inform ERT needs in the future? (product)

Evaluation of ERT should be more focused on the context, input, and process elements than product (learning). Note that we are not advocating for no evaluation of whether or not learning occurred, or to what extent it occurred, but simply stressing that the urgency of ERT and all that will take to make it happen in a short time frame will be the most critical elements to evaluate during this crisis. This is being recognized by some as a few institutions are beginning to announce changing to pass/fail options rather letter grades during ERT.

Also, given the continued evidence of problems surrounding student evaluations of instruction under typical higher education experiences, we recommend that the standard, end-of-semester teaching evaluations definitely not be counted against faculty members engaged in ERT. If an institution's policy mandates that those evaluations be administered, consider amending the policy, or make sure that the results are clearly qualified with the circumstances of the term or semester.

Final Thoughts

Everyone involved in this abrupt migration to online learning must realize that these crises and disasters also create disruptions to student, staff, and faculty lives, outside their association with the university. So all of this work must be done with the understanding that the move to ERT will likely not be the priority of all those involved. Instructors and administrators are urged to consider that students might not be able to attend to courses immediately. As a result, asynchronous activities might be more reasonable than synchronous ones. Flexibility with deadlines for assignments within courses, course policies, and institutional policies should be considered. For a high-level example, the US Department of Education has relaxed some requirements and policies in the face of COVID-19.

Hopefully the COVID-19 threat will soon be a memory. When it is, we should not simply return to our teaching and learning practices prior to the virus, forgetting about ERT. There likely will be future public health and safety concerns, and in recent years, campuses have been closed due to natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, and the polar vortex. Thus, the possible need for ERT must become part of a faculty member's skill set, as well as professional development programming for any personnel involved in the instructional mission of colleges and universities.

The threat of COVID-19 has presented some unique challenges for institutions of higher education. All parties involved-students, faculty, and staff-are being asked to do extraordinary things regarding course delivery and learning that have not been seen on this scale in the lifetimes of anyone currently involved. Although this situation is stressful, when it is over, institutions will emerge with an opportunity to evaluate how well they were able to implement ERT to maintain continuity of instruction. It is important to avoid the temptation to equate ERT with online learning during those evaluations. With careful planning, officials at every campus can evaluate their efforts, allowing those involved to highlight strengths and identify weaknesses to be better prepared for future needs to implement ERT.

Notes

See, for example: "Information for Ohio State University Students, Faculty and Staff," The Ohio State University, Wexner Medical Center; "President Eisgruber Updates University on Next Steps Regarding COVID-19 to Ensure Health and Well-Being of the Entire Community," Princeton University; and Everett Community College. ↩

"Coronavirus and Higher Education Resources," Bryan Alexander blog, March 17, 2020. ↩

Laura Czerniewicz, "What We Learnt from 'Going Online' during University Shutdowns in South Africa," PhilOnEdTech, March 15, 2020. ↩

"Teaching," Merriam-Webster. ↩

Robert M. Branch and Tonia A. Dousay, "Survey of Instructional Design Models," Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), 2015. ↩

Robert M. Bernard, Philip C. Abrami, Eugene Borokhovski, C. Anne Wade, Rana M. Tamim, Michael A. Surkes, and Edward Clement Bethel, "A Meta-Analysis of Three Types of Interaction Treatments in Distance Education," Review of Educational Research 79, no. 3 (2009): 1,243-89. ↩

Lynn Davies and Denise Bentrovato, International Institute for Educational Planning (2011). "Understanding Education's Role in Fragility; Synthesis of Four Situational Analyses of Education and Fragility: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Liberia,"↩

See "UDL On Campus," ↩

"Guidance for Interruptions of Study Related to Coronavirus (COVID-19)," Federal Student Aid, Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP), March 20, 2020. ↩

Elin Johnson, "As Fires Rage, More Campuses Close," InsideHigherEd, October 29, 2019; Jenni Fink, "Florida Universities Cancelling Classes, Closing Campus Ahead of Potential Category 4 Hurricane Dorian," Newsweek, August 29, 2019; and Perry Samson, "The Coronavirus and Class Broadcasts," EDUCAUSE Review, March 3, 2020. ↩

Charles B. Hodges is a Professor of Instructional Technology at Georgia Southern University.

Stephanie Moore is an Assistant Professor of Instructional Design and Technology in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Barbara B. Lockee is a Professor of Instructional Design and Technology, and Provost Faculty Fellow, at Virginia Tech.

Torrey Trust is an Associate Professor of Learning Technology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

M. Aaron Bond is Senior Director, Professional Development Network and Faculty Digital Fluency at Virginia Tech.

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the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning

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The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning

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Well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. Colleges and univ

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Kathryn E. Perez, Monitoring Editor

Educational videos provide an important content-delivery tool in many classes. Effective use of video is enhanced when instructors consider cognitive load, student engagement, and active learning. This essay reviews literature relevant to these elements and suggests practical ways instructors can use these principles when using video as an educational tool.

Abstract

Educational videos have become an important part of higher education, providing an important content-delivery tool in many flipped, blended, and online classes. Effective use of video as an educational tool is enhanced when instructors consider three elements: how to manage cognitive load of the video; how to maximize student engagement with the video; and how to promote active learning from the video. This essay reviews literature relevant to each of these principles and suggests practical ways instructors can use these principles when using video as an educational tool.

Video has become an important part of higher education. It is integrated as part of traditional courses, serves as a cornerstone of many blended courses, and is often the main information-delivery mechanism in online courses. Several meta-analyses have shown that technology can enhance learning (e.g., Means et al., 2010; Schmid et al., 2014), and multiple studies have shown that video, specifically, can be a highly effective educational tool (e.g., Allen and Smith, 2012; Kay, 2012; Lloyd and Robertson, 2012; Rackaway, 2012; Hsin and Cigas, 2013; Stockwell et al., 2015). Video may have particular value for student preparation in biology classes, in part because students may find it more engaging ( Stockwell et al., 2015) and because it can be well suited to illuminating the abstract or hard-to-visualize phenomena that are the focus of so many biology classes (e.g., Dash et al., 2016; see Video Views and Reviews features in CBE-Life Sciences Education for other examples). The medium is not inherently effective, however; Guo et al. (2014) have shown that students often disregard large segments of educational videos, while MacHardy and Pardos (2015) demonstrate that some videos contribute little to student performance. What, then, are the principles that allow instructors to choose or develop videos that are effective in moving students toward the desired learning outcomes? Consideration of three elements for video design and implementation can help instructors maximize video's utility in the biology classroom:

Together, these elements provide a solid base for the development and use of video as an effective educational tool.

COGNITIVE LOAD

One of the primary considerations when constructing educational materials, including video, is cognitive load. Cognitive load theory, initially articulated by Sweller (1988, 1989, 1994), suggests that memory has several components. Sensory memory is transient, collecting information from the environment. Information from sensory memory may be selected for temporary storage and processing in working memory, which has very limited capacity. This processing is a prerequisite for encoding into long-term memory, which has virtually unlimited capacity. Because working memory is very limited, the learner must be selective about what information from sensory memory to pay attention to during the learning process, an observation that has important implications for creating educational materials.

Based on this model of memory, cognitive load theory suggests that any learning experience has three components. The first of these is intrinsic load, which is inherent to the subject under study and is determined in part by the degrees of connectivity within the subject. The common example given to illustrate a subject with low intrinsic load is a word pair (e.g., blue = azul); grammar, on the other hand, is a subject with a high intrinsic load due to its many levels of connectivity and conditional relationships. In an example from biology, learning the names of the stages of mitosis would have lower intrinsic load than understanding the process of cell cycle control. The second component of any learning experience is germane load, which is the level of cognitive activity necessary to reach the desired learning outcome-for example, to make the comparisons, do the analysis, and elucidate the steps necessary to master the lesson. The ultimate goal of these activities is for the learner to incorporate the subject under study into a schema of richly connected ideas. The third component of a learning experience is extraneous load, which is cognitive effort that does not help the learner toward the desired learning outcome. It is often characterized as load that arises from a poorly designed lesson (e.g., confusing instructions, extra information) but may also be load that arises due to stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. These concepts are more fully articulated and to some extent critiqued in an excellent review by deJong (2010).

These definitions have implications for design of educational materials and experiences. Specifically, instructors should seek to minimize extraneous cognitive load and should consider the intrinsic cognitive load of the subject when constructing learning experiences, carefully structuring them when the material has high intrinsic load. Because working memory has a limited capacity, and information must be processed by working memory to be encoded in long-term memory, it is important to prompt working memory to accept, process, and send to long-term memory only the most crucial information ( Ibrahim et al., 2012).

The cognitive theory of multimedia learning builds on the cognitive load theory, noting that working memory has two channels for information acquisition and processing: a visual/pictorial channel and an auditory/verbal-processing channel ( Mayer, 2001; Mayer and Moreno, 2003). Although each channel has limited capacity, the use of the two channels can facilitate the integration of new information into existing cognitive structures. Using both channels maximizes working memory's capacity-but either channel can be overwhelmed by high cognitive load. Thus, design strategies that manage the cognitive load for both channels in multimedia learning materials promise to enhance learning.

These theories give rise to several recommendations about educational videos (see Table 1 ). Based on the premise that effective learning experiences minimize extraneous cognitive load, optimize germane cognitive load, and manage intrinsic cognitive lead, four effective practices emerge.

TABLE 1.

Element to consider

Recommendation

Rationale

Examples

Packaging video with interactive questions.

May increase germane cognitive load, improve memory via the testing effect, and improve student self-assessment.

Integrate questions into videos with HapYak or Zaption, as described by Obodo and Baskauf (2015)

Follow short videos with interactive questions within an LMS, as done by Keithly and colleagues (2015), or within Google Forms, as done by Caudel and colleagues (2015)

Use guiding questions.

May increase germane cognitive load, reduce extraneous cognitive load, and improve student self-assessment.

Senchina (2011) provides guiding questions for videos designed to introduce physiology students to professional ethics related to experimenter-subject interactions, such as the following: "Observe the subject's behavior and responsiveness during the dehydration period. What changes as the subject becomes dehydrated? What problems does he have? Observe the experimenters' behavior and responsiveness as dehydration progresses. What do they do differently? Why?"

Make video part of a larger homework assignment.

May increase student motivation, germane cognitive load, and student self-assessment.

Package videos with a series of questions or problems that ask students to apply the concepts from the videos. iBiology Education videos (e.g., What Can You Learn with a Light Microscope?) provide one example ( iBiology, 2016)

Signaling, which is also known as cueing ( deKoning et al., 2009), is the use of on-screen text or symbols to highlight important information. For example, signaling may be provided by the appearance of two or three key words ( Mayer and Johnson, 2008; Ibrahim et al., 2012), a change in color or contrast ( deKoning et al., 2009), or a symbol that draws attention to a region of a screen (e.g., an arrow; deKoning et al., 2009). By highlighting the key information, signaling helps direct learner attention, thus targeting particular elements of the video for processing in the working memory. This can reduce extraneous load by helping novice learners with the task of determining which elements within a complex tool are important, and it can also increase germane load by emphasizing the organization of and connections within the information. Mayer and Moreno (2003) and deKoning et al. (2009) have shown that this approach improves students' ability to retain and transfer new knowledge from animations, and Ibrahim et al. (2012) have shown that these effects extend to video.

The benefits of signaling are complemented by segmenting, or the chunking of information in a video lesson. Segmenting allows learners to engage with small pieces of new information and gives them control over the flow of new information. As such, it manages intrinsic load and can also increase germane load by emphasizing the structure of the information. Segmenting can be accomplished both by making shorter videos and by including "click forward" pauses within a video, such as using YouTube Annotate or HapYak to provide students with a question and prompting them to click forward after completion. Both types of segmenting have been shown to be important for student engagement with videos ( Zhang et al., 2006; Guo et al., 2014) and learning from video ( Zhang et al., 2006; Ibrahim et al., 2012).

Weeding, or the elimination of interesting but extraneous information that does not contribute to the learning goal, can provide further benefits. For example, music, complex backgrounds, or extra features within an animation require the learner to judge whether he or she should be paying attention to them, which increases extraneous load and can reduce learning. Importantly, information that increases extraneous load changes as the learner moves from novice toward expert status. That is, information that may be extraneous for a novice learner may actually be helpful for a more expert-like learner, while information that is essential for a novice may serve as an already known distraction for an expert. Thus, it is important that the instructor consider his or her learners when weeding educational videos, including information that is necessary for their processing but eliminating information that they do not need to reach the learning goal and that may overload their working memory. Ibrahim et al. (2012) has shown that this treatment can improve retention and transfer of new information from video.

Finally, the utility of video lessons can be maximized by matching modality to content. By using both the audio/verbal channel and the visual/pictorial channel to convey new information, and by fitting the particular type of information to the most appropriate channel, instructors can enhance the germane cognitive load of a learning experience. For example, showing an animation of a process on screen while narrating it uses both channels to elucidate the process, thus giving the learner dual and complementary streams of information to highlight features that should be processed in working memory. In contrast, showing the animation while also showing printed text uses only the visual channel and thus overloads this channel and impedes learning ( Mayer and Moreno, 2003). In another example, using a "talking head" video to explain a complex process makes productive use only of the verbal channel (because watching the speaker does not convey additional information), whereas a Khan Academy-style tutorial that provides symbolic sketches to illustrate the verbal explanation uses both channels to give complementary information. Using both channels to convey appropriate and complementary information has been shown to increase students' retention and ability to transfer information ( Mayer and Moreno, 2003) and to increase student engagement with videos ( Guo et al., 2014; Thomson et al., 2014).

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Another lens through which to consider educational video is student engagement. The idea is simple: if students do not watch videos, they cannot learn from them. Lessons on promoting student engagement derive from earlier research on multimedia instruction and more recent work on videos used within MOOCs (massive open online courses; see Table 1 ).

