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A fellow colleague in my Hyrbid Learning program plans to use Ring Central as a mechanism to have students break up into small groups to work on a problem during a synchronous session. Great idea Beth Sullivan.

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Void where prohibited. To qualify for the $19.99 holiday bundle offer you must purchase a new three-year RingCentral Essentials Office plan, between two (2) and forty-nine (49) digital lines, at a price of $14.99 per digital line per month. Phone rentals will be charged at $5.00 per line per month, for either the Poly VVX 350 or Yealink T46S telephone (particular phone model subject to availability). Promotional price applies to base monthly rate only and excludes fees, taxes, additional or premium services and other charges. These terms are subject to change at any time without prior notice. RingCentral reserves right to terminate this offer at any time. RingCentral Terms of Service apply. Early termination may be subject to additional fees. Promotion is for new RingCentral customers in the US and Canada only. Monthly charge will be $19.99 per digital line for the 36-month term, plus applicable taxes and fees. After first 36 months you'll pay the full $19.99 per digital line, plus applicable taxes and fees, subject to the Terms of Services.

Don't pay until 2020 only applicable for month-to-month pricing. Month-to-month pricing will begin January 2020, as determined by applicable 2019 commencement date. If customer elects annual payments, customer will be billed upon commencement of services. Annual payment will show 2019 monthly payments credits and remaining 2020 annual payments billed.

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Small Business Phone System by RingCentral

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Void where prohibited. To qualify for the $19.99 holiday bundle offer you must purchase a new three-year RingCentral Essentials Office plan, between two (2) and forty-nine (49) digital lines, at a price of $14.99 per digital line per month.

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Quizlet is a resource I utilize for knowledge checks. https://quizlet.com/

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10 ways to Overcome Barriers to Student Engagment

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10 ways to Overcome Barriers to Student Engagment

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I found this interesting.  Bonnie Hall

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By Ali Briggs.

Student engagement is a concept often discussed in education and an abundance of research exists on the topic. Student engagement is something instructors want to see and feel in their classrooms. Generally, student engagement tends to be viewed as the level of interest students show towards the topic being taught; their interaction with the content, instructor, and peers; and their motivation to learn and progress through the course.

Online learning presents new challenges when compared to a traditional classroom because students are separated from their instructor by a computer screen. How can we engage our students in the content, learning activities, and assessments? How can we prevent feelings of frustration or isolation and keep them motivated? These questions are frequently asked by online instructors looking to maintain the same levels of engagement they see and feel in their face-to-face classrooms.

I have a deep interest in this area and decided to explore it further by completing an online workshop from the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) called Fundamentals: Increasing Interaction & Engagement.The learning objectives of the workshop were twofold: Identify strategies that help overcome obstacles to student engagement and develop a plan to improve student engagement in your online course. Obstacles to student engagement were broken down into three areas: social, administrative, and motivational. Looking at student engagement barriers in this way made them seem easier to overcome. I found the experience helpful and have summarized ten ways to overcome barriers to student engagement online based on what was discussed during the workshop.
OLC is a professional organization devoted to advancing quality online learning. They offer a variety of workshops on topics related to online learning. William & Mary faculty and staff can contact April Lawrence for OLC workshop registration information.
Overcome Social Barriers

It's important to build community in an online course. Students may become disengaged if they feel isolated or if they don't get to interact with their instructor and peers. Foster community in your online course and overcome social barriers to student engagement with the following strategies:

1. Make first contact before the course begins. Send an email message to introduce yourself and provide instructions on how to get started. Add a personal touch by including a short video message relaying the same information so students can get a sense of your personality.

2. Create an introductory activity. Connect your students with each other and make them feel like they're part of a community of scholars. Create a simple Blackboard discussion forum for introductions. You can also ask students to upload a picture to their Blackboard profile.

3. Provide opportunities for learner interaction. Blackboard discussion forums, Padlet walls, or VoiceThread activities are great ways to promote student interaction. You can also create online study groups where students meet through Google Hangouts or another video conferencing service. The first study group could be guided by instructor-created questions and then you could challenge students to come up with future questions. WM Apps are an easy way for students to develop content together and WM Wikis also provides opportunities for collaboration.

4. Encourage sharing. Social media can be used to engage students in your content. Students can share resources related to the course informally through a Facebook group or Twitter hashtag. You can even embed a Twitter feed into your Blackboard course!

Overcome Administrative Barriers

Students may get frustrated if they don't know how and when to contact you. They may also get discouraged if they don't know their progress in the course or if expectations aren't clearly communicated. Set your students up for success using these strategies to overcome administrative barriers to student engagement:

1. Establish contact methods and hours. Communicate your email address and phone number as well as the best days and times to reach you. Let students know in advance when you'll be away longer than 24 hours to avoid feelings of frustration. Besides email and phone, you can hold online office hours using Adobe Connect or Google Hangouts. These services allow you to share your screen with students and have drawing capabilities.

2. Provide directions often and in various ways. Be clear and concise with your directions and expectations. Also provide your directions in multiple ways, such as through email and within the online course. If you create a video with instructions on how to complete a task be sure to provide the same directions in text.

3. Provide effective and timely feedback. This is important in any course, especially online. Make your presence known in a discussion forum by getting involved early and asking questions that keep the discussion going. Students should also be aware of their progress throughout the duration of the course. Blackboard's Assignment tools and Grade Center can help you communicate student progress. Self-check activities also help guide student learning and prepare students for course assessments.

Overcome Motivation Barriers

Procrastination can happen to the best of us! Students may face additional distractions when completing online course work from the comfort of their own home or in a busy coffee shop. Overcome motivation barriers to student engagement and keep your students on track using these strategies:

1. Chunk your content. Simply put, chunking means breaking down information into smaller pieces that are easier for the brain to digest. Content should be organized in a logical way that guides the learning process. Conceptually-related information should be grouped together making it more meaningful and easier to understand. Video lectures should also be broken into shorter segments, usually 5-7 minutes. Read more about chunking from eLearning Coach Connie Malamed.

2. Send reminders to keep students on track. Populate the course calendar with deadlines and send reminders to your students so they stay on track. If a student falls behind, make time to speak with that student on what he or she can do to get back on track. It's also helpful to provide some sort of checklist for students so they know what they have to complete and when.

3. Use a variety of multimedia and modalities. You will have different types of learners in your course and using a variety of content-delivery methods and learning activities will help keep them engaged. If your course is text-based, consider including images or graphs to clarify concepts. You can also replace some of the text with videos or audio depending on the topic. Small changes can drastically improve the learning experience for your students.

As you can tell, there are many different ways to engage your students in an online environment! What strategies have you used to increase student engagement in your online or blended course? Share your ideas by commenting below.

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Ten Ways to Overcome Barriers to Student Engagement Online (Academic Technology: At the College of William and Mary) - OLC

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Learn more about student engagement in one of our workshops: Fundamentals: Engaging Learners In Online Discussions or Fundamentals: Increasing Interaction & Engagement By Ali Briggs. Student engagement is a concept often discussed in education and an abundance of research exists on the topic. Read More >

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Cool paper discussing the purpose of learning objectives using a relatable analogy and also provides a framework for writing objectives.

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Blog Post 2 - The Purpose of Learning Objectives

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Faculty perspective on benefits and challenges to hybrid learning

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Faculty perspective on benefits and challenges to hybrid learning

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This paper discusses results from a study done at Iowa State University assessing benefits and challenges to hybrid learning from an instructor's perspective. Overall, they found hybrid learning to have more benefits than challenges.

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Self-Compassion and Empathy Leads to More Effectiveness and Less Burnout in "Helping" Professions (that's us!)

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Self-Compassion and Empathy Leads to More Effectiveness and Less Burnout in "Helping" Professions (that's us!)

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I'm gearing up to teach a course called Mindful Patient Management for Baylor's DPT program, and thought this content might be helpful for anyone else embarking on a new challenge like I am as a fairly "green" hybrid instructor. It's amazing the wide range of health benefits there are to mindfulness and meditation, particularly with an emphasis on loving-kindness and compassion to the SELF, as a means of fortifying us to be sustainably caring and compassionate to others. As we all face challenges and difficult learning moments as we grow in our skills as hybrid instructors, just remember to give yourself some grace! :)

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2014 Raab Mindfulness Self Compassion and Empathy Among Health Care Professionals A Review of the Literature

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I enjoyed reading this article about current practices in graduate OT programs in using technology. The authors described past studies showing benefits and other studies showing no differences between teaching OT students online or in traditional classrooms. The purpose of this study was to measure how frequently OT programs use IT. Results showed that 96% of programs used IT to supplement their program, but a limited number used online teaching as their main method of teaching. 

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I enjoyed reading this article about current practices in graduate OT programs in using technology. The authors described past studies showing benefits and other studies showing no differences between teaching OT students online or in traditional classrooms. The purpose of this study was to measure how frequently OT programs use IT. Results showed that 96% of programs used IT to supplement their program, but a limited number used online teaching as their main method of teaching. 

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Beth Sullivan

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Article on Technology Use for OT Students

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Actively Engaging Students inAsynchronous Online Classes

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Actively Engaging Students inAsynchronous Online Classes

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I found the concepts in this paper really helpful when designing courses so they foster better student engagement.
Vic Vaughan

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https://www.nvcc.edu/hybrid
/student/challenges.html

This link provides examples of the challenges with hybrid learning. It includes many of the issues we discussed, but provides a nice simple explanation. It also provides questions for students/instructors to reflect on to gauge whether hybrid learning is a 'good fit' for their teaching/learning style.