The first and most important guideline for maximizing student attention to educational video is to keep it short. Guo and colleagues examined the length of time students watched streaming videos within four edX MOOCs, analyzing results from 6.9 million video-watching sessions ( Guo et al., 2014). They observed that the median engagement time for videos less than 6 minutes long was close to 100%-that is, students tended to watch the whole video (although there are significant outliers; see the paper for more complete information). As videos lengthened, however, student engagement dropped, such that the median engagement time with 9- to 12-minute videos was ∼50%, and the median engagement time with 12- to 40-minute videos was ∼20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was 6 minutes. Making videos longer than 6-9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort. In complementary work, Risko et al. (2012) showed 1-hour videos to students in a lab setting, probing student self-reports of mind wandering four times in each lecture and testing student retention of lecture material after the lecture. They found that student report of mind wandering increased and retention of material decreased across the video lecture ( Risko et al., 2012).

Another method to keep students engaged is to use a conversational style. Called the personalization principle by Mayer, the use of conversational rather than formal language during multimedia instruction has been shown to have a large effect on students' learning, perhaps because a conversational style encourages students to develop a sense of social partnership with the narrator that leads to greater engagement and effort ( Mayer, 2008). In addition, some research suggests that it can be important for video narrators to speak relatively quickly and with enthusiasm. In their study examining student engagement with MOOC videos, Guo and colleagues observed that student engagement was dependent on the narrator's speaking rate, with student engagement increasing as speaking rate increased ( Guo et al., 2014). It can be tempting for video narrators to speak slowly to help ensure that students grasp important ideas, but including in-video questions, "chapters," and speed control can give students control over this feature-and increasing narrator speed appears to promote student interest.

Instructors can also promote student engagement with educational videos by creating or packaging them in a way that conveys that the material is for these students in this class. One of the benefits for instructors in using educational videos can be the ability to reuse them for other classes and other semesters. When creating or choosing videos, however, it is important to consider whether they were created for the type of environment in which they will be used. For example, a face-to-face classroom session that is videotaped and presented within an online class may feel less engaging than a video that is created with an online environment as the initial target ( Guo et al., 2014). A video's adaptability can be enhanced, however: when reusing videos, instructors can package them for a particular class using text outside the video to contextualize the relevance for that particular class and lesson.

ACTIVE LEARNING

As biology educators, we have abundant evidence that active learning in the classroom provides clear advantages over passive encounters with course material through lecture (e.g., Knight and Wood, 2005; Haak et al., 2011; Freeman et al., 2014). Similarly, elements that promote cognitive activity during video viewing can enhance student learning from this medium (see Table 1 ).

Schacter and Szpunar (2015) propose a conceptual framework for enhancing learning from educational videos that identifies online learning as a type of self-regulated learning. Self-regulation of learning requires students to monitor their own learning, to identify learning difficulties, and to respond to these judgments; in other words, it requires students to actively build and interrogate mental models, practicing metacognition about the learning process. Novices within a field, however, have difficulty accurately judging their understanding, often overestimating their learning ( Bjork et al., 2013). This problem may be enhanced when new information is delivered via video, which students report as easier to learn and more memorable than text ( Salomon, 1994; Choi and Johnson, 2005). Incorporating prompts for students to engage in the type of cognitive activity necessary to process information-to engage in active learning-can help them build and test mental models, explicitly converting video watching from a passive to an active-learning event. The means to do this can vary, but the following strategies have demonstrated success in some contexts.

Package Video with Interactive Questions

Szpunar et al. compared the test performance of students who answered questions interpolated between ∼5 min video lectures and students who did unrelated arithmetic problems between the videos, finding that the students in the interpolated question group performed significantly better on subsequent tests of the material and reported less mind wandering ( Szpunar et al., 2013). Students who received the interpolated questions also exhibited increased note taking, reported the learning event as less "mentally taxing," and reported less anxiety about the final test. These results suggest that interpolated questions may improve student learning from video through several mechanisms. First, they may help to optimize cognitive load by decreasing extraneous load (i.e., anxiety about an upcoming test) and increasing germane load (i.e., note taking, reduced mind wandering). Further, interpolated questions may produce some of their benefit by tapping into the "testing effect," in which recall of important information strengthens students' memory of and ability to use the recalled information ( Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Brame and Biel, 2015). Finally, interpolated questions may help students engage in more accurate self-assessment ( Szpunar et al., 2014), an important benefit for a medium that students may perceive as "easier" than text. Tools like HapYak and Zaption can also allow instructors to embed questions directly into video and to give specific feedback based on student response. This approach has similar benefits to interpolated questions in increasing student performance on subsequent assessments ( Vural, 2013) and has the additional benefit of making the video interactive (see following section).

Use Interactive Features That Give Students Control

Zhang and colleagues compared the impact of interactive and noninteractive video on students' learning in a computer science course ( Zhang et al., 2006). Students who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backward when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction. One simple way to achieve this level of interactivity is by using YouTube Annotate, HapYak, or another tool to introduce labeled "chapters" into a video. This not only has the benefit of giving students control but also can demonstrate the organization, increasing the germane load of the lesson.

Use Guiding Questions

Lawson and colleagues examined the impact of guiding questions on students' learning from a video about social psychology in an introductory psychology class ( Lawson et al., 2006). Building on work from Kreiner (1997), they had students in some sections of the course watch the video with no special instructions, while students in other sections of the course were provided with eight guiding questions to consider while watching. The students who answered the guiding questions while watching the video scored significantly higher on a later test. Guiding questions may serve as an implicit means to share learning objectives with students, thus increasing the germane load of the learning task and reducing the extraneous load by focusing student attention on important elements. This strategy is often used to increase student learning from reading assignments (e.g., Tanner, 2012; Round and Campbell, 2013), and it can translate effectively to helping students learn from video.

Make Video Part of a Larger Homework Assignment

MacHardy and Pardos (2015) have developed a model relating educational video characteristics to students' performance on subsequent assessments. One observation from their analysis of Khan Academy videos was that videos that offered the greatest benefits to students were highly relevant to associated exercises. This result is supported by results observed in a "teaching-as-research" project at Vanderbilt University (for background on teaching as research, see www.cirtl.net). Specifically, Faizan Zubair participated in the BOLD Fellows program, in which graduate students develop online learning materials for incorporation into a faculty mentor's course and then investigate their impact in teaching-as-research projects. Zubair developed videos on that were embedded in a larger homework assignment in Paul Laibinis's chemical engineering class and found that students valued the videos and that the videos improved students' understanding of difficult concepts when compared with a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework ( Zubair and Laibinis, 2015; see also Summary).

The important thing to keep in mind is that watching a video can be a passive experience, much as reading can be. To make the most of our educational videos, we need to help students do the processing and self-evaluation that will lead to the learning we want to see.

SUMMARY

Video may provide a significant means to improve student learning and enhance student engagement in biology courses ( Allen and Smith, 2012; Kay, 2012; Lloyd and Robertson, 2012; Rackaway, 2012; Hsin and Cigas, 2013; Stockwell et al., 2015). To maximize the benefit from educational videos, however, it is important to keep in mind the three key components of cognitive load, elements that impact engagement, and elements that promote active learning. Luckily, consideration of these elements converges on a few recommendations:

Keep videos brief and targeted on learning goals.

Use audio and visual elements to convey appropriate parts of an explanation; consider how to make these elements complementary rather than redundant.

Use signaling to highlight important ideas or concepts.

Use a conversational, enthusiastic style to enhance engagement.

Embed videos in a context of active learning by using guiding questions, interactive elements, or associated homework assignments.

REFERENCES

Caudel D, Grundstrom E, Stewart S. AstroNavigation. 2015. my.vanderbilt.edu/astronav/overview/coordinates (accessed 16 May 2016)

Guo PJ, Kim J, Robin R. L@S'14 Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning at Scale. New York: ACM; 2014. How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos; pp. 41-50. [Google Scholar]

iBiology. iBioEducation: iBiology Courses. 2016. [www.ibiology.org/ibioeducation.html (accessed 16 May 2016) Google Scholar]

Keithly M, Sebastian T, Woelfle M, Friedman K. Blending it up: active learning in a STEM classroom through the use of online materials, BOLD Fellows Project Gallery. 2015. https://vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/bsci-2210-principles-of-genetics (accessed 15 October 2016)

MacHardy Z, Pardos ZA. Evaluating the relevance of educational videos using BKT and big data. In: Santos OC, Boticario JG, Romero C, Pechenizkiy M, Merceron A, Mitros P, Luna JM, Mihaescu C, Moreno P, Hershkovitz A, Ventura S, Desmarais M, editors. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Madrid, Spain. 2015. [http://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2015/index.php?page=proceedings (accessed 15 October 2016) Google Scholar]

Mayer RE. Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2001. [Google Scholar]

Means B, Toyama Y, Murphy R, Bakia M, Jones K. Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Washington, DC: US Department of Education; 2010. [Google Scholar]

Obodo U, Baskauf S. BSCI 111b: Introduction to Biological Sciences Laboratory, BOLD Fellows Project Gallery. 2015. https://vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/bsci-111b-introduction-to-biological-sciences-laboratory (accessed 16 May 2016)

Salomon G. Hillsdale, NJ: 1994. Interaction of media, cognition, and learning. [Google Scholar]

Zubair F, Laibinis P. Interactive videos to enhance student understanding of thermodynamic efficiency. 2015. Presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, held 11 November 2015 in Salt Lake City, UT.

Articles from CBE Life Sciences Education are provided here courtesy of American Society for Cell Biology

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Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content

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Educational videos provide an important content-delivery tool in many classes. Effective use of video is enhanced when instructors consider cognitive load, student engagement, and active learning. This essay reviews literature relevant to these elements ...

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Creating videos is a daunting task that often takes copious amounts of time. In order to make effective videos and streamline their use for your online classes, keep in mind these useful strategies that will allow you to reuse videos in multiple courses.
Relevant Salutations
When introducing the topic of your video, it is helpful to say "hello" or "welcome to (course/module)" and move into the content. If you say "good morning" or "good afternoon," those phrases may only be applicable to you at that given moment and not when your students view the video. Starting off with a specific time reference, such as morning or evening, can jar students' attention and turn them off from the content in general, as the time reference may not be applicable to them.
Consistent Social Presence
Increasing social presence through instructor-led videos is an effective strategy for establishing a welcoming online environment. One strategy for increasing social presence is providing a welcome video that introduces the instructor to their students. When instructors share information about themselves or their families, it is best practice to reference years instead of length of time. For example, if you have a daughter who is 5 years old during the recording of the video, it is best to reference your daughter being born in 2012 versus how cute she is at 5 years old.
Recording Length
Instructional videos should be 20 minutes or less to keep students engaged. If 20 minutes is not enough time to cover the content, try breaking up the content into smaller segmented videos. Plus, when updating content in instructional videos, the smaller the video, the easier it is to update information.
Foster Active Listening
Unlike watching a TV show, instructional videos do not usually capture the audience, but there are some strategies that can be implemented to engage your learners. You need to fluctuate your voice and inflect on key details. Showing excitement, both in your voice and actions, will spark excitement in your learners. Also, some lecture recording software programs, such as Camtasia Studio, allow students to interact with the video. This option is also a great way to integrate informal self-assessment, which allows students to test their understanding of content.
Labeling Videos
Videos are best identified or referenced by topics versus where they fall within the course. Instead of giving videos a file name like Video 2 or Module 2 Video, use titles like "Educational Theories: Servant Leadership," which will allow you to reuse the video in different courses and/or at different points within a course.
Referencing Campus Resources
Videos should provide concrete examples to establish a baseline for all students. However, to increase the longevity of your videos, avoid identifying specific names. For example, if you are teaching students about a campus resource such as library personnel, instead of saying "visit Sarah Sparks in the library," you could say, "Speak to the campus reference librarian." Then, below the video or within your course module, provide the direct references (e.g., Sarah Sparks) in written format.
Geographical Examples
Providing examples of current events to create concrete examples strengthens students' understanding, but it is important to keep in mind that some local events might not resonate with all your students. For example, referencing resources within your community may not be applicable to others in different geographical locations. If the instructor lives by the ocean and she references the sea lice epidemic, someone in the Midwest may not be able to relate. Also, while the current event may be relevant at the time of the recording, it will diminish the life expectancy and relevancy for using the video in later courses.

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Creating effective instructional videos for online courses

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Salena Rabidoux and Amy Rottmann provide instructors easy-to-follow tips and techniques for developing evergreen videos that engage students.

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Video has become an important component of many flipped, blended, and online classes, but ensuring that videos are helping students involves taking a deeper look at video design and production. The key to designing effective educational videos is to begin with clear instructional intentions and follow research-based design principles. Instructors should consider the four general principles that are explained below.

On this page:

Work from a storyboard.

A storyboard is an essential tool in video design. Begin with a storyboard to map out an outline of your text and visuals to: plan what you will say, outline your visual elements, describe how you will apply design principles, and to determine the sequence of material. This will save a lot of time during production. If you write a complete script, you will also have a transcript to support learners who may experience accessibility issues with the video format. Here's a sample storyboard template.

Work from a script.

A script for your educational video will help condense and organize your content. Adopt a conversational tone and practice reading the script aloud. Edit passages that prevent a smooth delivery. Keep in mind the rate of speech, aiming for about 130 words per minute. See Script Writing Best Practices.

Apply course design principles.

Is video the best option? When planning your course, consider whether a video is the best way for your students to learn the content. Students learn more effectively when they are actively involved in constructing their own meaning around information ( Brooks and Brooks, 1993), so before you embark on a video production effort, ask yourself if there are more active ways for your students to engage with the material.

What learning will the video support? Re-examine the learning objectives and what you want your students to achieve. What are your goals? Video can be used to introduce new content, for review, or to reinforce essential content that has been previously introduced. Consider whether you are using your video to deliver course facts and concepts, or to teach skills. Make the purpose of the video clear to help students focus their learning.

How will learning be reinforced? Provide students with opportunities to reinforce learning by linking the viewing of the video to activities such as short quizzes, reflection activities, or discussion posts.

Reduce cognitive processing demand.

To understand how people learn with video, let's consider the principle of multimedia learning. This is the assertion that humans learn more deeply from a combination of words (spoken text or printed text) and pictures (illustrations, charts, photos, animation, or video) than from words alone. Multimedia instruction is therefore defined as "presenting words and pictures that are intended to foster learning" (Mayer, 2009). The cognitive theory of multimedia learning makes three assumptions about how the mind works: there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information; channel capacity is very limited and can hold very little information for short periods of time; and that learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information (see diagram below).

Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2009)
Multimedia content that doesn't directly contribute to learning can overload and exceed the processing capacity of the cognitive system, this is known as cognitive overload (Sweller, 1988).

To support learning with video, you should be intentional about your design in order to reduce extraneous processing and to manage the essential processing of the material (Mayer and Moreno, 2003; Mayer, 2008). Cognitive psychologist, Richard Mayer proposes several principles to improve multimedia instruction through intentional design. Below is a selection of these principles that are easy to quickly implement in instructional videos.

Coherence principle - limit extraneous content. Learning is better when words, pictures, and sounds unrelated to the essential material are excluded rather than included. Keep your content simple, limiting your words and visual elements to only what is strictly necessary to achieve learning.

Segmenting principle - break down the content in your video. Learning is better when content is presented in learner-paced segments. Create multiple, short, single-concept videos of 6 minutes or less (Guo, et al, 2014) rather than one long one.

Contiguity principle - coordinate corresponding content. Learning is better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the screen (spatial contiguity) and when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously (temporal contiguity). For example, place printed words near corresponding parts of graphics to reduce need for visual scanning.

Signaling principle - provide cues for how to process the material. Learning is better when learners don't have to look for the essential material, but cues are used to direct their attention to the critical aspects of the content. Signal verbal material using an outline, headings, highlighting, and use pointer words (such as first, second, third on your slides. Signal visual material with arrows, flashing, spotlighting, and other annotations.

You can review all twelve principles in Applying the Science of Learning: Evidence Based Principles for the Design of Multimedia Instruction (Mayer, 2008).

Make videos engaging.

If videos are not engaging, students are less likely to watch the entire video and complete post-video activities. Here are some research-supported recommendations to help increase engagement (Guo, et al, 2014).

Make shorter videos. Segment videos into chunks shorter than 6 minutes. Shorter videos also allow you to incorporate short activities at crucial points for students to apply what they viewed. These shorter videos can also become units that you can move around, combine, or use independently.

Be yourself - make it personal. Videos produced with a more personal feel can be more engaging than highly-produced professional recordings. Speak quickly and in a conversational style with high enthusiasm, rather than a formal style. Introduce yourself and what the segment will cover at the beginning of each video. When speaking to the camera, maintain eye contact, as if your students are watching.

Include talking head video. Video that include visuals of the instructor talking with slides are more engaging than slides alone. Instructor presence is engaging for students, so try mixing visual content such as slides, graphics and screencasts with video of the instructor talking.

Add drawings and animations. Khan academy-style tablet drawing tutorials are more engaging than PowerPoint slides. The visual flow of animated text and graphics draw and keep the learner's attention for longer.

References

Brooks, J. G., & Brooks, M. G. (1993). In search of understanding: the case for constructivist classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Design principles for multimedia learning (Mayer). (n.d.). Retrieved September 15, 2017, from http://www.digitaledidactiek.be/modules/2-ontwerp/uitdieping/mayer/?lang=en .

Guo, P., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos, 2014.

Hazlett, C. (2015, July 22). How MOOC Video Production Affects Student Engagement. Retrieved September 15, 2017, from http://blog.edx.org/how-mooc-video-production-affects

Mayer, R. E. (2008). Applying the science of learning: Evidence-based principles for the design of multimedia instruction. American Psychologist, 63(8), 760-769.

Mayer, R. E. (2012). Multimedia learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285

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Video has become an important component of many flipped, blended, and online classes, but ensuring that videos are helping students involves taking a deeper look at video design and production. The key to designing effective educational videos is to begin with clear instructional intentions and follow research-based design principles.

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Cite this guide: Brame, C.J. (2015). Effective educational videos. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/.

Video has become an important part of higher education. It is integrated as part of traditional courses, serves as a cornerstone of many blended courses, and is often the main information delivery mechanism in MOOCs. Several meta-analyses have shown that technology can enhance learning (e.g., Schmid et al., 2014), and multiple studies have shown that video, specifically, can be a highly effective educational tool (e.g., Kay, 2012; Allen and Smith, 2012; Lloyd and Robertson, 2012; Rackaway, 2012; Hsin and Cigas, 2013). In order for video to serve as a productive part of a learning experience, however, it is important for the instructor to consider three elements for video design and implementation:

Together, these considerations provide a solid base for the development and use of video as an effective educational tool.

Cognitive load

One of the primary considerations when constructing educational materials, including video, is cognitive load. Cognitive Load Theory, initially articulated by Sweller and colleagues (1988, 1989, 1994), suggests that memory has several components (see the figure). Sensory memory is transient, collecting information from the environment. Information from sensory memory may be selected for temporary storage and processing in working memory, which has very limited capacity. This processing is a prerequisite for encoding into long-term memory, which has virtually unlimited capacity. Because working memory is very limited, the learner must be selective about what information from sensory memory to pay attention to during the learning process, an observation that has important implications for creating educational materials.

Based on this model of memory, Cognitive Load Theory suggests that any learning experience has three components (see the figure). The first of these is intrinsic load, which is inherent to the subject under study and is determined in part by the degrees of connectivity within the subject. The common example given to illustrate a subject with low intrinsic load is a word pair (e.g., blue = azul), whereas grammar is a subject with a high intrinsic load due to its many levels of connectivity and conditional relationships. The second component of any learning experience is germane load, which is the level of cognitive activity necessary to reach the desired learning outcome- e.g., to make the comparisons, do the analysis, elucidate the steps necessary to master the lesson. The ultimate goal of these activities is for the learner to incorporate the subject under study into a schema of richly connected ideas. The third component of a learning experience is extraneous load, which is cognitive effort that does not help the learner toward the desired learning outcome. It is often characterized as load that arises from a poorly designed lesson (e.g., confusing instructions, extra information), but may also be load that arises due to stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. These concepts are more fully articulated and to some extent critiqued in an excellent review by de Jong (2010).

These definitions have implications for design of educational materials and experiences. Specifically, instructors should seek to minimize extraneous cognitive load and should consider the intrinsic cognitive load of the subject when constructing learning experiences, carefully structuring them when the material has high intrinsic load. Because working memory has a limited capacity, and information must be processed by working memory to be encoded in long term memory, it's important to prompt working memory to accept, process, and send to long-term memory only the most crucial information (Ibrahim et al., 2012).

Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning

The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning builds on the Cognitive Load Theory, noting that working memory has two channels for information acquisition and processing: a visual/pictorial channel and an auditory/verbal processing channel (Mayer and Moreno, 2003). Although each channel has limited capacity, the use of the two channels can facilitate the integration of new information into existing cognitive structures. By using both channels, working memory's capacity is maximized-but either channel can be overwhelmed by high cognitive load. Thus design strategies that manage the cognitive load for both channels in multimedia learning materials promise to enhance learning. In addition to the two key assumptions of dual-channel processing and limited working memory capacity, the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning also articulates the goal of any learning as "meaningful learning," which requires cognitive processing that includes paying attention to the presented material, mentally organizing the presented material into a coherent structure, and integrating the presented material with existing knowledge (Mayer and Moreno 2003) 1.

Recommendations

These theories give rise to several recommendations about educational videos. Based on the premise that effective learning experiences minimize extraneous cognitive load, optimize germane cognitive load, and manage intrinsic cognitive lead, four effective practices emerge:

Signaling, which is also known as cueing (deKoning et al., 2009), is the use of on-screen text or symbols to highlight important information. For example, signaling may be provided by the appearance of two or three key words (e.g., Mayer and Johnson, 2008; Ibrahim et al., 2012), a change in color or contrast (e.g., deKoning et al., 2009), or a symbol that draws attention to a region of a screen (e.g., an arrow; deKoning et al., 2009). By highlighting the key information, it helps direct learner attention, thus targeting particular elements of the video for processing in the working memory. This can reduce extraneous load by helping novice learners with the task of determining which elements within a complex tool are important, and it can also increase germane load by emphasizing the organization of and connections within the information. Mayer and Moreno (2003) and deKoning et al. (2009) have shown that this approach improves students ability to retain and transfer new knowledge from animations, and Ibrahim et al. (2012) have shown that these effects extend to video.

Segmenting is the chunking of information to allow learners to engage with small pieces of new information as well as to give them control over the flow of new information. As such, it manages intrinsic load and can also increase germane load by emphasizing the structure of the information. Segmenting can be accomplished both by making shorter videos and by including "click forward" pauses within a video, such as using YouTube Annotate or HapYak to provide students with a question and prompting them to click forward after completion. Both types of segmenting have been shown to be important for student engagement with videos (Guo et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2005), and learning from video (Ibrahim 2012; Zhang et al., 2006).

Weeding is the elimination of interesting but extraneous information from the video, that is, information that does not contribute to the learning goal. For example, music, complex backgrounds, or extra features within an animation require the learner to judge whether he should be paying attention to them, which increases extraneous load and can reduce learning. Importantly, information that increases extraneous load changes as the learner moves from novice toward expert status. That is, information that may be extraneous for a novice learner may actually be helpful for a more expert-like learner, while information that is essential for a novice may serve as an already-known distraction for an expert. Thus, it's important that the instructor consider her learners when weeding educational videos, including information that is necessary for their processing but eliminating information that they don't need to reach the learning goal and that may overload their working memory. Ibrahim (2012) has shown that this treatment can improve retention and transfer of new information from video.

Matching modality is the process of using both the audio/verbal channel and the visual/pictorial channel to convey new information, fitting the particular type of information to the most appropriate channel. For example, showing an animation of a process on screen while narrating it uses both channels to elucidate the process, thus giving the learner dual and complementary streams of information to highlight features that should be processed in working memory. In contrast, showing the animation while also showing printed text uses only the visual channel and thus overloads this channel and impedes learning (Mayer and Moreno, 2003). In another example, using a "talking head" video to explain a complex process makes productive use only of the verbal channel (because watching the speaker does not convey additional information), whereas a Khan-style tutorial that provides symbolic sketches to illustrate the verbal explanation uses both channels to give complementary information. Using both channels to convey appropriate and complementary information has been shown to increase students' retention and ability to transfer information (Mayer and Moreno, 2003) and to increase student engagement with videos (Thomson et al., 2014; Guo et al., 2014).

The table below gives a brief summary of how and why to use these practices.

Student engagement

One of the most important aspects of creating educational videos is to include elements that help promote student engagement. If students don't watch the videos, they can't learn from them. Lessons on promoting student engagement derive from earlier research on multimedia instruction as well as more recent work on videos used within MOOCs.

Keep it short. Guo and colleagues examined the length of time students watched streaming videos within four edX MOOCs, analyzing results from 6.9 million video watching sessions (2014). They observed that the median engagement time for videos less than six minutes long was close to 100%-that is, students tended to watch the whole video (although there are significant outliers; see the paper for more complete information). As videos lengthened, however, student engagement dropped off, such that the median engagement time with 9-12 minute videos was ~50% and the median engagement time with 12-40 minute videos was ~20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was six minutes. Making videos longer than 6-9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort.

Use a conversational style. Called the personalization principle by Richard Meyer, the use of conversational rather than formal language during multimedia instruction has been shown to have a large effect on students' learning, perhaps because a conversational style encourages students to develop sense of social partnership with the narrator that leads to greater engagement and effort (Meyer, 2008).

Speak relatively quickly and with enthusiasm.In their study examining student engagement with MOOC videos, Guo and colleagues observed that student engagement was dependent on the narrator's speaking rate, with student engagement increasing as speaking rate increased (2014). It can be tempting for video narrators to speak slowly to help ensure that students grasp important ideas, but including in-video questions , "chapters", and speed control can give students control over this feature-and increasing narrator speed appears to promote student interest.

Make sure the material feels like it is for these students in this class. One of the benefits for instructors in creating educational videos is the ability to reuse them for other classes and other semesters. When reusing videos, it's important to package them with text outside the video to contextualize them for the particular class for which they are being used. Further, it's important to create them for the type of environment in which they will be used. Guo and colleagues examined student engagement with MOOC videos that were created by chopping up videotaped lectures that had been presented in a face-to-face class (Guo et al., 2014). Student engagement was significantly less than when lectures were created with the MOOC environment in mind.

Match modality. While this consideration is important for managing cognitive load, it is also relevant to promoting student engagement. When telling a story, it can be very effective to show the storyteller's face or to show an animation of the story (see Jay Clayton example).When solving a problem, Khan academy-style videos are particularly helpful, showing students step-by-step with narration how to work through the problem (Guo et al., 2014). When teaching about an invisible phenomenon, it can be helpful to provide an illustration. In each case, providing visual elements that add to the lesson can not only promote student understanding but also engagement with the lesson.

Active learning

To help students get the most out of an educational video, it's important to provide tools to help them process the information and to monitor their own understanding. There are multiple ways to do this effectively.

Use guiding questions. Lawson and colleagues examined the impact of guiding questions on students' learning from a video about social psychology in an introductory psychology class (2006). Building on work from Kreiner (1997), they had students in some sections of the course watch the video with no special instructions, while students in other sections of the course were provided with eight guiding questions to consider while watching. The students who answered the guiding questions while watching the video scored significantly higher on a later test.

Use interactive features that give students control. Zhang and colleagues compared the impact of interactive and non-interactive video on students learning in a computer science course (2006). Students who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backwards when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction. One simple way to achieve this level of interactivity is by using YouTube Annotate, HapYak, or another tool to introduce labeled "chapters" into a video. This not only has the benefit of giving students control, but also can demonstrate the organization, increasing the germane load of the lesson.