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Some students procrastinate more than others; some are satisfied with barely passing a course. If you are this type of person, you may find that a hybrid course is much more time consuming and difficult for you.

Here are some common challenges students come across:

Procrastination

Procrastination can become magnified when online work adds up. Start on your hybrid weekly coursework early in the week! If you tend to put things off or try to do things at the last minute, hybrid will present you with serious difficulties. You must be able to complete a specified task on time. Establish a regular work routine.

Student Advice

As the proverb goes, "do not put off things that you can do today."

Online Temptations

Online Temptations can distract you when you set out to do your hybrid work. Minimize your time with social networking, gaming, etc. Set a timer and allow yourself limited time on these other sites.

Passive Learning

Some students get through courses by doing only the bare minimum of work to pass. This type of student is likely to fail a hybrid course, where students must be active learners.

A typical hybrid course emphasizes volunteering, working with groups online, and taking initiative more than in a traditional face-to-face course.

You may be asked to demonstrate your understanding of the course ideas and concepts by applying them to real-world situations.

Student Advice

I would encourage participation ..."The more one responds to others, the more others respond to you in the online class, so you improve and connect with your colleagues."

Misunderstandings

Online communication can be misunderstood and cause angry/hurt feelings among classmates because you do not have the benefit of seeing or hearing the author -- eye contact, body language, voice intonations all give clues about humor or sarcasm. We can respectfully disagree with classmates about issues and course content. Keep this in mind and try to see each other's perspectives.

Forgetfulness

Some students can never remember that they have hybrid assignments due at midnight on Thursdays. If this is you, you risk racking up absences, losing points, and failing the course.

Poor Reading Skills

If you are not a careful or strong reader, you may miss a crucial element of online hybrid assignments. Hybrids abound with detailed written instructions. You may be asked to follow directions about where to post essays, how to conduct peer reviews, and how to complete an online workshop.

On the positive side, taking a hybrid course can give you an opportunity to practice and improve your reading skills, making you a better student overall!

Student Advice

"Read the syllabus carefully because everything is there; read the assignments and follow all the steps; post assignments on time."

You Thrive on Talking in Class

Some people learn best through face-to-face social interaction, which you can have during in-person class days. However, for half the course, the interaction via online discussion might seem lonely and isolated for some.

Poor or Slow Typing (Keyboarding) Skills

The online assignments require a lot of writing. The more proficient a typist you are, the better. You do not have to type 80 words a minute, but if you only "hunt and peck," you may be spending more time than you want typing.

Student Advice

"You will need to type faster and be more active in the online class part. You need good word processing skills ... type well."

Irregular Work Schedule

Hybrids are for busy students with packed schedules, job hours, child care, etc. They are designed to be flexible, but one part is not flexible -- the in-person meeting. This is where valuable face-to-face contact occurs; it is where you can connect as part of a community; it is where you can work out your weekly concerns and confusions. If you cannot attend the in-person portion regularly or have to miss several classes for whatever reason, that particular hybrid course section is not for you.

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Some students procrastinate more than others; some are satisfied with barely passing a course. If you are this type of person, you may find that a hybrid course is much more time consuming and difficult for you. Here are some common challenges students come across: Procrastination can become magnified when online work adds up.

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This is a valuable tool for converting text to sound. I listen to articles on walks and in the car. Sometimes it takes a bit of work to format the text, but I'm getting better at that. It is not expensive. I would recommend not getting the premium voices. The robot voices are quite understandable.

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NextUp Talker is a Text to Speech program specifically designed for people who have temporarily or permanently lost their voice. With natural, human-sounding voices and convenient short-cuts to quickly enter commonly used sentences and phrases, NextUp Talker allows you to overcome vocal impairment by communicating with others using a Windows PC or Tablet PC.

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TextAloud Text to Speech Software and Natural Sounding Voices

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NextUp Talker is a Text to Speech program specifically designed for people who have temporarily or permanently lost their voice. With natural, human-sounding voices and convenient short-cuts to quickly enter commonly used sentences and phrases, NextUp Talker allows you to overcome vocal impairment by communicating with others using a Windows PC or Tablet PC.

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I use TED talks to inspire myself and this is no exception.  Although focused on high school history, the lessons are easily translated into any learning environment with a focus on creating a community of learning where students WANT to learn and the use of assessments as a STARTING point, not an ending point.

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What If? Let's Reimagine Learning. Technology Can Help. | Kerry Gallagher | TEDxYouth@BHS

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Although this tool is not free, I've seen it in action, and it is an amazing tool with easy usability for creating interactive online teaching content.

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Optimized effortlessly

The responsive player provides the best view of your course on every device. Unlike Adobe Captivate, there's no need to tweak your course for various device breakpoints. The responsive player does all the work for you.

Mobile-friendly playback

Designed to deliver an ideal learner experience, the player hides sidebar menus, eliminates browser chrome, and delivers mobile-friendly playback controls optimized for every screen size and orientation.

Touchscreen gesture support

Invite deeper interaction with your courses. The responsive player supports touchscreen gestures, so learners can swipe, drag, and pinch-to-zoom on tablets and mobile devices.

Go zero to gorgeous in 60 seconds

You'll feel like a pro even if you're a beginner with Storyline 360. It's intuitive, familiar, and integrates seamlessly with Content Library 360, so you can start your course with the most beautiful, high-quality assets in the industry. Add Content Library 360 templates and characters right from Storyline 360, without breaking stride.

Collaborate with your team

Articulate 360 Teams plan only

Make collaboration easy for your team. Create a collection of shared team slides that everyone can access right from Storyline 360. Upload branded project templates, share slides that need to be in every course, and give teammates access to reusable slide content.

Storyline 360 is everything I love about Storyline and more. Simple enough for new designers to get their courses designed and produced quickly. Robust enough for power users to design anything they can imagine. And with the responsive player, courses play beautifully on every device.

Tracy Parish
Southlake Regional Health Centre

Easy interactivity, without limits

Create virtually any interaction under the sun in minutes. Storyline 360 is simple enough for beginners, yet powerful enough for experts.

Build any interaction

If you can imagine an interaction, you can easily build it with the slide layers, triggers, and states in Storyline 360. Learners can click, hover over, or drag any object to trigger any action.

Get instant interactivity

Drop buttons, dials, sliders, markers, and hotspots on your slide to add interactivity in seconds. With a few clicks, you'll have an engaging interaction.

Personalize interactions

Respond to learners with dynamic, personalized content. With the variables in Storyline 360, you can customize interactivity to the max with minimal effort.

Create screencasts

Show learners exactly what they need to know by recording your screen activity. Then easily add captions, characters, and pan-and-zoom effects.

Build software simulations

Create simulations in minutes, not days. Record your screen once, then edit recordings whenever and however you want. There's no need to re-record.

Add any video

Import video of any type or format, including personalized screencasts you record with Replay 360 or with Peek 360, our Mac screencasting app.

Discover what learners know

Storyline 360 has everything you need to assess learners any way you want. Create insightful assessments quickly by using 25 different question types and importing existing questions.

Pool and randomize questions to keep content fresh and learners on their toes. And turn objects into drag-and-drop and other decision-making activities in minutes.

You can even discourage guessing with negative scoring, test throughout your course to get a clear view of performance, and combine results from multiple quizzes for a final score.

Get stakeholder buy-in

Finish projects faster with Review 360. Simply upload your Storyline 360 course, share the link, and watch the feedback from stakeholders roll in-all in one place. Subject matter experts (SMEs) can see the latest version, make in-context comments, and chime in on existing threads. And you can easily view, resolve, and respond to their feedback, keeping everyone in sync.

Deliver to everyone, everywhere

Localize content

Easily translate courses for learners across the globe. Storyline 360 supports right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic and double-byte character sets for languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Distribute and track

Publish Tin Can API 1.0‑, SCORM‑, and AICC-compliant content for your learning management system.

Boost accessibility

Make your courses even more accessible with Storyline 360's Section 508 and WCAG support, tables, custom tab order feature, and skippable player navigation.

The best e-learning authoring tool for the best companies

Organizations in every industry rely on award-winning Storyline 360 to create interactive e-learning, easily.

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Build Highly Interactive E-Learning Courses with Storyline 360

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Develop interactive training courses for any device with Storyline 360, one of the apps in Articulate 360. Storyline's intuitive features make it simple to create richly interactive e-learning.

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Flipped classroom improves  student learning in health professions education:  a meta-analysis.

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Flipped classroom improves  student learning in health professions education:  a meta-analysis.

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The study compared pre-recorded lectures (not textbook reading) to a traditional classroom.

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BACKGROUND:

The use of flipped classroom approach has become increasingly popular in health professions education. However, no meta-analysis has been published that specifically examines the effect of flipped classroom versus traditional classroom on student learning. This study examined the findings of comparative articles through a meta-analysis in order to summarize the overall effects of teaching with the flipped classroom approach. We focused specifically on a set of flipped classroom studies in which pre-recorded videos were provided before face-to-face class meetings. These comparative articles focused on health care professionals including medical students, residents, doctors, nurses, or learners in other health care professions and disciplines (e.g., dental, pharmacy, environmental or occupational health).

METHOD:

Using predefined study eligibility criteria, seven electronic databases were searched in mid-April 2017 for relevant articles. Methodological quality was graded using the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI). Effect sizes, heterogeneity estimates, analysis of possible moderators, and publication bias were computed using the COMPREHENSIVE META-ANALYSIS software.

RESULTS:

A meta-analysis of 28 eligible comparative studies (between-subject design) showed an overall significant effect in favor of flipped classrooms over traditional classrooms for health professions education (standardized mean difference, SMD = 0.33, 95% confidence interval, CI = 0.21-0.46, p < 0.001), with no evidence of publication bias. In addition, the flipped classroom approach was more effective when instructors used quizzes at the start of each in-class session. More respondents reported they preferred flipped to traditional classrooms.

CONCLUSIONS:

Current evidence suggests that the flipped classroom approach in health professions education yields a significant improvement in student learning compared with traditional teaching methods.

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Flipped classroom improves student learning in health professions education: a meta-analysis.

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BACKGROUND: The use of flipped classroom approach has become increasingly popular in health professions education. However, no meta-analysis has been published that specifically examines the effect of flipped classroom versus traditional classroom on student learning. This study examined the findings of comparative articles through a meta-analysis in order to summarize the overall effects of teaching with the flipped classroom approach.

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Meeting the Challenge of Instructor Shortages: A Blended Teaching and Learning Model for a Neuroscience Course in a Doctor of Physical Therapy Program

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Meeting the Challenge of Instructor Shortages: A Blended Teaching and Learning Model for a Neuroscience Course in a Doctor of Physical Therapy Program

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BACKGROUND:

Physical therapy workforce shortages are expected to increase for all 50 states through 2030. There is a recognized nationwide unprecedented shortage of well-prepared physical therapy instructors. One practical solution can be to share instructors among Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs using a blended teaching and learning model.

OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a blended teaching and learning model for a neuroscience course in a DPT program.

METHODS:

Faculty members from two DPT programs collaborated to develop, implement, and evaluate a blended teaching and learning model. The Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) was available at both institutions and chosen as the learning platform. The design of this research study was retrospective nonexperimental observational.

RESULTS:

The overall feedback from the students was positive. Most students (91.6%) strongly agreed or agreed that the content of the course was appropriate for learning neuroscience. The students taking this blended course performed slightly better than the students taking the traditional course, though there was no significant difference (p=0.06).

CONCLUSIONS:

The results support the use of a blended teaching and learning model to meet faculty shortage challenges. Future research with a larger sample size is necessary.

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BACKGROUND: Physical therapy workforce shortages are expected to increase for all 50 states through 2030. There is a recognized nationwide unprecedented shortage of well-prepared physical therapy instructors. One practical solution can be to share instructors among Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs using a blended teaching and learning model.

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This is a great overview of the 10 essential elements of developing effective, efficient and engaging online courses.
Janine Hatch

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Effective online courses are well designed so that teaching and learning is organized in the most effective and engaging manner possible. In an online learning situation, the student's learning experience is almost entirely mediated through some form of technology; therefore, the design of the teaching and learning experience is especially critical.

Instructional Design is a broad term that encompasses the selection, organization, sequencing, and assessment of content, tools, and experiences to help learners attain a certain set of goals. Poorly designed technology-based courses can confound learning, frustrate learners and instructors, and result in high attrition rates. Oftentimes, a focus on Instructional Design often focuses on micro-level actions - which apps to use, which videos to include in a course (all important). This article instead focuses on several (though not all) good, high-level, Instructional Design practices for creating effective online courses - primarily for teachers in an online learning program.

Instructional Design: A Big Picture View

Effective online courses do the following:

1. They Are Grounded In An Understanding Of The Learning Process.

An effectively designed online course or program must take into account multiple factors - the characteristics of targeted learners, the nature of the content, the role of the community in shaping learning, and integration of ongoing feedback and assessment; ample opportunities for practice and expert feedback to guide the development of knowledge in action.

2. They Are Based On The Needs Of Adult Learners.

Research on adult learning demonstrates that adult learners share common characteristics and beliefs that can be integrated into any learning experience. Adult learners:

Need to be treated with respect and recognition and their professional experiences integrated into workshops and discussions.

Are practical and want solutions they can implement to address real-life challenges.

Are self-directed and need to be given the opportunity to reflect on and analyze their own practice.

Need to process information as part of learning.

Have different learning styles.

Need support of peers.

3. They Link Theory And Practice.

Online teacher professional development has been critiqued for its relative failure vis-à-vis face-to-face instruction to integrate theory with practice. As such, concepts such as "pedagogical knowledge" remain more conceptual than practical - focusing on knowledge about practice versus knowledge in practice. Using real-time video -such as a videoconferencing system or web cameras- can capture practice "live" (though stationery video systems may not provide a full picture of student interactions and behaviors). Videorecording teachers' practice at certain points in the school year can provide a visual archive of teacher progression or regression in a certain area. And video can also be shared with other teachers as a study tool.

4. They Accommodate Range Of Learning Styles.

Cognitive models or "frames of mind" shape the way learners perceive and process information and suggest that an individual's ability to learn is influenced by the manner in which information is presented. Course designers should create an array of assignments, activities, and assessments that allow learners to interact and practice with content in multiple ways, on multiple cognitive levels and using multiple measures and methods to assess learning.

5. They Are Accessible.

Effective online courses should be accessible to all learners. One way to do this is to make sure courses are "universally" designed. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) advocates that all learning experiences should be purposefully designed to be "barrier free" and accessible by providing multiple and flexible methods of the following elements:

Presentation of information and knowledge (e.g., voice-to-text applications, screen readers, digital books).

Expression with alternatives for students to demonstrate what they have learned (e.g., concept mapping).

Engagement to tap into diverse learners' interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn (choices among various scenarios for learning the same competency).

6. They Are "Flexibly" Designed.

One of the most common misconceptions in online education is that face-to-face curriculum can be transferred wholesale to a distance education format. Rather, online courses must be designed "flexibly" and specifically for an online medium. Flexible design proposes that content be organized in flexible formats, used in a variety of activities and accessible through a variety of technologies to allow for customized learning experiences. Some of its key components are:
a) Medium of delivery.
Maximizing the strengths of the technology delivery model or modality while mitigating its weaknesses.
b) Organization.
Content, activities, and experiences should be sequential, cumulative, and coherent. They should be highly interactive and allow for a range of levels of learning, learner entry points, and experiences. Information should be "chunked" and moves sequentially from simple to complex; concrete to abstract and general to specific, in clear, concise text.
c) Design clarity.
This includes ease of access and navigation. Such clarity and the intuitive organization of materials significantly influence learners' satisfaction and perceived learning of course material in online learning environments.
d) Types of learner experiences.
Flexibly designed courses favor "ill structured" activities over well-structured ones; interactivity over passivity; inductive over deductive instruction; and activity over text and lecture. Such course design supports both the individual and group's learning and promotes applied approaches to learning.
e) Digital tools.
Must be functional; provide multichannel opportunities to build understanding of complex concepts; allow for the completion of a range of tasks (finding information, communicating, writing, reflecting, organizing information, etc). Technology should be not just a medium of delivery but a learning aid that provides opportunities for concrete, contextually meaningful experiences through which they can search for patterns, raise their own questions, and construct their own models, concepts, and strategies.

7. They Offer Flexible Delivery.

In addition to being flexibly designed, distance courses should be flexibly delivered. Flexibly delivered courses offer:

Realistic options and choice in terms of time, place, and technology.

Multiple modes of delivery (in the workplace; in block modes; modules; interactive format and other "non-standard" delivery).

Options for delivery include alternative ways of on campus, in-class, independent lectures, seminars, tutorials, and practical sessions.

Accommodation of the diverse learning needs and learning styles of learners.

Use of technology and resources for learning supports to provide options to any students to access and use materials in his/her own place (e.g., web-based teaching materials and exercises or assessment that is not time and place specific).

8. They Provide For Flexible Assessment.

Assessment is often the weakest component of an online program. One way to improve assessment is to design a "flexible assessment" system. Flexible assessment involves the following practices:

Uses synchronous and asynchronous approach to assessment.

Utilizes a range of assessment formats, for example computer-based, performance-based, and face-to-face assessments in a central location with proctors and invigilators.

Employs a combination of formative and summative assessments.

Collaborative assessments in which teachers and teacher candidates create, joint products to showcase their learning (e.g. folksonomies).

Grading policies that combine self-, peer-, and instructor assessment of the products, processes and progress of learning.

9. They Use A Variety Of Media.

A mix of media is more effective than the reliance on one type of media because it satisfies the many types of learning preferences that one person may embody or that a class embodies. Particularly in print- and web-based professional development courses which are primarily text heavy, the use of still and moving visual media can help learners who are poor readers better understand content.

Print instruction should be delivered in an individualized mode which allows the learner to set the learning pace. Visual media -such as animations and simulations- can help learners enhance their understanding of concepts, such as object identification and spatial relationships. Visual media which portray motion can demonstrate psychomotor or cognitive domain expectations by showing the skill as a model against which students can measure their performance. Images can enhance vocabulary and reading comprehension for poor readers. Full motion video can be used to depict performance so that learners can copy the movement. Audio narration can help poor readers comprehend information and music can serve as a memory aid. Literacy research shows that readers remember what they've read if key words are highlighted by different colors and font styles. Color coding concepts is also an effective visual mnemonic.

10. They Are Interactive.

"Interactivity" is one of those terms we often use without clearly defining. It involves 5 levels:

1. Learner interaction with an object or person in a way that allows learners to improve their knowledge and skills in a particular domain.