Integrate questions into the video. Tools like HapYak can allow instructors to incorporate questions directly into video and to give feedback based on student response. Vural compared the effect of video with embedded questions to interactive video without embedded questions in pre-service teachers, finding that the embedded questions improved the students' performance on subsequent quizzes (2013).

Make video part of a larger homework assignment. Faizan Zubair and Mary Keithly are each part of theBOLD Fellows program at Vanderbilt University, in which graduate students develop online learning materials for incorporation into a faculty mentor's course. Faizan developed videos on that were embedded in a larger homework assignment in Paul Laibinis' Chemical Engineering class, and found that students valued the videos and that the videos improved students' understanding of difficult concepts when compared to a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework. Mary worked with Kathy Friedman to develop videos and follow-up questions to serve as pre-class preparation in a genetics class. Although there was no apparent change to learning outcomes in the class, students valued the videos and post-video questions as learning tools and thought that they were effective for promoting student understanding.

The important thing to keep in mind is that watching a video can be a passive experience, much as reading can be. To make the most of our educational videos, we need to help students do the processing and self-evaluation that will lead to the learning we want to see. The particular way you do this should be guided by goals of the course and the norms of your discipline.

Summary

Videos can be an effective tool in your teaching tool kit. When incorporating videos into a lesson, it's important to keep in mind the three key components of cognitive load, elements that impact engagement, and elements that promote active learning. Luckily, consideration of these elements converges on a few recommendations:

Keep videos brief and targeted on learning goals.

Use audio and visual elements to convey appropriate parts of an explanation; make them complementary rather than redundant.

Use signaling to highlight important ideas or concepts.

Use a conversational, enthusiastic style to enhance engagement.

Embed videos in a context of active learning by using guiding questions, interactive elements, or associated homework assignments.

References

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1 Mayer and Moreno talk about essential processing, incidental processing, and representational holding as rough equivalents of germane load, extraneous load, and intrinsic load.
Cite this guide:
Brame, C.J. (2015). Effective educational videos. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Cynthia J. Brame Print Version Cite this guide: Brame, C.J. (2015). Effective educational videos. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/. Video has become an important part of higher education. It is integrated as part of traditional courses, serves as a cornerstone of many blended courses, and is often the main information delivery mechanism in MOOCs.

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Migration and transformation: a sociomaterial analysis of practitioners’ experiences with online exams

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Migration and transformation: a sociomaterial analysis of practitioners’ experiences with online exams

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1 'Online exams' are understood here as high-stakes summative assessment events, mediated by digital technologies, often taking place in a defined place or time and under secure conditions (e.g. invigilation, restrictions on access to course materials, notes or communication).

2 Myyry and Joutsenvirta (2015) acknowledged that 'the specific context and tradition of university examinations in Finland' (p. 129) might have influenced their results.

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Migration and transformation: a sociomaterial analysis of practitioners' experiences with online exams

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Barad, K. (2003) 'Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter', Signs, vol. 28, pp. 801-831. doi: 10.1086/345321 Bayne, S. (2015) 'What's the matter with 'technology-enhanced learning?', Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 40, pp. 5-20. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851 Berggren, B., Fili, A. & Nordberg, O.

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Medical students take final exams online for first time, despite student concern

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Imperial College London believes the assessment of 280 students is a world first

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Many universities have begun to teach online amid concerns that traditional classes could spread the coronavirus. Yale-NUS lecturer Catherine Shea Sanger explains how it can be done quickly and effectively Having to work from home might mean your kids have a bit more screen time - and that's OK.

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Online teaching strategies

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The IDEAS (Inclusion, Design, Engagement, Evaluation, Assessment, and Support) Framework for online teaching and learning highlights best practices for before, during, and after the delivery of an online course to help instructors deliver high-quality courses and improve learner experience and outcomes.

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Explore this resource site-a collection of all EDUCAUSE resources related to online teaching strategies.

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Ère numérique oblige, l'accompagnement technique a changé de figure. S'il suffisait autrefois de recourir à un technicien en informatique pour assister le prof dans les manipulations d'un artefact technologique pendant ses cours , cet accompagnement tend aujourd'hui à s'estomper au profit d'une nouvelle figure qui a fait son apparition dans le monde de la pédagogie : l'ingénieur techno-pédagogique, encore appelé ingénieur numérique éducatif dans le système éducatif français ou encore conseiller pédagogique TIC outre-Atlantique.

Un alliage de compétences en vue d'un accompagnement à l'intersection de trois univers : la pédagogie, la technologie et la discipline. La présence omniprésente d'outils technologiques dans les salles de classe a conduit à une nouvelle forme d'encadrement puisqu'on est passé de l'accompagnement technique à un encadrement technopédagogique.

L'occasion de faire un petit rappel sur les usages pédagogiques des outils technologiques ainsi que quelques modèles d'intégration des TIC dans les pratiques et leurs usages.

D'un simple outil technique à une puissance technologique

La technologie en apprentissage ne se résume pas à la seule notion d'outils et de recours à des systèmes d'apprentissage sophistiqués ou encore de connexion à un quelconque réseau Internet. En effet, la révolution technologique ne date pas d'hier, elle a eu lieu à chaque progrès technique et a donc engendré une transformation au niveau des méthodes utilisées dans l'apprentissage. Les techniques utilisées depuis le début de tout système d'apprentissage ont été nombreuses comme par exemple l'écriture, l'imprimerie, le recours au traitement de texte, etc.

Les TIC en apprentissage ont pour effet l'introduction d'un artefact, c'est-à-dire un outil technologique qui servira de média entre un l'apprenant et le contenu de formation. Cette médiation par des outils technologiques de l'activité humaine renvoie donc au terme de " médiatisation ".
La médiation qui est au cœur de la pratique médiatique est une médiation technologique et sera d'ailleurs appelée " médiatisation ". En pédagogie, le terme " médiatisation " est définie par D. Peraya comme un processus de " mise en média " qui relève de l'ingénierie pédagogique, introduit dans le processus de communication et de formation un dispositif médiatique.

Les termes n'ont pas manqué pour évoquer l'ampleur de l'impact des technologies dans notre vie quotidienne mais surtout en éducation où l'on fait désormais appel à des outils intellectuels définis par P. Lévy comme " un outil ou dispositif utilisé par un être humain en vue de renforcer les capacités intellectuelles ou cognitives. Dans Les technologies intellectuelles, P.Lévy ose même l'expression " dimension transcendantale de l'informatique " . On assiste à une " resacralisation " de l'outil technologique: l'outil est tantôt dénié, tantôt " resacralisé ".

On équipe !

Si la réponse à la transition numérique a été au départ traduite en termes d'équipement technologique, l'écho a aussitôt résonné quant à lui en termes de fracture. En effet, nombreux ont été ceux à parler d'abord parler de fracture numérique au départ, une fracture à triple dimension : géographique, sociale ou générationnelle. En effet, des disparités ont été observées entre pays du nord et pays du sud ainsi qu'entre zone urbaines et zones rurales. A cela s'est ajouté une fracture entre utilisateurs aisés et moins aisés et une fracture entre les publics juvéniles et les personnes âgées. Cette fracture, les pouvoirs publics en ont fait leur cheval de bataille : on se souvient encore du plan Ordinateurs portables pour tous en France.

Alors on a équipé: les écoles, les collèges et les lycées. Déploiement massif en tablettes et ordinateurs portables et pour quels résultats ? Outre-Atlantique, d'autres nouveaux instruments sont venus prolonger la liste des outils en apprentissage: serious game, environnements numériques de travail (ENT) ou encore les réseaux sociaux. Des dispositifs offrant un cadre organisateur des usages du numérique (Bruillard) mais dont l'intégration réelle et effective reste encore en suspens.

De l'outil à l'instrument : pour quels usages du numérique ?

" Ne leur faisons pas croire au miracle des solutions technologiques. Enseigner n'est pas un miracle mais bien un processus de construction commune. " (B. De Lièvre)

Si l'introduction des technologies en éducation a incité à s'interroger sur leur rôle exact, à savoir s'ils étaient de simples gadgets numériques ou bien s'ils constituaient de réels supports au service de l'apprentissage, la question ne se pose désormais plus en 2020. Les outils numériques ne doivent pas être utilisés uniquement pour supporter l'apprentissage, dans le sens où ils ne représenteraient que de simples gadgets au service de l'apprentissage mais ils doivent être exploités pour faire émerger la connaissance, la construire et la produire et non l'inverse autrement dit, ils se doivent d'être exploités en tant qu'outils cognitifs (cognitive tools) plutôt qu'en tant que vecteurs (D. H.Jonassen).

L'artefact technologique ne devient instrument au service de la pédagogie que quand il sert la pédagogie et non inversement. Par ailleurs, les utilisations des technologies en éducation se sont accrus avec la masse d'outils qui ont été déployés. Se pose donc alors la question de leur appropriation par les apprenants car mettre à disposition des outils, c'est bien, mais encore faut-il qu'ils soient utilisés à bon escient, voire utilisés tout simplement. Daele, dans Comment un "nouvel outil qu'il faut bien utiliser" devient un instrument au service d'une activité(2000) soulève cette problématique induite par l'introduction des technologies dans le domaine éducatif et de leurs usages par l'apprenant.

En clair, pour qu'il y ait usage efficace de ces outils, il va falloir adapter ces technologies aux différents acteurs du dispositif de formation en prenant en compte plusieurs variables. La théorie de l'activité grâce notamment aux travaux de Flichy et de Fazzini-Feynerol permet de rendre compte de ces usages par l'apprenant au niveau microsocial et individuel. Au niveau microsocial, les représentations partagées par chacun des acteurs d'un dispositif déterminent l'adoption de l'outil, notamment dans le cadre d'un travail collaboratif.

Au niveau individuel, l'artefact, tel qu'il est perçu par P. Rabardel ne renvoie pas uniquement à l'outil technologique mais également à son usage. Selon lui, l'appropriation de l'outil est évolutive et passe par une phase de " genèse instrumentale " durant laquelle l'individu va construire des schèmes d'utilisation des outils qui vont lui permettre d'atteindre le but visé par l'activité. Par conséquent, une phase de formation aux outils s'impose et c'est bien là que l'on retrouve les failles importantes.

Entre rupture des usages et ruptures pédagogiques

" Le numérique revêt un immense potentiel mais ce sont les usages qui feront la différence. " (T. Karsenti)

Stop! Les outils ne sont pas la panacée.On l'aura vite compris, les outils sont vite venus en renfort pour marteler davantage le fossé numérique entre ceux qui maîtrisent et ceux qui maîtrisent et beaucoup moins, entre les convaincus et les pessimistes. Savoir manipuler un artefact technologique, quasiment tout le monde sait le faire. Cela étant, l'utilisation ne garantit pas la pertinence de l'usage , encore plus dans le cadre de ses pratiques pédagogiques. Si les uns n'ont pas hésité à parler de fracture des usages (T. Karsenti) pour ce qui relève de l'usage fait par les apprenants, d'autres vont même plus loin et n'hésitent pas à évoquer les fractures des usages pédagogiques (B. De Lièvre). En effet, les artefacts technologiques, utilisés à bon escient produisent des effets positifs sur les apprentissages mais... seulement si et seulement si ils sont utilisés pertinemment.

Les modèles sont là pour servir d'appui au professeur si tant est qu'ils soient eux-aussi en cohérence avec la discipline dans laquelle ils sont déployés.

Modèles supports d'intégration des TIC en éducation

Le modèle d'intégration des Technologies en éducation TPACK mis au point par les professeurs Koehler et Mishra (2006) a pour objectif de guider l'enseignant concernant l'intégration des technologies dans ses pratiques pédagogiques. TPACK a pour particularité de faire interagir trois dimensions qui sont d'après ses auteurs indissociables: la technologie, la pédagogie ainsi que la discipline. Il vise ainsi à mettre en exergue les relations qui existent entre les trois dimensions.A cela s'ajoutent trois autres sous-composantes :

TK (Technological Knowledge/ Connaissance Technologique), c'est-à-dire la connaissance liée l'utilisation d'outils technologiques et la compréhension profonde des TIC dans une visée communicative, informationnelle et la relation entre les deux.

PK Pedagogical Knowledge/Connaissance Pédagogique CP) porte sur les processus, les méthodes et les stratégies pédagogiques etd 'apprentissage et

CK (Content Knowledge/ Connaissance du Contenu), connaissance de la matière enseignée et qui vise à porter un regard sur la façon dont les technologies influencent l'objet à enseigner.

Enfin, au cœur des ces trois interactions, nous avons le TPACK (Technology Pedagogy And Content Knowledge) qui rassemble les connaissances technopédagogiques de ces trois dimensions et dont les interactions sont essentielles et indissociables.

En somme, le TPACK est à la base même d'un enseignement efficace avec les technologies. La force majeure inhérente à ce modèle est sa capacité à permettre de voir les effets des interactions des trois composantes que sont la discipline, la technologie et la pédagogie et non pas seulement seulement de voir la technologie comme un simple accessoire.

Cependant, certains chercheurs ont pointé du doigt ce modèle TPACK car il ne prendrait pas suffisamment en compte le rôle crucial du contexte sur les pratiques de l'enseignant notamment dans l'enseignement supérieur. (M. Glowatz, E. O'Brien, 2013).

La révision du modèle TPACK proposé par O'Brien et M. Glowatz fait entrer une autre composante qui est celle du contexte qui, comme on le sait, a une influence significative sur l'apprentissage. On y retrouve alors l'enseignant, son style pédagogique, l'apprenant avec son environnement culturel, son profil, les ressources à disposition, les objectifs assignés ainsi que les expériences.