2. Multiple communications between learners around an object of study, a tool, or an experience.

3. Learner control and program adaptation based on learner input.

4. Reciprocal process of information exchange and sharing ideas between students and teachers.

5. Multiple forms of synergistic participation and communication that aid the development of meaningful learning.

A full list of references used in this post can be found in pages 138-150 of Burns, M. (2011), Distance Education for Teacher Training: Modes, Models, and Methods. Washington, DC: Education Development Center, Inc.

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Designing Effective Online Courses: 10 Considerations

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Want to know how to design Effective Online Courses? Check 10 Instructional Design best practices for Designing Effective Online Courses.

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The student as CEO of their life and learning (Ester Wojcicki) – TED Talk

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The student as CEO of their life and learning (Ester Wojcicki) – TED Talk

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Exemplar for guiding students to take control and leadership for their education/learning.

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The student as CEO of their life and learning | Esther Wojcicki | TEDxBerkeley

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A Framework for Evaluating Class Size in Online Education

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A Framework for Evaluating Class Size in Online Education

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A Framework for Evaluating Class Size in Online Education

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Jodie Valls - Improving Education in Medical Statistics: Implementing a Blended Learning Model in the Existing Curriculum

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Jodie Valls - Improving Education in Medical Statistics: Implementing a Blended Learning Model in the Existing Curriculum

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https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148882

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Applying Liberating Structures (LS) to Improve Teaching in Health and Sciences: Pilot Study Results

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Applying Liberating Structures (LS) to Improve Teaching in Health and Sciences: Pilot Study Results

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Evidence-based research examining the use of liberating structures by K-12 teachers for improving engagement while teaching science and health education.

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Recipes for Effective Online Teaching: Curated Videos Plus Activit

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Blended learning for Health coaching/prevention

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Blended learning for Health coaching/prevention

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Discusses pros and cons of Blended learning in healthcare.

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Monitoring Editor: Panagiotis Bamidis

Reviewed by Spyros Kitsiou, Tobias Raupach, and Azizeh Sowan

Qian Liu, MMSc,#¹ Weijun Peng, MMSc, ¹ Fan Zhang, MMSc, ¹ Rong Hu, MPH, ¹ Yingxue Li, MMSc, ¹ and Weirong Yan, PhD ¹

Abstract

Background

Blended learning, defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face learning and asynchronous or synchronous e-learning, has grown rapidly and is now widely used in education. Concerns about the effectiveness of blended learning have led to an increasing number of studies on this topic. However, there has yet to be a quantitative synthesis evaluating the effectiveness of blended learning on knowledge acquisition in health professions.

Objective

We aimed to assess the effectiveness of blended learning for health professional learners compared with no intervention and with nonblended learning. We also aimed to explore factors that could explain differences in learning effects across study designs, participants, country socioeconomic status, intervention durations, randomization, and quality score for each of these questions.

Methods

We conducted a search of citations in Medline, CINAHL, Science Direct, Ovid Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, and ERIC through September 2014. Studies in any language that compared blended learning with no intervention or nonblended learning among health professional learners and assessed knowledge acquisition were included. Two reviewers independently evaluated study quality and abstracted information including characteristics of learners and intervention (study design, exercises, interactivity, peer discussion, and outcome assessment).

Results

We identified 56 eligible articles. Heterogeneity across studies was large (I ² ≥93.3) in all analyses. For studies comparing knowledge gained from blended learning versus no intervention, the pooled effect size was 1.40 (95% CI 1.04-1.77; P<.001; n=20 interventions) with no significant publication bias, and exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result. For studies comparing blended learning with nonblended learning (pure e-learning or pure traditional face-to-face learning), the pooled effect size was 0.81 (95% CI 0.57-1.05; P<.001; n=56 interventions), and exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result. Although significant publication bias was found, the trim and fill method showed that the effect size changed to 0.26 (95% CI -0.01 to 0.54) after adjustment. In the subgroup analyses, pre-posttest study design, presence of exercises, and objective outcome assessment yielded larger effect sizes.

Conclusions

Blended learning appears to have a consistent positive effect in comparison with no intervention, and to be more effective than or at least as effective as nonblended instruction for knowledge acquisition in health professions. Due to the large heterogeneity, the conclusion should be treated with caution.

Keywords: blended learning, effectiveness, knowledge, health professions, meta-analysis

Introduction

Electronic learning (e-learning) has quickly become popular for health education [ 1- 3], especially since the emergence of the Internet has allowed its potential to be realized [ 4]. E-learning can not only transcend space and time boundaries and improve convenience and effectiveness for individualized and collaborative learning, but also provide reusable and up-to-date information through the use of interactive multimedia [ 3, 5- 9]. However, it also suffers from disadvantages such as high costs for preparing multimedia materials, continuous costs for platform maintenance and updating, as well as learners' feelings of isolation in virtual environments [ 8, 10, 11]. Traditional learning must be conducted at a specific time and place and is considered vital in building a sense of community [ 12, 13]. Blended learning, defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face learning and asynchronous or synchronous e-learning [ 14], has been presented as a promising alternative approach for health education because it is characterized as synthesizing the advantages of both traditional learning and e-learning [ 8, 15, 16]. Moreover, blended learning has shown rapid growth and is now widely used in education [ 17, 18].

With the introduction of blended learning, increasing research has focused on concerns about its effectiveness. Three original research articles reporting on quantitative evaluations of blended learning were published in the 1990s [ 19- 21], and then many were published after 2000 [ 16, 22- 29]. A quantitative synthesis of these studies could inform educators and students about evidence for, and factors influencing, the effectiveness of blended learning.

Rowe et al's systematic review reported that blended learning has the potential to improve clinical competencies among health students [ 30]. In another systematic review, McCutcheon et al suggested a lack of evaluation of blended learning in undergraduate nursing education [ 31]. Several reviews have also summarized the evaluation of e-learning in medical education, but none separated blended learning from pure e-learning [ 32- 34]. Furthermore, these systematic reviews were limited to only some areas or branches of health education; there has been no quantitative synthesis to evaluate the effectiveness of blended learning in all professions directly related to human and animal health.

Therefore, our study aimed to identify and quantitatively synthesize all studies evaluating the effectiveness of blended learning for health professional learners who were students, postgraduate trainees, or practitioners in a profession directly related to human or animal health. We conducted two meta-analyses: the first summarized studies comparing blended learning with no intervention, and the second explored blended learning compared with nonblended learning (including pure e-learning and traditional face-to-face learning). We also aimed to explore factors that could explain differences in learning effectiveness across characteristics of participants, interventions, and study designs. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that learning outcomes would be improved through exercises, cognitive interactivity, and peer discussion [ 35- 38]. Exercises contain cases, quizzes, self-assessment test, and other activities requiring learners to apply knowledge acquired from the course [ 33]. Cognitive interactivity reflects cognitive engagement required for course participation, and multiple practice exercises, essays, and group collaborative projects account for high interactivity [ 38]. Peer discussion includes instructor-student or peer-peer face-to-face discussion that might arise in a typical lecture, and synchronous or asynchronous online communication such as discussion boards, email, chat, or Internet conferencing [ 33].

Methods

Reporting Standards

We conducted and reported our study according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines [ 39] (see e-Table 7 in Multimedia Appendix 1) and meta-analyses of observational studies in epidemiology [ 40].

Eligibility Criteria

Inclusion criteria for studies were based on the PICOS (population, intervention, comparison, outcome, and study design) framework [ 39]. Studies were included only if they (1) were conducted among health professional learners, (2) used a blended learning intervention in the experimental group, (3) involved a comparison of blended learning with no intervention or nonblended learning, (4) included quantitative outcomes with respect to knowledge assessed with subjective (eg, learner self-report) or objective assessments (eg, multiple-choice question knowledge test) of learners' factual or conceptual understanding of the course, and (5) were randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or nonrandomized studies (NRSs), which are widely used in health profession education [ 33]. Studies in any language and of any publication type were included. Gray literature was searched in CENTRAL and ERIC.

Studies were excluded if they did not compare blended learning with nonblended learning or no intervention, did not report quantitative outcomes with respect to knowledge, used a single-group posttest-only design, were not conducted with health professional learners, evaluated pure e-learning instead of blended learning, or used the computer only for administrative purposes. Reviews, editorials, or meeting abstracts without original data were also excluded.

Data Sources

To identify relevant studies, we conducted a search of citations in Medline, CINAHL, Science Direct, Ovid Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, and ERIC. Key search terms included delivery concepts (eg, blended, hybrid, integrated, computer-aided, computer-assisted; learning, training, education, instruction, teaching, course), participants' characteristics (eg, physician*, medic*, nurs*, pharmac*, dent*, cme, health*), and study design concepts (eg, compar*, trial*, evaluat*, assess*, effect*, pretest*, pre-test, posttest*, post-test, preintervention, pre-intervention, postintervention, post-intervention). The asterisk (*) was used as a truncation symbol for searching. For instance, evaluat* retrieved entries containing the following words: evaluate, evaluation, or evaluative, etc. E-Table 1 in Multimedia Appendix 1 describes the complete search strategy for each database. The last date of search was September 25, 2014. In addition, all references of included studies were screened for any relevant articles.

Study Selection

Using these criteria, QL and FZ independently screened all titles and abstracts and reviewed the full text of all potentially eligible abstracts. Conflicts between these reviewers were resolved through discussion with other members of the research group until a consensus was obtained.

Data Extraction

QL and FZ developed a form (based on the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group's data extraction template), pilot-tested it on 10 randomly selected included publications, and refined it accordingly. Using the same form, data related to the following issues were extracted independently by QL and FZ: first author's name, year of publication, country where the intervention was conducted, study design, study subjects, sample size, specific health profession of the intervention, comparison intervention, intervention duration, exercises, interactivity, peer discussion, outcome assessment, conflict of interest (whether there was a conflict of interest), and funding from company (whether funding was obtained from a source that had a direct interest in the results). Disagreements were resolved through discussion with another research team member until agreement was reached. If the required data for the meta-analyses were missing from the original report, attempts were made to obtain the information by contacting the corresponding authors by email.

Quality Assessment

Recognizing that many nonrandomized and observational studies would be included, the methodological quality of the studies was evaluated using a modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (also called the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale-Education), which is an instrument used to appraise the methodological quality of original medical education research studies, typically in the process of a literature review of a field or topic in medical education [ 33, 41- 43]. Each study could receive up to 6 points and was rated in the following five domains:

Representativeness: the intervention group was "truly" or "somewhat" representative of the average learner in this community (1 point).

Selection: the comparison group was drawn from the same community as the experimental cohort (1 point).

Comparability of cohorts (2 points possible): These include nonrandomized two-cohort studies (further classified into "controlled for baseline learning outcome [eg, adjusted for knowledge pretest scores; 1 point]" and "controlled for other baseline characteristics [1 point]") and randomized studies (further classified into randomized [1 point] and allocation concealed [1 point]).

Blinding: outcome assessment was blinded (1 point). These include (1) blinded if the assessor cannot be influenced by group assignment; (2) assessments that do not require human judgment (eg, multiple-choice tests or computer-scored performance) are considered to be blinded; (3) one-group studies are not blinded unless scoring does not require judgment or authors describe a plausible method for hiding the timing of assessment; (4) participant-reported outcomes are never blinded.

Follow-up: subjects lost to follow-up were unlikely to introduce bias; small number lost (75% or greater follow-up) or description provided of those lost (1 point).

In addition, we evaluated the quality of evidence with the Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) instrument [ 44- 53]. GRADE identifies five factors that may decrease the quality of evidence of studies, and three factors that may increase it. RCTs start with a high rating and observational studies with a low rating. Ratings are modified downward due to (1) study limitations (risk of bias) [ 47], (2) inconsistency of results [ 50], (3) indirectness of evidence [ 51], (4) imprecision [ 49], and (5) likely publication bias [ 48]. Ratings are modified upward due to (1) large magnitude of effect, (2) dose response, and (3) confounders likely to minimize the effect. Evaluating these elements, we determine the quality of evidence as "high" (ie, further research is very unlikely to change our confidence in the estimate of effect), "moderate" (ie, further research is likely to have an important impact on our confidence in the estimate of effect and may change the estimate), "low" (ie, further research is very likely to have an important impact on our confidence in the estimate of effect and is likely to change the estimate), or "very low" (ie, we are very uncertain about the estimate).

Data Synthesis

Analyses were carried out for knowledge outcomes using Stata Version 12.0 and R 3.1.2. The standardized mean difference (SMD; Hedges g effect sizes), converted from means and standard deviations from each study, was used [ 33, 54]. When the mean was available but the standard deviation (SD) was not, we used the mean SD of all other included studies. As the overall scores of included studies were not the same and SMD could eliminate the effects of absolute values, we adjusted the mean and SD so that the average SD could replace the missing value of SD.

The I ² statistic was used to quantify heterogeneity across studies [ 55]. When the estimated I ² was equal to or greater than 50%, this indicated large heterogeneity. As the studies incorporated are functionally different and involve different study designs, participants, interventions, and settings, a random-effects model allowing more heterogeneity was used. Meta-analyses were conducted and forest plots were created. To explore publication bias, funnel plots were created and Begg's tests were performed. To explore potential sources of heterogeneity, we performed multiple meta-regression and subgroup analyses based on factors selected in advance, such as study design, country socioeconomic status, participant type, duration of intervention, randomization, quality score, exercises, interactivity, peer discussion, outcome assessment, and intervention of the control group. Moreover, we performed sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of findings.

Results

Study Selection

The search strategy identified 4815 citations from the databases, and 642 duplicates were removed. After scanning the titles and abstracts, 225 were found to be potentially eligible. Then, full texts were read for further assessment, and 62 remained. For 12 articles without accessible full texts and 6 without sufficient quantitative data (mean knowledge scores), we tried contacting the authors by email but received no reply. Thus, 56 publications were included, among which one publication compared blended learning with both no intervention and nonblended instruction ( Figure 1 ). No more relevant articles were found by reviewing the references of the included articles. E-Table 2 in Multimedia Appendix 1 includes the references of articles excluded based on full text (n=163) and insufficient quantitative data reported (n=6).

Study Characteristics

In the meta-analysis, we included 13 publications representing 20 interventions published from 2004-2014, which compared blended learning with no intervention and included 2238 health professional participants [ 22- 24, 56- 65]. The number of participants ranged from 6 [ 61] to 817 [ 62], and the duration of the intervention ranged from 24 hours [ 63] to one semester [ 58].

We included 44 publications representing 56 interventions comparing blended learning with nonblended learning published from 1991 to 2014 that covered 6110 health profession participants [ 16, 19- 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 63, 66- 100]. There was 1 pre-posttest one-group intervention, 27 posttest-only two-group interventions, and 28 pre-posttest two-group interventions. The number of participants ranged from 14 [ 72] to 609 [ 84], and the duration ranged from 1 hour [ 101] to 1 year [ 77].

Components or features of the study intervention were mostly "Web-based+ face-to-face", "e-learning+ class session", and "Web-based online instruction+ off-line instruction (review of the core contents on the online program, case analysis, small group discussion, and miscellaneous activities)". "Modality or technology" varied, such as "Moodle, on-site workshops", "asynchronous discussion forums, a live audio and text-based online synchronous session (Centra); online modules (Macromedia Breeze)". More than 80% of the interventions were measured using objective assessment, which included multiple choice questions, true or false questions, matching questions, and essays. For most studies, there was no delay between the end of the intervention and the posttest. Table 1 summarizes the key features and e-Table 3 in Multimedia Appendix 1 describes the detailed information.

Table 1

Study characteristics

No intervention comparison

Nonblended learning comparison

Interventions, n (%)
(N=20)

Participants, n
(N=2238)

Interventions, n (%)
(N=56)

Participants, n
(N=6110)

Study design

RCT/NRS

Country

Participant

Intervention duration

Exercises

Interactivity

Peer discussion

Outcome assessment

Comparison intervention

Conflict of interest

Quality score

Study Quality

All of the intervention groups in the included studies were representative of average learners. Ten percent (2/20) of no-intervention controlled studies and 98% (55/56) of nonblended learning controlled studies selected the control group from the same community as the experimental group. Nearly a third (30%, 6/20) of the no-intervention controlled studies and 46% (26/56) of nonblended learning controlled studies reported blinded outcome assessment. All of the no-intervention controlled studies (100%) and 96% (54/56) of nonblended learning controlled studies reported completeness of follow-up. The mean (SD) quality score was 3.40 (0.82) for no-intervention controlled studies, and 4.45 (0.78) for nonblended learning controlled studies. The results of the quality assessment are shown in e-Table 4 in Multimedia Appendix 1.

Quantitative Data Synthesis

Comparisons With No Intervention

As effect sizes larger than 0.8 were considered to be large [ 102], the pooled effect size (SMD 1.40; 95% CI 1.04-1.77; Z=7.52, P<.001) suggests a significantly large effect. However, significant heterogeneity was observed among studies ( P<.001, I ²=94.8%, 95% CI 93.1-96.0), and individual effect sizes ranged from -0.12 to 4.24. Figure 2 shows detailed results of the meta-analysis. The test of funnel plots ( Figure 3 ) indicated no significant publication bias among studies (Begg's test P=.587). Based on risk of bias and large effect, we graded the quality of evidence as moderate. E-Table 5 in Multimedia Appendix 1 provides the GRADE evidence profile. E-Table 6 in Multimedia Appendix 1 contains the mean, standard difference, and number of participants for both blended learning and no intervention/nonblended learning.

Meta-Regression and Subgroup Analysis

We investigated a multiple regression model with each possible source of heterogeneity (I ²_res=85.33%, adjusted R ²=48.89%; I ²_res means residual variation due to heterogeneity) and found that the outcome assessment ( P=.03) was a potential source of heterogeneity ( Table 2 ). Studies with objective outcome assessments had larger pooled effect sizes. Furthermore, subgroup analyses were performed to evaluate the sources of heterogeneity. A statistically significant interaction favoring pre-posttest two-groups designs and pre-posttest one-group designs was found ( P for interaction<.001), which was consistent with the result of the meta-regression. Statistical differences existed between the groups of participants ( P for interaction<.001). Nonrandomized studies had larger effects than randomized ones ( P for interaction=.01). The effect size was significantly larger for blended learning with objective assessment than with subjective assessment ( P for interaction=.005). However, we did not find support for the hypotheses regarding subgroup interactions across levels of exercises ( P for interaction=.92).

Table 2

Subgroup

Interventions, n

Pooled effect sizes (95% CI)

Heterogeneity (I ²), P

Interaction, P a

Meta-regression

Coef.