Un autre modèle proposé par J. Bachy(2013) se propose d'intégrer aux modèles développés par ses prédécesseurs (Mishra & Koehler, Shulmann) la dimension épistémologique (E) personnelle. Il a pour objectif de représenter le savoir technopédagogique disciplinaire des enseignants (STPD), c'est-à-dire les relations entre les différentes relations (T,P,E et D) pour enseigner un contenu de la discipline enseignée par l'enseignant. L'étude menée par S. Bachy a montré l'existence d'une compétence dite technopédagogique. L'étude menée auprès d'enseignants universitaires a mis en exergue une corrélation forte entre connaissances pédagogiques et connaissances technologiques. En revanche, elle a également confirmé l'absence de corrélation de la technologie seule.

Dans Le numérique en formation. Oui, mais pour changer quoi ? , F. Duriez nous propose trois analyses de l'utilisation des technologies numériques en formation. Il revient notamment sur le modèle ASPID pour une intégration des TIC en contexte éducatif proposé par Thierry Karsenti , l'un des rares à pointer le risque de régression des technologies en éducation.

Avec son modèle d' intégration des technologies SAMR, Ruben Puentedura propose une intégration des technologies basée sur la taxonomie de Bloom et constitué de quatre phases allant de la Substitution jusqu'à la Redéfinition en passant par l'Augmentation puis la Modification.

Selon l'auteur, les niveaux les plus élevés de la taxonomie de Bloom que comprennent " créer " et " évaluer " renvoient au stade de " redéfinition du modèle SAMR. Les niveaux les plus bas tels que " comprendre- appliquer et analyser correspondent aux stades d'"augmentation" et de "modification".

Enfin, un troisième modèle nous est présenté dans l'article de F. Duriez, celui de Marcel Lebrun : le modèle IMAIP. A partir des travaux de Combs, 1976 Saljo (1979) Biggs & Telfer '1987) Savoie (1994) et Laurillard (1993) , Marcel Lebrun a dégagé 5 facettes du processus d'apprentissage pour constituer son propre modèle d'apprentissage IMAIP, un modèle qui se veut pragmatique. Cinq facettes constituent ce modèle : Information- Motivation - Activité - Interaction - Production.

Veille technologique et Communautés de pratiques

Parce que le soutien technique passe par une bonne manipulation des outils, il convient également de prendre en compte la pratique dans l'appropriation des artefacts technologiques eux-même. Mettre en place sa propre veille technopédagogique est devenu incontournable pour l'enseignant. En effet, si l'objectif premier est de fournir le veilleur en contenu informationnel, l'intérêt est que la veille amène également l'enseignant à se former sur l'utilisation de nouveaux outils par exemple via des tutoriels sur les chaînes éducatives YouTube.

Parmi les ressources sur les outils TICE, l'on pourra citer entre autres:

Par ailleurs, certaines initiatives prises ont le mérite comme les rencontres entre pais enseignants en vue d'échanges de pratiques réflexives,etc. On citera par exemple les ateliers du 10>20>Trente de l'Université Paris Sorbonne dont le but est de proposer un accompagnement pour enseigner avec le numérique.
Illustrations: En-tête: Adobe par vectorfusionart
Schémas: S. Budel Références
Bruno De Lièvre, " Le numérique aujourd'hui pour former des adultes de demain ", Alsic [En ligne], Vol. 22, n° 1 | 2019
http://journals.openedition.org/alsic/3607 https://twitter.com/Brunodelievre/status/1225724291901247488/photo/1
- Le numérique en formation. Oui, mais pour changer quoi ?
Trois analyses de l'utilisation des technologies numériques en formation (F. Duriez)
https://cursus.edu/11194/le-numerique-en-formation-oui-mais-pour-changer-quoi

- Le modèle ASPID (T. Karsenti) http://www.karsenti.ca/aspid/

- Pratiques pédagogiques, Médias, médiations, médiatisations (C. Belisle)

- Quelques modèles d'intégration des TICE (Eric Vekout)
http://www.adjectif.net/spip/spip.php?article231

- Un modèle-outil pour représenter le savoir technopédagogique disciplinaire des enseignants
(Sylviane Bachy)
https://journals.openedition.org/ripes/821?lang=en#tocto1n4

- Technology as Cognitive Tools : Learners as designers de D.H. Jonassen

- Academic Engagement and Technology: Revisiting the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge Framework (TPACK) in Higher Education (HE): The Academics' Perspectives (M. Glowatz & O. O'Brien)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319158518_Academic_Engagement_and_Technology_Revisiting_the_Technological_Pedagogical_and_Content_Knowledge_Framework_TPACK_in_Higher_Education_HE_The_Academics'_Perspectives

Voir plus d'articles de cet auteur

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Si la réponse à la transition numérique a été traduite au départ en termes d'équipement technologique dans le secteur de l'éducation, l'écho a aussitôt résonné quant à lui en termes de fracture. Rupture des usages et ruptures pédagogiques quant à l'utilisation des outils technologiques.

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The eight Ivy League schools are among the most prestigious colleges in the world. They include Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia Universities, and the University of Pennsylvania.

All eight schools place in the top fifteen of the U.S. News and World Report national university rankings.

These Ivy League schools are also highly selective and extremely hard to get into. But the good news is that all these universities now offer free online courses across multiple online platforms. These courses are know as MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses.

So far, they've created 500 courses, of which around 450 are still active. Class Central has made a collection of all these, which you can explore below. I've split these courses into the following categories:

Computer Science

Data Science

Programming

Humanities

Business

Art & Design

Science

Social Sciences

Health & Medicine

Engineering

Mathematics

Education & Teaching

and Personal Development

I've also assembled these courses on Class Central's collection page for Ivy League MOOCs. This collection gets updated automatically as new courses are added. You can subscribe to receive updates by clicking the blue "follow" button there.

Note that some of the Coursera courses are a bit harder to access, so I wrote this guide to show you how. And if you are new to online learning, check out these 30 actionable tips to stay focused.

For a more in-depth overview of Data Science courses read this series:

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Here are 450 Ivy League courses you can take online right now for free

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The eight Ivy League schools are among the most prestigious colleges in the world. They include Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia Universities, and the University of Pennsylvania. All eight schools place in the top fifteen of the U.S. News and World Report national university rankings. These Ivy

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Soutien aux personnes enseignantes - Service de soutien à la formation - Université de Sherbrooke

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La préparation d’un cours est une étape fondamentale pour toute personne qui enseigne, car c’est LE moment où elle identifie les cibles de formation de son cours (les apprentissages visés), la ou les stratégies pédagogiques et les activités qui seront utilisées pour faire faire les apprentissages, l…

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Abstract

Remote proctoring allows students to take an assessment at a remote location while ensuring the integrity of the exam. These systems require students to confirm their identity, and, during the exam, the system monitors students through video, looking for behavior that could indicate cheating. In some cases, a human proctor monitors the student remotely. Such systems provide assurance to institutions, individual faculty, and accreditors that remote testing is secure and trustworthy.

The 7 Things You Should Know About... series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the 7 Things briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

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7 things you should know about remote proctoring

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7 Things You Should Know About Remote Proctoring

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Remote proctoring allows students to take an assessment at a remote location while ensuring the integrity of the exam.

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Lessons learned from campuses nationwide have informed an approach to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act during the process of online

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In an age of technology, learning is no longer restricted to lecture halls and textbooks. Videos have now become a frequently used method of teaching, providing students with interactive content that makes learning more fun. Let's take a look at some of the best educational YouTube channels out there that can help you to improve your knowledge and make learning fun.

Why Educational YouTube Channels are a Good Idea

Firstly, it is important to remember that you can only concentrate for a limited time.

In fact, one popular study technique is known as the 50/10 study sessions. This means you study for 50 minutes and then take a 10-minute break.

What's great about many YouTube accounts is that they ensure that each lesson is short and sweet. This makes it easier to stay focused and concentrated without getting distracted or fatigued.

Another great thing about YouTube videos is that they are engaging, but not distracting like study groups might be. While it may be fun to study with friends, it can be easy to drift off in conversation and talk about things that have nothing to do with studying.

Most YouTube channels also have organized playlists. This means that each lesson is given in the correct order of how you should learn the subject.

Finally, some learners simply find it easier to study using visual or audio methods. YouTube videos provide both visual and audio assistance, which makes them easier and more fun to learn from than textbooks.

So without further ado, let's take a look at some of the best YouTube learning channels out there!

25 Best YouTube Learning Channels

1. Ted-Ed

Since March 1, 2011, Ted-Ed has provided a wide range of classes, from visual arts to mathematics, health studies, and business. Each video features entertaining animations, with lessons taught in a fun way using interesting examples.

As of 2019, Ted-Ed has 10.2 million subscribers and the channel has been viewed around 1.6 billion times!

Here is one of Ted Ed's intriguing history lessons:

2. Crash Course

This channel launched on May 19, 2006, with the purpose of teaching a wide range of subjects such as world history, biology, and even psychology.

With 10.2 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion views, Crash Course uses a combination of historical footage, descriptive illustrations, and humor to keep viewers informed and entertained.

Here is one Crash Course on entrepreneurship:

3. C.G.P. Grey

Started on Aug 12, 2010, this channel focuses on providing classes in history, politics, philosophy, and technology.

C.G.P. Grey currently has more than 4.2 million subscribers and has been viewed over 483 million times.

Below is an interesting video about how the electoral college works.

Don't forget to check out C.G.P. Grey's Twitter account!

4. Vsauce

This channel started uploading science lessons during the summer of 2010. Each lesson is focused on answering an intriguing rhetorical question such as "What if the Sun disappeared?"

To date, Vsauce has 15 million subscribers and more than 1.7 billion views and counting.

5. Khan Academy

Since November 16, 2006, this channel has provided tutoring in subjects such as math, science, computing, and economics.

In each lesson, the teacher explains the concept and provides examples in front of you - just like in real life!

Here is one example of a math lesson:

This channel has 5.24 million subscribers and 1,708,601,969 views. Khan Academy can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

6. Veritasium

Since July 21, 2010, Veritasium has provided an insider's look at science, innovations, and places of interest. Each video includes demonstrations, interviews, and/or tours in order to give you a 3-dimensional look at the subject matter.

Here is one fascinating video about How Cod Saved the Vikings.

7. AsapSCIENCE

Launched on May 28, 2012, AsapSCIENCE teaches scientific concepts in a simple, laid-back way.
Each lesson includes illustrations to help you take in knowledge, while the narrators explain theories in an easy-to-understand manner.

How To Fall Asleep In 2 Minutes is just one of AsapSCIENCE's many fascinating videos:

8. Common Sense Education

This channel has provided students and teachers with tips on how to use technology in education since February 8, 2011.

Here is one example of advice provided by this channel:

What's great about this channel is that it also caters to Spanish speakers!

Common Sense Education has over 26,000 subscribers and over 7 million views. You can also check them out on Twitter and Facebook.

9. Edutopia

Launched on May 1, 2007, Edutopia informs teachers and students about the latest education techniques that are working for learners in K-12 education.

This channel will be especially helpful to you if you are an aspiring teacher studying Education who wants to provide students with some unique value.

At present, this channel has 114,000 subscribers and more than 23 million views.

Here is just one example of Edutopia's short-and-sweet lessons.

Edutopia is also on Facebook and Twitter.

10. Big Think

Since October 1, 2006, this channel has provided stimulating content from an array of experts, including famous names such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

To date, this channel has 2.68 million subscribers and 326,416,123 views.

11. Teaching Channel

Since October 14, 2010, this channel has provided teachers with tons of special techniques to help every student grow. Today, this channel has more than 47,000 subscribers and over 76,000 views.

Teaching Channel can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

12. National Geographic

For those who are passionate about nature, the environment, science, and adventure, National Geographic has been providing engaging videos since May 7, 2006. This channel has 12.6 million subscribers and has been viewed well over 3 billion times!

Here is just one example of their captivating videos:

13. expertvillage

Powered by eHow, this channel has provided tons of tutorials, tips, and life hacks since its launch on April 5, 2006.

Just one example of its helpful hints is the video on how to open a wine bottle with a bike pump.

To date, this channel has 3.56 million subscribers and over 3.7 billion views as well as a Twitter page.

14. minutephysics

Launched on June 20, 2011, minutephysics is a channel dedicated to providing lessons in physics and other science topics.

Here is just one of its videos that uses amusing animations to capture viewers' attention.

This channel has 4.84 million subscribers and 423,186,865 views and counting. You can also check out more content on minutephysics' Twitter and Facebook pages.

15. SmarterEveryDay

Launched on April 3, 2006, this channel uses science to inform viewers about the world around them. The slow-motion video on how Houdini died is just one of this channel's many captivating videos.

SmarterEveryDay has 7.39 million subscribers as well as over half a billion views. You can check out more content on this channel's Facebook and Twitter pages.

16. SciShow

This channel has been dedicated to delving into scientific mysteries since October 20, 2011. SciShow currently has 5.94 million subscribers as well as over a billion views.

From The Secret Language of Elephants to The Oldest Shipwreck in the World, this channel explores new topics every day of the week!

17. Numberphile

Started on September 15, 2011, this channel is focused on fascinating facts about numbers.

The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake is just one of these intriguing lessons.

This channel has 3.1 million subscribers and 444,585,086 views. Its Facebook and Twitter pages are packed with more eye-opening content.

18. TheBadAstronomer

Focused on astronomy, space, and science, TheBadAstronomer has been around since March 25, 2006. This channel has 51.3 thousand subscribers and over 12 million views.

19. MIT OpenCourseWare

Provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this channel provides free lessons covering content from real-life MIT curriculums! Viewers can learn about a variety of subjects, such as Engineering, Science, and Statistics.

Here is one example of a real lecture that was provided on the YouTube channel:

Launched on October 11, 2005, this channel now has 2.18 million subscribers and 177,018,285 views.

20. Sick Science!

Since June 14, 2007, this channel has shown students a variety of interesting science experiments. The lessons on this channel are hosted by Steve Spangler - a teacher, science toy designer, and Emmy award-winning television personality.

21. Life Noggin

Since March 31, 2013, Life Noggin has been answering its viewers' questions about life and the universe. This channel uses entertaining animations to keep viewers glued to their screens, and provides answers to amusing questions such as What If You Never Washed Your Hands?