P

All interaction

20

1.40 (1.04-1.77)

94.8% (93.1-96.0), P<.001

Study design

Country

Participant

Intervention duration

Randomization

Quality score

Exercises

Interactivity

Peer discussion

Outcome assessment

Funding from company

Sensitivity Analyses

Exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result, which ranged from 1.24 (95% CI 0.91-1.57) to 1.48 (95% CI 1.14-1.83).

Comparisons With Nonblended Learning

The pooled effect size (SMD 0.81; 95% CI 0.57-1.05; Z=6.59, P<.001) significantly reflected a large effect, and significant heterogeneity was observed among studies ( P<.001, I ²=94.6%, 95% CI 93.7-95.5). Figure 4 shows detailed results of the main analysis. The test of asymmetry funnel plot ( Figure 5 ) indicated publication bias among studies (Begg's test P=.01). The publication bias may have been towards larger studies with generally large magnitudes of effects. The trim and fill method indicated that the effect size changed to 0.26 (95% CI -0.01 to 0.54) after adjusting for publication bias, which suggested that blended learning was at least as effective as nonblended learning. Based on risk of bias, publication bias, and large effect, we graded the quality of evidence as low. E-Table 5 in Multimedia Appendix 1 provides the GRADE evidence profile.

Meta-Regression and Subgroup Analysis

A multiple regression model for each possible source of heterogeneity was conducted (I ²_res=94.59%, adjusted R ²=-26.38%), and no significant source of heterogeneity was found ( Table 3 ). Furthermore, subgroup analyses were performed to evaluate the sources of heterogeneity. We found both pre-posttest two-group studies and pre-posttest one-group studies showed larger effects than posttest-only studies ( P for interaction<.001). It was shown that the presence of exercises could yield a larger SMD ( P for interaction=.49). Studies with objective assessments yielded a larger effect than studies with subjective assessments ( P for interaction=.01). Studies without conflicts of interest yielded a larger effect than those with conflicts of interest ( P for interaction<.001). However, high interactivity and presence of peer discussion did not yield larger effect sizes ( P for interaction>.85).

Table 3

Subgroup

Interventions, n

Pooled effect sizes (95% CI)

Heterogeneity (I ²), P

Interaction, P

Meta-regression

Coef.

P

All interventions

56

0.81 (0.57-1.05)

94.6% (93.7-95.5), P<.001

Study design

Posttest 2-groups

27

0.70 (0.32-1.07)

94.0% (92.3-95.3), P<.001

<.001

Pre-posttest 2-groups

28

.89 (0.58-1.19)

94.5% (93.0-95.6), P<.001

-.001

.99

Pre-posttest 1-group

1

1.97 (1.63-2.32)

0

Country

Participant

Intervention duration

Randomization

Quality score

Exercises

Interactivity

Peer discussion

Outcome assessment

Comparison intervention

Conflict of interest

Yes

2

-0.06 (-0.21 to 0.10)

0.0%

<.001

1.17

.44

Sensitivity Analyses

Exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result, which ranged from 0.70 (95% CI 0.48-0.92) to 0.86 (95% CI 0.63-1.10).

Discussion

Principal Findings

This meta-analysis shows that blended learning has a large consistent positive effect (SMD 1.40, 95% CI 1.04-1.77) on knowledge acquisition compared with no intervention, which suggested that blended learning was very effective and educationally beneficial in health professions. Moreover, we also found that blended learning had a large effect (SMD 0.81, 95% CI 0.57-1.05) in comparison with the nonblended learning group. This means that blended learning may be more effective than nonblended learning, including both traditional face-to-face learning and pure e-learning. Possible explanations could be as follows: (1) compared with traditional learning, blended learning allows students to review electronic materials as often as necessary and at their own pace, which likely enhances learning performance [ 8, 16], and (2) compared with e-learning, blended learning learners are less likely to experience feelings of isolation or reduced interest in the subject matter [ 8, 11, 103]. However, publication bias was found in the nonblended learning comparison group, and the trim and fill method showed that the pooled effect size changed to 0.26 (-0.01 to 0.54), which means blended learning is at least as effective as nonblended learning. To the best of our knowledge, this may be the first meta-analysis to reveal the effectiveness of blended learning for knowledge acquisition in health professions, which includes all those directly related to human and animal health.

However, large heterogeneity was found across studies in both no-intervention and nonblended comparisons, and the subgroup comparisons partially explained these differences. The heterogeneity may be due to variations in study design, outcome assessment, exercises, conflict of interest, randomization, and type of participants. We found that effect sizes were significantly higher for studies using pre-posttest designs than posttest-only designs, which suggested that the former improved learning outcomes relative to the latter. As pretests may inform instructors about the knowledge learners have acquired before the course, which is considered to be one of the most important factors influencing education [ 104], they allow instructors to determine learning objectives and to prepare course materials accordingly [ 105]. Therefore, it is necessary for educators to administer pretests to learners to prepare well for courses. We also found that studies with objective assessments yielded a larger effect than those with subjective assessments. In contrast, Cook et al reported no difference between objective and subjective assessments in knowledge scores [ 33]. This is probably due to differences in personality traits of learners, as people with greater confidence tend to give higher ratings on subjective assessments than people who are less confident [ 106]. Thus, educators should objectively assess learners instead of using subjective evaluations.

Additionally, effect size was found to be significantly larger for blended courses with exercises versus no exercises, which was consistent with the results of a previous study conducted by Cook et al in 2006, which found that continuity clinics had higher test scores when using a question format compared to a standard format [ 37]. Thus, it is necessary for educators to include exercises in their teaching, such as cases and self-assessment questions. However, we failed to confirm our hypothesis that presence of peer discussion and high interactivity would yield larger effect sizes. Although we found statistical differences between the RCTs and NRS in the no-intervention comparison, it could probably be due to chance as there were only two RCTs (130 participants) included. Differences between studies with conflicts of interest and those without conflicts of interest in nonblended comparisons could be also due to chance, as only two studies with conflicts of interest (612 participants) were included. The remainder of the high heterogeneity may arise from other characteristics, such as individual learning styles, study intervention, assessment instrument, and ongoing access to learning materials [ 33, 107, 108], for which detailed information was not available in the included studies. As Wong et al cited in their review, different modes of course delivery suit different learners in different environments [ 109].

Our samples consisted of various health professional learners (nurses, medical students, nursing students, physicians, public health workers, and other health professionals) across a wide variety of health care disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, ethics, health policy, pharmacy, radiology, genetics, histology, and emergency preparedness. Moreover, we found medium or large effects for the pooled effect sizes of almost all subgroup analyses exploring variations in study design, participant type, randomization, quality scores, exercises, interactivity, and peer discussion. Thus, our results suggest that health care educators should use blended learning as a teaching component in various disciplines and course settings.

Strengths and Limitations

Our meta-analysis also has several strengths. Evaluations of the effectiveness of blended learning for health professions are timely and very important for both medical educators and learners. We intentionally kept our scope broad in terms of subjects and included all studies with learners from health professions. We searched for relevant studies in manifold research databases up to September 2014. The systematic literature search encompassed multiple databases and had few exclusion criteria. We also conducted all aspects of the review process in duplicate.

However, there are limitations to consider. First, although we searched gray literature in two databases (CENTRAL and ERIC), gray literature indexed by other databases may have been missed, which could be the reason for the observed publication bias. Second, the quality of meta-analyses is dependent on the quality of data from the included studies. Although the standard deviation of eight interventions was not available due to poor reporting, we used the average standard deviation of other included studies and imputed effect sizes with concomitant potential for error. Third, despite conducting the review and extraction independently and in duplicate, the process was subjective and dependent on the descriptions of the included articles instead of direct evaluation of interventions. Fourth, although the modified Newcastle-Ottawa scale is a useful and reliable tool for appraising methodological quality of medical education research and enhances flexibility for different study designs, it increases the risk of reviewer error or bias due to a certain amount of rater subjectivity. Then, results of subgroup analyses should be interpreted with caution because of the absence of a priori hypotheses in some cases, such as study design, country socioeconomic status, and outcome assessment. Moreover, although the subgroup analyses showed the variability of participant types, socioeconomic status of country, intervention duration, interactivity, peer discussion, and study design of RCT or NRS did not make a difference in the overall results, the large clinical heterogeneity and inconsistent magnitude of effects across studies makes it difficult to generalize the conclusions. In addition, as variability of study interventions, assessment instruments, circumstances and so on, which were not assessed, could be potential sources of heterogeneity, the results of both meta-analyses should be treated with caution. Furthermore, publication bias was found in the meta-analysis with the nonblended comparison. Although we used the trim and fill method for adjustment, the results should be treated with caution.

Implications

Our study has implications for both research on blended learning and education in health professions. Despite the fact that conclusions could be weakened by heterogeneity across studies, the results of our quantitative synthesis demonstrated that blended learning may have a positive effect on knowledge acquisition across a wide range of learners and disciplines directly related to health professions. In summary, blended learning could be promising and worthwhile for further application in health professions. The difference in effects across subgroup analyses indicates that different methods of conducting blended courses may demonstrate differing effectiveness. Therefore, researchers and educators should pay attention to how to implement a blended course effectively. This question could be answered successfully through studies directly comparing different blended instructional methods. Thus, such studies are of critical importance.

Studies comparing blended learning with no intervention suggested that blended learning in health professions might be invariably effective. However, although observational studies yielded a large effect size, the quality of evidence was lower due to their inherent study design limitations. Additionally, owing to the small number of RCTs, the meta-analysis did not meet the optimal size (imprecision) and therefore, quality of evidence was ranked lower. Thus, despite the consistency of effect and no significant reporting bias, the evidence of the no-intervention comparison was of moderate quality, which means further research is likely to have an impact on our confidence in the estimate of effect and may change the estimate, and RCTs with large samples may modify the estimates. Thus, there is still great value in further research comparing blended learning with no intervention, and RCTs with large samples may modify the estimates. For nonblended comparisons, pooled estimates showed that blended learning is more effective than or at least as effective as pure e-learning and pure traditional learning. However, due to publication bias towards larger studies with generally large magnitudes of effects, the evidence was of low quality, which means further research is very likely to change our estimate. Furthermore, only four studies using e-learning were included. Therefore, the effect of blended learning especially in comparison with e-learning should be evaluated in future research, and studies with small magnitudes of effect should merit publication.

Conclusions

Blended learning appears to have a consistent positive effect in comparison with no intervention and appears to be more effective than or at least as effective as nonblended instruction for knowledge acquisition in health professions. Moreover, pre-posttest study design, presence of exercises, and objective outcome assessment in blended courses could improve health care learners' knowledge acquisition. Due to the large heterogeneity, the conclusion should be treated with caution.

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 281930, ARCADE RSDH. Our research was partly supported by the project "Strengthening Primary Healthcare Workers' Competence by Using an Internet-based Interactive Platform in Rural China" funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, China.

Abbreviations

GRADE

Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation

PICOS

population, intervention, comparison, outcome, and study design

PRISMA

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

SD

standard deviation

SMD

standardized mean difference

Multimedia Appendix 1

E-tables 1-7.

Footnotes

Contributed by

Authors' Contributions: WRY conceptualized and designed the study. QL and FZ performed the review, extraction, and data analysis. QL prepared the first draft of the paper. WRY, WJP, RH, YXL, and FZ contributed to the revision of the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

References

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Articles from Journal of Medical Internet Research are provided here courtesy of Gunther Eysenbach

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The Effectiveness of Blended Learning in Health Professions: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

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Blended learning, defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face learning and asynchronous or synchronous e-learning, has grown rapidly and is now widely used in education. Concerns about the effectiveness of blended learning have led to an increasing ...

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INTEGRATING HYBRID DIGITAL COACHING (HDC) IN LEARNINGTHROUGH MULTIMEDIA TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCESTANDARD

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INTEGRATING HYBRID DIGITAL COACHING (HDC) IN LEARNINGTHROUGH MULTIMEDIA TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCESTANDARD

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Learn to skype,  face to face communication between teachers, learners and peers.
Instructions for using AVATAR on page 78. I can't wait!
also get  Skype User Guide - free download: www.skype.com

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Technology and Teaching- Avoiding the Pitfalls, Increasing Student Engagement, and Improving Outcomes

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Technology and Teaching- Avoiding the Pitfalls, Increasing Student Engagement, and Improving Outcomes

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Interesting case on nursing education- good takeaways for faculty:student ratios

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Integration of blended learning into an occupational therapy curriculum. 

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Integration of blended learning into an occupational therapy curriculum. 

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Integration of blended learning into an occupational therapy curriculum; a qualitative reflection

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Strategies for Building Blended Learning

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Strategies for Building Blended Learning

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S

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Kristen Johnson

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Blended Learning: How Traditional Best Teaching Practices Impact Blended-Learning Classrooms

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Blended Learning: How Traditional Best Teaching Practices Impact Blended-Learning Classrooms

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Blended Learning:  Emerging Best Practices in Allied Health Workforce Development

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Blended Learning:  Emerging Best Practices in Allied Health Workforce Development

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5 Strategies To Improve Your Online Teaching

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5 Strategies To Improve Your Online Teaching

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Trying to learn something new every day

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Online courses have become an incredibly popular way for students and employees to advance their education or professional development. Teaching an online course requires different methods from the traditional classroom, so it's important that teachers adapt or develop their skills to the online learning environment, to make their materials effective and engaging for learners. Let's look at 5 strategies you can implement to improve your online teaching and make your eLearning course a successful experience for both you and your learners.

1. Engage With Your Learners Online

Without your physical presence in the classroom, it's vital that you establish a virtual presence at the very beginning of the eLearning course. Online teachers need to be engaging and supporting students right from the start and for the duration of the course, to maintain an effective learning community.

By establishing your teacher presence, you'll show students that you're both visible and available. You'll also be welcoming them to their new learning community - just as you would in any traditional classroom.

Let your students know what days or timeframes you will be online and how they can contact you outside of those hours.

Engage with your learning community through online posts, forums or social media - when people see teachers putting time into discussions and engagement, they'll be more encouraged to participate themselves. Through this engagement, you'll also develop professional relationships with your students and make their experience far more personal and memorable.

2. Create A Supportive Learning Environment

As an online teacher, you have an opportunity to create a supportive online community for your learners.

The best way to achieve this is through encouraging both teacher-to-student engagement and student-to-student interaction. Dr Judith V. Boettcher, PhD and author of A Faculty Guide for Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web, suggests the following strategies:

At the start of your online course, get the ball rolling with a personal introduction post, and encourage participants to contribute their own short bio or introduction to the group.

Create an open forum or discussion board where learners can post to request help and assistance from each other, developing peer-to-peer support.

Set up small groups, similar to traditional study groups, for supportive mentoring of fellow learners.

These strategies will encourage learners to work together as an active learning community, which brings benefits to all individuals involved.

3. Use A Mix Of Learning Tools For Better Engagement

These days, we're fortunate to have the technology to create virtual learning environments that allow us to collaborate and engage just as well as if we were in the classroom.

As Dr Boettche says, "the variety of activities that are now possible online makes it possible to create many types of effective learning environments."

The best online teachers use a combination of both synchronous and asynchronous activities, creating a blend of traditional online learning styles with newer, more collaborative audio and visual tools. Working with a mix of activities makes the content more interesting and exciting, increasing student engagement with both the teacher and other learners.

You can learn more about blended learning models in Teaching Online, a short 2-hour course that looks at the differences between online and face-to-face classroom teaching, as well as ways to introduce collaborative learning into your online program.

4. Provide Ongoing Feedback

Feedback is an essential component of all effective learning environments - including online.

As an online teacher, your feedback will help to create an eLearning experience that is informative, engaging, and motivational for the learner. Your feedback should be continuous during the eLearning process, with constructive feedback offered as soon as possible so that students can clearly identify which behaviors or skills need to be improved.

You can encourage group feedback through collaborative exercises, which also helps to promote peer engagement.

5. Make eLearning Content Mobile

It's wise to acknowledge the importance of mobile learning for online teachers, with students and employees now accustomed to using their mobile devices for learning.

Mobile learning holds key advantages for learners, allowing them to access up-to-date course materials and relevant content anywhere, anytime. With bite-sized pieces of information available to be digested quickly and easily, learners can work through course materials at their own pace, assisting both performance and productivity.

Make sure your eLearning content can be easily accessed via smartphones, laptops, and iPads to maximize your teaching methods. You'll also be demonstrating to your learners that you're in touch with the needs of today's modern workforce and its relevant technology.

With these strategies in place you can feel more confident about your online teaching skills and eLearning materials. You'll also know that you're working to create a more positive and collaborative learning environment for your students.

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5 Strategies To Improve Your Online Teaching

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Online courses have become an incredibly popular way for students and employees to advance their education or professional development. Teaching an online course requires different methods from the traditional classroom, so it's important that teachers adapt or develop their skills to the online learning environment, to make their materials effective and engaging for learners.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Scaffolding Online Student Success | Faculty Focus

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Where did it all go wrong? Professor Elavor* just wrapped up what she hoped would be a successful semester of her new online course-Introduction to Natural Sciences. Unfortunately, the course ended with a giant thud. For their final projects, students were asked to write an essay illustrating the connection between chemistry and biology and the impact of these sciences on industry and society.

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Seven Tips for Creating Community In Online Courses | EdSurge News

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Seven Tips for Creating Community In Online Courses | EdSurge News

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We're in the age of the sharing economy. A few years ago, hopping into the backseat of a stranger's car or sleeping in their guest room might have been a scary prospect. Today, companies like Airbnb and Uber have made sharing with strangers seem totally normal. Yet, online courses haven't quite figured out how to cultivate this same type of sharing culture. Large MOOC providers focus on offerings that promise individual career advancement and skills development rather than social learning. While we have more data than ever about where and when people are learning, we still haven't cracked the code on how to use technology to foster trusting learning communities.

+Acumen has been building courses for teams since 2013, and, while we still don't have all the answers, we know that people remain hungry for real, in-person connection. Adults have always enjoyed learning together-whether in book clubs, literary salons or meetup groups like the famous Homebrew Computer Club. Coursera and the US Department of State have done important work to create a network of learning hubs, "physical locations scattered across the globe where MOOC students can meet in person to collaborate," and we think this is a good first step. However, trying to retrofit MOOCs designed for individual learning to facilitate collaboration is tougher than it might seem. As any good teacher will tell you, activities for groups have to be designed differently than assignments for individuals. If you try to give a group of fourth graders a single worksheet to complete, not much meaningful learning will occur. We think the same principle applies to online course design. Here are seven tips we'd give to instructional designers looking to build community around online courses:

1. Think of online courses as a way to facilitate offline learning. Not all learning has to be confined to videos and multiple choice quizzes. Envision the online platform as a scaffold for offline work. For example, DIY.org gives kids instructions for activities they can complete offline like baking bread or building a bike light. Then they upload evidence to the platform to receive a digital badge. +Acumen courses similarly ask participants to get outside and interview customers, hold a discussion group or build a prototype and then share what they learned back on the platform.