22. Computerphile

Since April 10, 2009, Computerphile has provided viewers with all sorts of interesting trivia from the world of computers, plus in-depth explanations about all things tech.

Computerphile has 1.51 million subscribers and 117,022,324 views.If you enjoy this channel, you can find more content on Computerphile's Facebook and Twitter pages.

23. Applied Science

Launched on July 23, 2006, Applied Science teaches students about how science and technology are applied in the world around them.

By following this channel, you will learn concepts such as How a film camera superimposes the date onto photos.

This channel has over 588,000 subscribers and over 53 million views. If you're looking to enjoy even more science content, be sure to check out Applied Science's Twitter page.

24. Thomas Frank

If you ever find yourself in need of advice for being more productive while studying, be sure to check out Thomas Frank's YouTube channel. By watching Frank's lessons, you can pick up tips on how to get the most out of your time at school or college.

This page has 1.67 million subscribers and more than 91 million views. If you find Thomas's advice to be helpful, be sure to also check out his Instagram and Twitter pages.

25. In A Nutshell

Since July 9, 2013, In a Nutshell has taught students about science with the use of amusing animated videos. If you're curious to find out more about scientific concepts such as wormholes, In A Nutshell's captivating videos are sure to keep you both entertained and engaged.

Honorable Mentions

1. Easy Languages

If you've always wanted to learn another language, then this is the channel for you! Since July 17, 2006, Easy Languages has conducted interviews on the streets in order to teach viewers about other people's languages and cultures. This video about learning Portuguese is just one fascinating first-hand look at different world cultures:

This page has over 770,000 subscribers and 106 million views. Be sure to check out Easy Languages' Facebook page for more engaging content on world languages!

2. HowStuffWorks

Since November 11, 2006, this channel has kept students informed about the goings-on in the world around them. As the name suggests, this channel teaches you about how stuff works, such as How Physics Help Animals Fly:

3. THINKR

Launched on March 27, 2012, this channel uses people, insights, and stories to provide viewers with new perspectives. Videos such as the one about Miami's Public Hives provide viewers with important takeaways about design:

This channel has more than 918,000 subscribers and 164 million views. If you enjoy the unique perspectives that THINKR has to offer, be sure to also check out THINKR's Twitter and Facebooks pages!

Conclusion

With so many educational YouTube channels out there for you to choose from, you now have a greater opportunity than ever before to learn important lessons in an engaging, enjoyable, and interactive way.

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25 Best Educational YouTube Channels for College Students

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If you're looking for a fun way to learn outside of the classroom, then check out the Best Educational YouTube Channels for College Students!

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THE BEST YOUTUBE EDUCATION CHANNELS FOR LEARNING ONLINE

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THE BEST YOUTUBE EDUCATION CHANNELS FOR LEARNING ONLINE

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Yes, the top Youtuber PewDiePie (who has 21 billion views!) is famous for screencasting himself playing video games while telling incredibly stupid jokes but fortunately there are lots of other educational YouTube channels for productively wasting spending your time.

YouTube offers a treasure trove of edutainment opportunities for both learners and teachers. Many people find learning on YouTube better than sitting in a lecture hall. The world's largest video website is empowering a new generation of both online learners and digital teachers who are building massive audiences and teaching millions of people through the Internet.

The typical lecture model doesn't work very well on YouTube. The new YouTube educators are fun, creative, and savvy with the tools and practices of video storytelling. They grab your attention right away and they hold it through a rollercoaster ride of visual storytelling, humor, and fascination.

Enjoy some of YouTube's best educational channels run by "edutainers" and see for yourself how they can spark your curiosity for learning more online:

John Green may be the world's most famous online teacher that you haven't yet heard of (or maybe you already know him!). In his fascinating educational videos, he covers a wide range of interesting subjects like world history, biology, ecology, psychology and more.

Subscribers: 5.6 million
Views: 556 million

ASAP Science is a weekly dose of fun and interesting science from musician, artists and pop philosophers Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown. Who knew a science lesson could be so interesting?

Subscribers: 6.3 million
Views: 725 million

C. G. P. Grey is the brilliant narrator of some of the most thought-provoking YouTube videos on controversial topics like religion, politics, history and technology. He also co-hosts one of the world's most popular podcast Hello Internet with another successful YouTube educator Brady Haran.

Jason Silva is the host of Origins and Brain Games, the most popular show on the National Geographical channel. He goes freestyle on his weekly series of philosophical "shots of espresso" that are geared toward helping you ponder the far reaches of what may be possible with our human ingenuity and technological innovation.

Joe Hanson, Ph.D. calls himself a curious group of atoms in a curious universe. He's on YouTube to help demystify this giant Universe by telling you how it all works according to science. He produces weekly videos that will inspire you to learn more about science.

Featured Ad: Video Storytelling Retreat

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The educational arm of the annual TED conference held each spring in Vancouver. On their YouTube education channel, you'll find a growing library of carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed website.

A YouTube channel dedicated to showing you how and why the world around you is so amazing. One of the best YouTube channels for inspiring learning and curiosity with mind-bending philosophical puzzles.

Hank Green's SciShow breaks down the latest discoveries and news in the different fields of science. With equal parts skepticism and enthusiasm, he goes a little deeper than most...without going off the deep end.

Another excellent science video channel featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science related.

Epipheo is an animation studio that makes some of the funniest and most engaging animated videos that I've come across on YouTube. It you want an immersive visual learning experience then Epipheo are your guys!

Did we miss your favorite YouTube education channel? Please let me know what educational channels on YouTube inspire your curiosity in the comments.

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Edutainment! The Best YouTube Education Channels For Learning Online

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Who says you can't learn valuable things on YouTube? Explore these amazing educational channels on the world's largest video website.

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Table of Contents arrow 2

Studying and Learning

Music, Movies, and Arts

Music Education

Science, Engineering, and Technology

Geography, History, and Society

Self-Improvement and Life Skills

Business, Money, and Entrepreneurship

Start Watching, Never Stop Learning

If you're like a lot of people, you probably use YouTube for listening to music, watching videos of cute animals, or just for procrastinating on homework.

While it is a platform for all of those things, there's a whole other side to YouTube you may have never considered. YouTube has hundreds of channels that can teach you any subject you could ever think of (as well as dozens you didn't even know existed).

With hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, however, it can be difficult to sort out the helpful, quality channels from the useless ones.

That's why we've created this guide, which covers the 100+ best educational YouTube channels currently in existence. You'll find videos on everything from music theory to weird geography facts to how to succeed in business (the hard, effective way).

To be quite honest, the right mix of these YouTube channels might be able to teach you more than you could ever learn in college. At the least, many of these channels can serve as useful supplements to the classes you are taking. If you're not a student, you can still get a lot of value out of watching these, as they can help you to never stop learning.

This is a college blog, after all, so it makes sense to start with some channels that will help you improve your study skills. Some of these channels focus on specific study techniques, while others will guide you through specific subjects.

If you're looking for advice on school supplies, organization, or just what the academic side of college is like, then check out this channel from current college student Sareena.

Most language courses are boring, formulaic, and unrealistic. Easy Languages is the opposite - each video teaches you vocabulary, grammar, or concepts in a language using real conversations with people on the streets.

They have videos for just about every language you can think of, and they add new content regularly. If you're trying to learn a language, this is an essential resource.

Thomas Frank makes videos that help you be more productive - whether you're in high school, college, university, or the real world.

This includes study tips to help you learn faster and ace your exams, advice on destroying procrastination, reading and note-taking strategies, and more.

Want to get a philosophy degree for free? Then watch Philosophy Tube, which shows you how to use philosophy to make sense of current events and life's big questions.

Ali Abadaal is a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). He vlogs about life as a doctor, as well as about how to study more effectively.

Jess graduated top of her class with a psychology degree, and now she's created this channel to help you get motivated and stay organized. While there are lots of videos for college students, there's also plenty aimed at high school students or even people who are out of college.

Mariana is currently pursuing a Master's degree in International Law, and in her spare time, she works on this channel, which focuses helping you stay organized and study smarter (while also giving some sweet writing material recommendations).

Ever wonder what life in med school is like? Are you a pre-med or current medical student looking for advice on how to set yourself up for success? This is the channel that will answer all questions you have about how to pursue a career in medicine.

Struggling with a particular academic subject? Want to learn a new subject on your own? Crash Course can help. They have courses on physics, philosophy, games, economics, U.S. government and politics, astronomy, anatomy & physiology, world history, biology, sociology, computer science, film history, mythology, literature, ecology, chemistry, psychology, and U.S. history.

You'll never have an excuse to say "I'm bored" again.

In the future, being able to code will be as crucial as knowing how to read. Okay, so that's probably an exaggeration, but if you've been wanting to learn how to code, The Coding Train is a great place to start.

The videos are detailed, easy to understand, and even funny. Whether you want to learn the very basics or are exploring a more advanced topic such as machine learning, The Coding Train has a video series for you.

Each week, Mike Boyd takes a new skill and tries to learn it as quickly as possible. Whether it's knife throwing, making a fire, or picking locks, you'll be amazed how quickly you can learn when you focus and apply the right techniques.

Toby, a physics Ph.D. student living in Australia, makes videos about physics, math, astronomy, and beauty in the world around us.

You can use YouTube to (sometimes illegally) watch movies or listen to music. But you can also learn a lot about the techniques that artists use to create them, which is what each of the channels below looks at in one way or another.

Wisecrack produces a variety of shows that explore big ideas in unusual (and hopefully super entertaining) ways. They use movies, TV shows, video games, and books to explore concepts in philosophy and critical thinking.

Patrick Willems is a filmmaker who produces short films, critiques popular films, and explores the techniques behind the movies you love (or love to hate).

Do you love indie and alternative music? Then you'll love this channel, which explores the best of these genres that's currently out there.

This channel analyzes screenplays to help you understand what it takes to tell a great story (and how you can do the same).

Lindsay's video essays explore media through a critical eye, focusing especially on high-profile superhero and action movies.

This channel presents unconventional explorations of what defines different musical genres, styles, and artists.

Each video from Polyphonic is a video essay about music and other aspects of pop culture. The videos about classic rock are especially interesting if (like me and most people reading this blog) you're too young to remember when the music came out.

Now You See It takes a look at the themes and tropes in film. As the channel descriptions puts it, "It's like a college film analysis class minus the lecture halls, essay assignments, and student loan debts."

Do you love to nerd out about Game of Thrones and Westworld? Then this is the channel for you, where you'll find explanations and detailed analyses of these shows.

You can often learn just as much from studying bad work as you can from great work. This channel teaches you to be a better writer by (very sarcastically) telling you how not to write.

Volksgeist makes videos "examining important works of music." The channel primarily focuses on hip hop artists and albums, though there are also videos about rock and even other music YouTubers.

This channel is hard to explain (and frankly a bit over my head), but it generally uses music and media to explore post-irony.

A channel that examines movies, literature, and writing to answer the question, "How does someone become a great artist?"

These videos take a critical look at superhero movies and other pop culture, with lots of speculation and commentary about what these movies do right (and how they could improve).

For the serious video game nerds only, LowSpecGamer shows how to run modern games on low-end computers...by doing whatever it takes.

Thomas, Martin, and I all play music and are interested in learning more about it. These are some of our favorite channels for learning about everything from music theory to the reason pop songs are so catchy.

If you're learning guitar, then Paul Davids' channel is a must-watch. He teaches everything from basic scales to advanced chord progressions and riffs. He also has a variety of videos that will help you shop for guitars and gear.

Adam Neely is a bassist and composer who makes videos about music theory and "new horizons in music." It's definitely more of an advanced channel, but any music nerds reading will love it.

Music theory might seem like an obscure, boring topic that only music majors or composers need to care about. If you watch this channel, however, you'll learn that that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, music theory can help you appreciate the music you love at an even deeper level.

Andrew Huang is a producer, composer, and all-around creator of unusual, inventive music. His channel explores weird instruments, how he makes songs, and his travels around the world. Whether you're looking for some Ableton Live tips or just want some inspiration, this channel will provide.

Rob Scallon is a guitarist and all-around multi-instrumentalist. His videos explore how he makes music, including song challenges and genre-bending compositions.

He also does interviews with people who play interesting instruments, such as the organist at Wrigley Field and the professional carillon player at the University of Chicago.

Have a science question? Struggling in your physics class or wondering how engineering shapes the world around us? You can find the answers in the channels below, which show just how mind-blowing science and tech can be.

Simon Clark makes videos about climate physics and the crazy world of online video.

Unless you're an engineer, you probably think of engineering as a boring, complex topic that only the gifted few can understand. Practical Engineering, however, will show you just how interesting and important engineering is.

And unlike lots of channels that just show video footage or animations to explain a topic, Practical Engineering uses real scale models and at-home examples to demonstrate engineering concepts. At the very least, this channel will give you a deeper appreciation for all the thought that goes into engineering everyday things.

Ph.D. student Inés Dawson makes videos about interesting science and language facts, all with the aim of stimulating your curiosity about the world around you.

TierZoo uses gaming to explain zoology, showing some of the bizarre things that have resulted from evolution.

Every Think explores science and, more generally, "everything interesting that is." Whether you're curious how atomic clocks work or what happens when you get struck by lightning, Every Think has the answer.

The animated videos on this channel explore the science of the world, with a special focus on animals and food science.

After completing a Bachelor's in Applied Physics, Jade began making videos about physics, math, and computer science (featuring really fun illustrations).

Our Changing Climate explores humanity's relationship with the natural world, examining the environmental impact of just about everything. Whether you're curious which form of transportation is the greenest or which type of non-dairy milk has the lowest environmental impact, Our Changing Climate will help you out.

Cool Worlds is the project of David Kipping, a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University. The videos explore astronomy, exoplanets, astroengineering, the search for extraterrestrial life & intelligence, futurism, and interstellar travel. It may sound like science fiction, but it's all based in very real science.

There are lots of YouTube channels that make animated science videos, but Kurzgesagt creates some of the most beautiful ones out there. We really can't express how gorgeous these animations are. You have to see it for yourself.

Deep Look explores science topics by "going very, very small." Each video uses macro photography and microscopy to take a very close look at the natural world. Each video will teach you something new...and possibly creep you out a bit.

Interested in futurism and space exploration? This channel uses science fiction as a way to examine what could be possible as technology continues to advance and we reach further towards the stars.

Medlife Crisis aims to give you accurate, research-backed information about science and medicine. The host is cardiologist, internal medicine doctor, and university researcher, so you can bet the information will be high-quality.

But even more than giving you accurate information, Medlife Crisis does so with humor and hilariously bad jokes, making even the most obscure topics interesting.

Katie is a biochemist who makes videos about the basics of chemistry, biology, and the science of health.

A channel that explains complicated physics concepts in short, simple videos (with lots of fun whiteboard drawings).

SciShow discusses strange and fascinating science topics, with regular episodes based on questions from viewers.

Using the same style as SciShow, this channel focuses on the wonders of the human brain and how humans interact with the world.

From the beginning of time itself to the current groundbreaking research and space exploration, you'll find it on SciShow Space.

Dianna Cowern covers everything from sound to quantum mechanics to ultraviolet waves. AND she made a video with Rodney Mullen, our founder's favorite skateboarder.

Philip doesn't post very often, but when he does, he posts some of the most well-explained content on quantum computing, physics, and computer science that you'll ever see.

Fascinating whiteboard videos answering almost any science question you can think of.

The theory and practice of construction isn't something most of us think about, but it affects how we live and work each day. The B1M creates videos that document both the history and current practice of construction, showing you how the most impressive buildings and infrastructure are created.

Plus, the narrator has a soothing British accent that makes the channel great for relaxing after a day of work or studying.

Host Rene Ritchie is obsessed with technology, and he shares his obsession on this YouTube channel, where he discusses trends in personal technology and apps.

Everybody's talking about the "maker movement," but few channels on the topic are as exciting and funny as Simone Giertz. Whether it's turning a Tesla into a pickup truck or building a robot that gives (somewhat questionable) manicures, this channel will both educate and entertain you.

Ever wonder what it's like to care for over 80 exotic animals? This is what Animal Wonders explores, as well as fascinating facts about animals you didn't even know existed.

The beauty products we use every day have a fascinating science behind them, and this channel will teach you all about it.

Engineering is a fascinating subject that manifests itself in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Real Engineering explains the math and physics behind how all of this works, along with a good bit of interesting history in the process.

These videos tell stories of unusual (and at times disturbing) medical cases that the channel's creator has witnessed or heard about from colleagues.

Amazingly well-explained videos about complex math concepts.

TechAltar creates videos about the past, present, and future of consumer technology.

I'm a sucker for weird geography and history facts, so I love most of the channels below. They all cover different topics, but taken together they provide a unique view of history and the world we live in today.

Wendover Productions creates videos that investigate travel, economics, geography, marketing, and more, all with the goal of giving you a better understanding of the world.

Freedom in Thought seeks to make ideas from the humanities and social sciences more accessible to people who didn't major in them in school but still want to learn more.

Austin McConnell makes videos about an eclectic range of topics, from video essays on media to random questions such as what to do if your parachute fails.

Knowing Better attempts to present a balanced viewpoint on controversial, misunderstood topics. Much of the channel focuses on historical events, but it also covers religion, politics, and even scientific topics.

The law affects every aspect of your life, so it's worth understanding how it works. LegalEagle gives you an "insider's view" of the legal system, so that you can learn to think like a lawyer. I especially recommend his "Real Lawyer Reacts to..." videos.

The founder of City Beautiful is a city planner, and he creates videos to educate people about topics such as transportation, land use planning, and urban design.

Second Thought explores questions worth thinking about using stick figures and poorly drawn animals.

It's difficult to categorize Tom Scott's channel, and that's precisely what makes it so interesting to watch. In his "Things You Might Not Know" series, he explores unusual topics in science, geography, and pretty much anything else that interest him.

Meanwhile, his "Amazing Places" series will take you across the world to some of the most fascinating and bizarre spots on Earth. Expect to leave each video informed and awed.

From the creator of Wendover Productions, Half as Interesting examines random facts about geography and history in a short, bingeable format.

Suibhne makes animated history videos, with a particular focus on the macro-history of specific nations and cultures.

CGP Grey is a cryptic, intriguing channel of animated videos about technology, history, philosophy, politics, and a lot more.

Sam O'Nella's channel takes a look at the darker, more disgusting sides of history, society, and agriculture.

Trains, planes, and boats...and the fascinating science and history behind them.

Knowing Better creates videos about history, government, and psychology, all with the aim of helping you be a more informed person.

The world is complicated, and PolyMatter aims to help you understand it just a little bit better.

Alex Nickel creates videos about science, humanities, and everything else in the world that fascinates him.

Real Life Lore answers questions you never thought to ask, primarily in the areas of history, geography, economics, and science.

Dr. Aaron Carroll explains healthcare policy, medical research, and answers a lot of other questions you may have about medicine, health, and healthcare.

Kento Bento creates videos on "intriguing & thought-provoking Asiany topics, including stereotypes, history, culture & geography."

Geography and politics can get really complicated. WonderWhy aims to help you understand them.

Joe Scott starts with viewer questions and comments in order to explore the funny, unique, but universal truths that give you a new perspective on the world.

Feature History will teach you all about military history, despite the channel creator's claim that they're "wholly unqualified to teach it."

Self-improvement is a topic we discuss a lot here on College Info Geek, so you know we have to feature some of our favorite channels in this area. The channels below won't automatically improve your life-you still have to do the work yourself. But they will show you what steps you can take to make your life better.

Improvement Pill teaches ideas that help you change your life. Some videos focus on motivating or inspiring you, while others teach specific self-improvement concepts.

Want to live a more effective life? Then this is a channel you should definitely check out. Better Ideas explores a mix of productivity and self-improvement topics, presented in an engaging, entertaining way.

The Gentleman's Gazette produces some of the most consistently high-quality videos on YouTube about how to dress better and upgrade your style.

Matt D'Avella makes videos about minimalism, filmmaking, and creativity. His film production background really shows through in the videos - the gorgeous filming and editing make them a treat to watch.

The School of Life works to foster emotional well-being by applying psychology, philosophy, and culture to everyday life.

This channel will teach you how to be more charismatic and confident so that you can form new relationships and improve the ones you already have.

Best known for his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss also has a YouTube channel where he discusses self-improvement and health, as well as featuring frequent interviews with top performers in a variety of fields.

Primed helps you to improve yourself mentally, physically, and financially.

Whether you have ADHD or know someone with ADHD and want to learn more about it, this channel is the place to go. You'll find tips and tricks for living (and thriving) with an ADHD brain.

One of the best cooking channels on YouTube. If you can learn to cook food you actually like, then you'll save a ton of money and end up maintaining a healthier diet.

Think that cooking your own food is too difficult and time-consuming? Pro Home Cooks challenges that belief with each of their videos. Whether it's mastering the art of brewing kombucha or showing you how to eat for just $3 a day, this channel will show teach you to love cooking for yourself and others.

If you're of legal drinking age, then you're probably tired of spending $10, $15, 0r even $20 for a drink at a cocktail bar or restaurant. That's why I highly recommend Cocktail Chemistry, which will show you how to make outstanding drinks at home with just a few simple tools and ingredients.

Ever wonder what the foods from your favorite movies and TV shows would look like in real life? Binging with Babish aims to find out. Each week, Andrew Rea recreates a different dish from the wonderful world of media, all while teaching you cool cooking techniques.

I also recommend his series "Basics with Babish," which goes over a variety of fundamental cooking skills and dishes.

You don't have to major in business to get the benefits that come with studying it. These YouTube channels will teach you how to start (and grow) your own business, as well as how other businesses work (or fail).

Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and founder of the digital agency Vayner Media. He knows a thing or two about business, and he shares his insights on his YouTube channel. This is a great place to start if you want to launch your own business.

Business Casual examines the history of the companies and corporations that have shaped our world.

Pat Flynn teaches you how to grow your following and build a sustainable online business.

If personal finance makes you anxious, then this channel is your antidote. It will teach you everything you need to know about managing your money, even if you're a total beginner.

Curious why some companies are so successful, or why companies that used to be huge have faded into obscurity? Company Man explores the answers to these questions.

I hope the list of channels in this article has shown you that YouTube can be a powerful tool for learning new things.

Of course, watching videos can only get you so far. To really learn new things, you also have to practice and apply them. For more information on how to do that, check out our guide to the Dreyfus Model of skill development.
Image Credits: featured

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Watch and Learn: The 100+ Best Educational YouTube Channels in 2023

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You can learn just about anything on YouTube these days. Here are the 100+ best channels for learning math, science, and self-improvement.

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Since the inception of Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) technology, it's become an enticing way for organizations to save travel costs and offer more sessions that are available to employees in every timezone. However, with all the benefits come concerns around perceived lack of interaction and engagement, lack of learner progress, ROI, or impact over time. But when done right, virtual learning can be just as impactful as in-person learning and can allow additional space for new, creative solutions for a more flexible workforce.

Our Learning Services Team has put together some recommendations on how to get started when shifting from in-person training to effective virtual sessions. To access their curated Pathways of the best virtual learning resources, find the links at the bottom of this page.

It All Starts with Technology

First, start with the technology. This may seem obvious enough but ensuring that you've thought through the process, worked past the hurdles, and built protocols before launching the programs will help the change management for end-users and administrators.

Here are the most important four features to help you identify your chosen tech solution:

Use technology that can scale with you. Some packages limit the number of online attendees. Ensure that you have enough licenses for the types of online learning you are going to facilitate.

Certify that attendees can log on from their systems. This might also include dial-in numbers from phones or VOIP for browsers. You need to know your audience and ensure global employees have access.

Make certain that you can share apps and presentations.

Look for software that allows for the following:

Polling

Whiteboarding

Breakout rooms

Chat windows for attendees

Reporting

Video streaming

Q&A

But Don't Forget the Human Element

Plain and simple, if your experience isn't engaging, your workforce won't be engaged. The second factor is to keep your solution user-focused, which is the only way to keep engagement high. Here are five suggestions to increase energy and engagement levels during learning sessions:

1. Polling. Offering an engaging activity can be a great start for keeping users stimulated in the virtual learning environment. Polls can be kept simple, and in addition to keeping your audience engaged, they can gather data to help keep administrators informed.

2. Use a chat window. Encourage attendees to utilize a chat window during sessions. Here are some example questions:

What are 2-3 websites you use every day to get the latest news about your day?

What do you like about them?

Where are you calling in from today?

3. Whiteboards. Using whiteboards is a great way to promote user interaction. After polling attendees, copy the text from their given answers and paste them on the whiteboard to continue the conversation.

4. Breakout rooms. For topics that require more in-depth levels of conversation, or to add some variance to the sessions, try using breakout rooms. It's common in larger online learning spaces for a few people to share repeatedly while others remain silent. Using smaller breakout rooms with fewer individuals will minimize the imbalance and promote activity from all attendees. In most applications, you can assign people to virtual break rooms to tackle a question or do an activity.

5. Annotation tools. Many conferencing platforms will offer annotation tools, which help create environments similar to in-person meetings, drawing users' attention to specific areas if you need to "re-engage" the audience.

Takeaways for designing a user-centered learning strategy:

People want to feel connected.

People want self-directed learning to feel empowered as well as interaction. Give them both through pre-work and continued learning after the program.

Give people direction, but also let them explore their learning paths and collaborate with others.

To engage learners, use a combination of technology and techniques (asynchronous and synchronous) to create a robust social learning journey for employees.

The key to designing a user-focused virtual learning program is to maintain a balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning. That means offering equal opportunities for people to engage in larger learning sessions as well as autonomous, self-directed learning- along with all variations in between. Selecting the right technological solutions can help you foster this kind of holistic and supportive learning environment for your whole team.

To help administrators and end-users shift from in-person learning to virtual learning programs, our Client Services Experts have built two Pathways of all our most effective resources, which you can access below. Do you have more questions or want to learn more about how our teams can help you get started? Reach out to a Degreed representative today!
Pathways for U.S. Audiences: How to Transition to a Remote Workforce Virtual Collaboration in Organizations Pathways for E.U. Audiences: How to Transition to a Remote Workforce Virtual Collaboration in Organizations

Pssst! Looking for more resources to enable your leaders and teams? Check out these additional Pathways our experts have built just for you - free and accessible to anyone:
Building Resilience as a Skill Building Trust Across Teams Wellness for People Leaders Employee Wellness for HR and L&D

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How to Transition to a Virtual Learning Program | Degreed Blog

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Since the inception of Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) technology, it's become an enticing way for organizations to save travel costs and offer more sessions that are available to employees in every timezone. However, with all the benefits come concerns around perceived lack of interaction and engagement, lack of learner progress, ROI, or impact over time.

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As the fall term approaches, college and university leaders are weighing a range of fluid and sometimes competing factors as they decide whether and how to require vaccinations.

See other QuickPoll topic results and create your own campus surveys, using the EDUCAUSE DIY Survey Kits.

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coronavirus and higher education resources

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how are universities responding to covid 19

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As the fall term approaches, college and university leaders are weighing a range of fluid and sometimes competing factors as they decide whether and how to require vaccinations. See other QuickPoll topic results and create your own campus surveys, using the EDUCAUSE DIY Survey Kits.

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The author shares some advice and best practices for moving face-to-face courses online at midsemester on short notice.

Credit: Markus Gann / Shutterstock.com © 2020

Many colleges and universities are telling their students not to return to campus after spring break, and many more might soon do the same. Faculty members who teach in physical classrooms probably did not design their courses to go online on short notice at midsemester. Whether or not you have experience teaching online, here are a few basic questions and answers to help you get started.

Will students be comfortable moving to online learning? Students already do everything else online, so they will be comfortable moving to online learning. Some students will have unreasonably high expectations for faculty, including faculty who are new to teaching online and, in that sense, are "teaching without a net." Many of my students prefer reading on their laptops, tablets, or even phones. A simple note to students that you're doing your best on short notice and that their support and ideas are welcome might salve most of the questions.

Do I need to change my entire course? Before you shift to online teaching and before you make any changes to your syllabus, go back and review the original learning outcomes. When you designed the course, what did you want students to learn? It is easy to become frustrated by technology or distracted by its shiny baubles. Even if you need to modify the learning outcomes or modify your syllabus, focusing on what you hoped students would learn is a useful starting point before trying to do the rest.

What questions are students most likely to ask? Students' first or second question is going to be, "How does this affect my grade?" If your course is already set up to have take-home deliverables, these can be submitted easily by email or-even better-through your learning management system (LMS) (Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, etc.). If you have in-class quizzes and exams, these can be done at home and submitted online as well. If students do not have textbooks at home with them, you can search "open educational resources" to find electronic alternatives for them. If one or more grading components must be changed (in-class presentations, pop quizzes, etc.), be as transparent and beneficent with the students as possible.

Do I have to record 75-minute lectures and post them? No-and you very likely do not want to. (If you must, you are better off recording a series of short videos rather than one long one.) You should include a brief introduction (a few paragraphs or a three-to-five-minute video, for example).

This week, we are discussing X. These are some of the questions about this topic, and these are the skills you want to acquire. This is how it builds on what we've been doing and how it forms a foundation for what we're doing next.

You probably do this in the classroom already. This type of introductory material can be very useful for students. You can create video content within your LMS or even with your cell phone.

Many schools offer advice about transforming a face-to-face class to an online class and temporarily moving classes online.

Can I replicate class discussion? Do I want to? It depends. If you want to hold synchronous class sessions online, where all of your students are online with you during the regular class time, that's possible. But asynchronous classes generally are preferable. Asynchronous instruction is when teachers post the readings, videos, and other materials online before the class period, and students respond to essay prompts, problems, quizzes, etc., by a given due date/time.

Asynchronous classes have trade-offs, but they can be technologically easier. Online classroom interactions are different from in-person classroom discussions. The time lag for asynchronous questions and answers takes away some of the spontaneity. On the other hand, not all students are ready to jump into rapid classroom conversations. Those who prefer to think before they raise their hands may have more frequent and thoughtful conversations in an online format.

Will all of my students be able to access the course content? Not all students have reliable technology and internet to support online, at-home learning. Students with disabilities also may have issues accessing some materials or technologies. Consult with the disability and access office at your school for help captioning videos and creating accessible content.

What do students want? In a nutshell, students want flexibility, feedback, and connection. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing stress among students-and everyone else on college and university campuses. Place the work you do to transition your course content within the context of these hectic, uncertain conditions. Grade and comment on work quickly and in ways that demonstrate empathy. Make yourself and your class available through online classroom discussions, and answer email promptly. Use Skype to video chat or open a Google Hangout or Zoom where students can "drop-in" to see you and their classmates. Show nervous and isolated students that they are fully part of a supportive educational environment.

EDUCAUSE will continue to monitor higher education and technology related issues during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For additional resources, please visit the EDUCAUSE COVID-19 web page.

For more insights about advancing teaching and learning through IT innovation, please visit the EDUCAUSE Review Transforming Higher Ed blog as well as the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and Student Success web pages.

The Transforming Higher Ed blog editors welcome submissions. Please contact us at [email protected]

Jim Quirk is professorial lecturer at American University.

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online learning: some notes for going online midsemester

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Online Learning: Some Notes for Going Online Midsemester

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The author shares some advice and best practices for moving face-to-face courses online at midsemester on short notice. Many colleges and universities are telling their students not to return to campus after spring break, and many more might soon do the same.

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As many colleges and universities move instruction online as part of their response to COVID-19, data about user preferences, access, and training can help ease that transition for students and faculty.

Credit: MSSA / Shutterstock © 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning in place of face-to-face classes, in an effort to limit transmission of the virus. Faculty, students, and support staff are all working to accommodate this massive change. EDUCAUSE research on student, faculty, and institutional readiness for online learning can help institutions better understand the pre-COVID-19 perspectives and status of their faculty, students, and organizations. This research summary is one of a series of reports outlining higher education's readiness to move teaching and learning online to preserve and continue its educational mission during the current pandemic.

Device Access

Most, but not all, students have access to digital devices that could be used for online learning (see table 1). Institutions should be prepared to make accommodations for students who either do not have access to devices at all or lack devices that are compatible with the institutional LMS. Access varies significantly by institution type.

Table 1. Device access among community college and four-year students

LMS Use

Most students have some experience using the LMS for their courses (mostly accessing the syllabus or checking grades; see table 2), but a sizable portion of students have minimal experience using online classroom platforms, especially for more-involved course activities. As a general rule, providing students with instructions on how to use the LMS and advice for navigating the peculiarities of particular courses can improve their learning experiences. Patience and lenience are the order of the day with students who might have a difficult time accessing and using the platform. Instructors should plan for the additional time this will take when moving abruptly to online learning. IT support staff should be prepared to provide just-in-time support for these cases. Additionally, consider using asynchronous and flexible approaches to teaching and deadlines to accommodate students with constraints or emergencies that would prevent them from attending synchronous events or who lack reliable Wi-Fi or broadband access.

Table 2. Students' LMS use

LMS Training

It's time to ramp-up your LMS training program. Although 99% of institutions provide LMS and educational technology support for students, a majority of students have either not received any LMS training or don't know if they have received training; more students at AA institutions have received formal LMS training than students at other types of institutions (see table 3). The lack of formal LMS training poses serious issues for institutions requiring that courses be moved online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Institutions should not assume that students with no formal LMS training will be able to move easily into online learning environments. In addition to faculty needing to provide coaching for their particular courses, IT support services might find themselves overwhelmed by students seeking advice or needing to troubleshoot problems as they begin to take all of their courses online.

Table 3. Students' LMS training experiences

Learning Environments Preferences

The completely online learning environments into which students' courses are being migrated in response to COVID-19 will be suboptimal relative to student preferences. Nearly all students prefer at least some face-to-face contact, with a majority preferring that their classes be mostly to completely face-to-face (see figure 1). While some groups of students have a stronger preference for completely online courses based on their personal circumstances, most still prefer at least a little face-to-face engagement. It is possible that some students will resist the completely online experience and might disengage or not perform as well as they might otherwise, given their preferences for other types of learning environments. It is critical that faculty migrating face-to-face courses to completely online ones create engaging and thoughtful learning experiences to improve student buy-in to and experiences with the online environment. Both faculty and students will need support from others in the institution, whether that be IT to help them come up to speed, teaching and learning centers to help faculty revise their curricula and teaching methods, or student advising and success officers to understand the potential speed bumps this might introduce to course and degree completion.

Figure 1. Student learning environment preferences, by key demographic factors

Learning Environment Preferences for Activities and Assignments

Students also have strong preferences for the type of classroom activities and assignments they conduct in a completely online environment (see figure 2). Submitting homework and assignments; taking exams, quizzes, or tests; conducting peer-reviewing or peer-grading activities; and having course-related discussions are the activities that students most often prefer to conduct in a completely online environment the most, but relatively few students prefer this environment even for the activities most suited to it. Understanding these preferences can help faculty make decisions about how to convert or whether to jettison activities and assignments that were originally designed for face-to-face learning environments. These data may also help teaching and learning center staff develop focused support for helping understand and address the root causes of students' preferences.

Figure 2. Student learning environment preferences for specific course-related activities and assignments

The COVID-19 pandemic is presenting higher education with a host of unprecedented challenges. Moving all courses with face-to-face components to completely online environments is new territory for students, faculty, and institutions. Fortunately, we know that online learning works, and we know a lot about how teaching and learning works in online environments. And, while there is an abundance of IT, teaching and learning, and instructional design resources that can facilitate the academic triage currently under way, institutions will need to provide expanded support and additional channels of support to help students. Our efforts here draw upon current EDUCAUSE student, faculty, and institutional data to help higher education employees anticipate potential problems as they move all of their course offerings online.

Read about faculty readiness to adopt fully online learning. EDUCAUSE will continue to monitor higher education and technology related issues during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For additional resources, please visit the EDUCAUSE COVID-19 web page.

D. Christopher Brooks is Director of Research at EDUCAUSE.

Susan Grajek is Vice President of Communities and Research at EDUCAUSE.

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students' readiness to adopt fully remote learning

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Students' Readiness to Adopt Fully Remote Learning

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As many colleges and universities move instruction online as part of their response to COVID-19, data about user preferences, access, and training can help ease that transition for students and faculty. The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning in place of face-to-face classes, in an effort to limit transmission of the virus.

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As many colleges and universities move instruction online as part of their response to COVID-19, data about user preferences, access, and training can help ease that transition for students and faculty.

Credit: MSSA / Shutterstock © 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning in place of face-to-face classes, in an effort to limit transmission of the virus. Faculty, students, and support staff are all working to accommodate this massive change. EDUCAUSE research on student, faculty, and institutional readiness for online learning can help institutions better understand the pre-COVID-19 perspectives and status of their faculty, students, and organizations. This research summary is one of a series of reports outlining higher education's readiness to move teaching and learning online to preserve and continue its educational mission during the current pandemic.

Device Access

Most, but not all, students have access to digital devices that could be used for online learning (see table 1). Institutions should be prepared to make accommodations for students who either do not have access to devices at all or lack devices that are compatible with the institutional LMS. Access varies significantly by institution type.

Table 1. Device access among community college and four-year students

LMS Use

Most students have some experience using the LMS for their courses (mostly accessing the syllabus or checking grades; see table 2), but a sizable portion of students have minimal experience using online classroom platforms, especially for more-involved course activities. As a general rule, providing students with instructions on how to use the LMS and advice for navigating the peculiarities of particular courses can improve their learning experiences. Patience and lenience are the order of the day with students who might have a difficult time accessing and using the platform. Instructors should plan for the additional time this will take when moving abruptly to online learning. IT support staff should be prepared to provide just-in-time support for these cases. Additionally, consider using asynchronous and flexible approaches to teaching and deadlines to accommodate students with constraints or emergencies that would prevent them from attending synchronous events or who lack reliable Wi-Fi or broadband access.

Table 2. Students' LMS use

LMS Training

It's time to ramp-up your LMS training program. Although 99% of institutions provide LMS and educational technology support for students, a majority of students have either not received any LMS training or don't know if they have received training; more students at AA institutions have received formal LMS training than students at other types of institutions (see table 3). The lack of formal LMS training poses serious issues for institutions requiring that courses be moved online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Institutions should not assume that students with no formal LMS training will be able to move easily into online learning environments. In addition to faculty needing to provide coaching for their particular courses, IT support services might find themselves overwhelmed by students seeking advice or needing to troubleshoot problems as they begin to take all of their courses online.

Table 3. Students' LMS training experiences

Learning Environments Preferences

The completely online learning environments into which students' courses are being migrated in response to COVID-19 will be suboptimal relative to student preferences. Nearly all students prefer at least some face-to-face contact, with a majority preferring that their classes be mostly to completely face-to-face (see figure 1). While some groups of students have a stronger preference for completely online courses based on their personal circumstances, most still prefer at least a little face-to-face engagement. It is possible that some students will resist the completely online experience and might disengage or not perform as well as they might otherwise, given their preferences for other types of learning environments. It is critical that faculty migrating face-to-face courses to completely online ones create engaging and thoughtful learning experiences to improve student buy-in to and experiences with the online environment. Both faculty and students will need support from others in the institution, whether that be IT to help them come up to speed, teaching and learning centers to help faculty revise their curricula and teaching methods, or student advising and success officers to understand the potential speed bumps this might introduce to course and degree completion.

Figure 1. Student learning environment preferences, by key demographic factors

Learning Environment Preferences for Activities and Assignments

Students also have strong preferences for the type of classroom activities and assignments they conduct in a completely online environment (see figure 2). Submitting homework and assignments; taking exams, quizzes, or tests; conducting peer-reviewing or peer-grading activities; and having course-related discussions are the activities that students most often prefer to conduct in a completely online environment the most, but relatively few students prefer this environment even for the activities most suited to it. Understanding these preferences can help faculty make decisions about how to convert or whether to jettison activities and assignments that were originally designed for face-to-face learning environments. These data may also help teaching and learning center staff develop focused support for helping understand and address the root causes of students' preferences.

Figure 2. Student learning environment preferences for specific course-related activities and assignments

The COVID-19 pandemic is presenting higher education with a host of unprecedented challenges. Moving all courses with face-to-face components to completely online environments is new territory for students, faculty, and institutions. Fortunately, we know that online learning works, and we know a lot about how teaching and learning works in online environments. And, while there is an abundance of IT, teaching and learning, and instructional design resources that can facilitate the academic triage currently under way, institutions will need to provide expanded support and additional channels of support to help students. Our efforts here draw upon current EDUCAUSE student, faculty, and institutional data to help higher education employees anticipate potential problems as they move all of their course offerings online.

Read about faculty readiness to adopt fully online learning. EDUCAUSE will continue to monitor higher education and technology related issues during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For additional resources, please visit the EDUCAUSE COVID-19 web page.

D. Christopher Brooks is Director of Research at EDUCAUSE.

Susan Grajek is Vice President of Communities and Research at EDUCAUSE.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
students' readiness to adopt fully remote learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Students' Readiness to Adopt Fully Remote Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As many colleges and universities move instruction online as part of their response to COVID-19, data about user preferences, access, and training can help ease that transition for students and faculty. The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning in place of face-to-face classes, in an effort to limit transmission of the virus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Faculty Readiness to Begin Fully Remote Teaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One response to the COVID-19 virus is to immediately shift all courses to fully online environments, but many faculty are not prepared to teach online