2. Build playbooks and kits. Somewhat counterintuitively, people taking online courses still like something they can print & bring to a group meeting. Many of our courses feature "playbooks" that can be downloaded as a PDFs. People also like to assemble learning "kits" to accompany online courses. Just as Blue Apron packages all the ingredients needed for a meal, instructional designers can prepare a list of all the supplies people need for course activities. For example, here's one IDEO.org created for our upcoming Prototyping course:

3. Use a "Choose Your Own Adventure" approach to course design. Adults want to feel in control of their time and learning. Most of our courses have the option to complete assignments using a pre-designed case study. Teams can also work on a personal project, an option which about 40 percent of teams select. Having this "choose your own adventure" format makes all group members feel more motivated to complete the work.

4. Look for platforms that enable team formation, team work spaces and assignment galleries. We've experimented with building courses on NovoEd, EdCast and Wordpress. NovoEd uniquely enables people to use a team workspace and view submissions from other groups in an assignment gallery. At the same time, we encourage people to share their work on Twitter and use Google Hangouts or appear.in to hold virtual meetings. Don't feel like you have to confine a course to one learning management system or platform.

5. Leverage "course catalysts" to facilitate connections between teams. Our team relies on volunteers to facilitate discussion forums, an idea we first saw piloted in Leticia Britos Cavagnaro's Design Thinking Action Lab course from Stanford. A course catalyst can point out overlapping interests to the teams and encourage them to share ideas with others from around the world.

6. Make instructions very explicit to reduce logistical hassles. We designed a ' course overview' deck that presents best practices for forming teams.We added resources to assist with group facilitation, including tips for moderating discussions and polling cards to get everyone quickly on the same page. Having these clear and detailed guidelines ensures that a group clicks quickly, rather than spending a lot of time spinning their wheels.

7. Enable people to learn new things about the people around them. In our MOOC on storytelling, individuals completed life maps tracing their personal histories & then shared them with the group. Having this structured way to learn new things about each other propelled a sense of connection. Adults don't necessarily want gamification, but they like activities that offer surprising insights and feel practical or fun.

After two years of running team-based courses for thousands of learners globally, we're heartened by the ingenuity, resourcefulness and dedication of learners that come together around online courses and defy low completion rates. In fact, an inverse MOOC model that enables learners to co-create ideas, rather than simply being recipients of transmitted information might be one of the most exciting and overlooked developments happening in education right now. The MOOCs of 2012 were limited to lecture videos and multiple choice quizzes, but the MOOCs of 2015 are pushing the format forward in new directions. They're worth a second look. Just as we're using technology to share things like cars, houses or meals in new ways, we need learning environments where people feel empowered to get out from behind their screens and build offline communities that can then be amplified and analyzed online.

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Seven Tips for Creating Community In Online Courses - EdSurge News

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We're in the age of the sharing economy. A few years ago, hopping into the backseat of a stranger's car or sleeping in their guest room might have been a scary prospect. Today, companies like Airbnb and Uber have made sharing with strangers seem totally normal.

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Using Blogs as an alternative to discussion boards

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Using Blogs as an alternative to discussion boards

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A solid rationale for why blogging can be more meaningful than discussion boards

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Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 228 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Laura Gibbs joins me to talk about how to create engaging online classes.

Production Credit: [00:00:14] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:22] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating and learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:51] Joining me on today's episode is Laura Gibbs whose work has inspired my teaching since pretty much as long as I knew that she was out there inspiring our work. Laura completed her bachelor's in classical and Slavic languages and her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UC Berkeley. Laura then joined the University of Oklahoma faculty in 1999 and she has been teaching fully online courses at OU since 2002, specifically mythology and folklore and epics of India. She has also taught online courses in Latin and Greek. And she maintains a long running Latin blog at the Bestiaria Latina - home of the Latin lolcats. You can find her online at myth folklore.net.

Bonni: [00:01:44] Laura, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Laura: [00:01:47] Hi Bonni.

Bonni: [00:01:48] It is so lovely to be talking to you. Every time we have a conversation, whether it was that precious time we got to spend in person at the campus conference, the instructor conference, or whether it is on Twitter or whatever way, I just always walk away energized, inspired, and have learned so much. And I know that will be the case today.

Bonni: [00:02:08] Would you start out with a discouraging topic... I already know you're going to already know you're going to inspire us, so let's just start out by discouraging us. Would you describe some of the ways in which many online classes really fail to engage students?

Laura: [00:02:25] I guess one of the themes that is really important to me is the difference between open ended assignments and closed assignments. And to me the reason I love teaching online is because it's the internet, like the most open, interconnected wide ranging kind of space. And what I worry about with a lot of online courses that are conceived inside and offered inside an LMS is that they feel closed in all kinds of ways, closed off from the Internet, closed in that sense of you've designed an activity where there's just one destination for the student to end up at you know the right answer on a quiz that the computer's going to grade for you. Closed off is not how I see the world of learning and it's just not fun for the students. So that's in a general sense the real problem I see is your course open or closed? And I'd love to see online courses that are open to everything. But often you see that it's just the opposite, they're really close.

Bonni: [00:03:29] One of the terms that gets used for the first dichotomy that you expressed is the "throw away assignments" and just for people listening that this may be new to, I know it's not new to you, but the idea that I wrote this paper and the only person that's really going to see it is my professor. And there's really not a value- I don't have any intrinsic motivation to write it. It's something I quote on quote "have to do" for points that all feels very very transactional and not really meaningful, there's nothing that makes it feel like the work I might put into it is going to be significant.

Bonni: [00:04:06] And the last thing that you ended on, I don't want to lose sight of because you said a lot of online- or maybe you didn't say "a lot of" but I'm going to say a lot of online classes are just not fun.

Laura: [00:04:18] Right. And once again this is something that has worried me since my first semester of college teaching back when I was in a classroom. I taught a larger class like 50-60 students, I was in a kind of big lecture hall in the basement of a building that had a bunch of these big lecture halls that were for 100-200 students. And I will never forget the first time I came out of one of those lecture halls and I just finished my class and another class was filing out of their lecture hall and they clearly just been given a paper back from their professor.

Laura: [00:04:55] And there were these big garbage bins, round ones maybe three or four feet high, big metal garbage bins. And the students were just throwing their papers away, they flipped to the back and looked at the grade and then threw it in the trash can. And I saw like dozens of students just walking by me throwing their papers in the trash bin. I've never seen anything like that. And it really shocked me and made me think about what I was doing. This was my first semester of college teaching and sure enough the first round of papers that I had assigned and came back were just not good. The students were clearly bored. I was bored. It wasn't working.

Laura: [00:05:32] So I had that revelation before I started teaching online about the problem with traditional papers. And one of the reasons it came to me my first semester of college teaching was that in graduate school I didn't teach essay type writing classes. I taught foreign language classes. And foreign language classes, thankfully, don't drift into that throw away assignment mode as much because it's very active learning, you're making things, you're doing things, you're not just writing abstract essays. You're working with the language itself and making things with language is part of what a foreign language class is about. And I realized I needed to take that approach, that idea of making things, and language is important and you're communicating in all ideas to do things with language and use that for my more traditional humanities classes that I've ended up teaching and at the college level.

Laura: [00:06:25] So that's not even about online versus the classroom, that's just about how you conceive your assignments. I'll say one more thing real quickly is that my school participated in something called the meaningful writing project. I cannot say enough good things about this. It's a campus investigation that they did where they interviewed graduating seniors about what their most meaningful writing was in college. Very open ended kind of survey but then they went back and did this really complex semantic analysis to find out what students said about meaningful writing. And the book came out maybe two years ago. So people are curious about learning more about what students say is meaningful and what makes something important to them not throw away a sign that literally or metaphorically.

Laura: [00:07:13] Check out this book called The Meaningful Writing Project. There's the Kindle edition, it's on Amazon. And the students are so clear about understanding the difference, to them, of what's meaningful writing and what's not and how meaningful writing can happen in any kind of class, any kind of discipline, but you have to design the class to make that happen.

Bonni: [00:07:36] I am so glad that you said that last part because one of the things I didn't want to have people think is that the answer to all of these questions is to simply ask people to take that paper they would have written and just turned into you and put it online instead. For this you know whatever the audience might look like and there are all kinds of reasons that someone may not wish to share something online. And that's not what today's episode is necessarily about. But to me, you just called attention to it isn't about put it online, expose yourself in ways that you may or may not be comfortable with.

Laura: [00:08:18] That would be so easy if I all we had to deal with like which switch to technology mode and all our problems would be solved. But unfortunately that's not it at all.

Bonni: [00:08:27] Yeah and I think that for me I know- I shouldn't say I think, I know for me, I have not fully comprehended what I was asking people to consider when moving their stuff online just because I navigate that space so much. And that's been an important distinction for me to make and I don't want anyone listening to miss it. And that sounds like a wonderful wonderful resource.

Laura: [00:08:51] So we said that the answer to making assignments more meaningful isn't simply to move the audience. And the answer to creating engagement is not to put up a discussion board. Could you describe discussion boards gone wrong? And some of the challenges inherent with thinking that is the solution to engage in our students?

Laura: [00:09:10] Right the discussion board I mean once again a sort of general term like what is the problem with a discussion board is that it doesn't belong to any body. It belongs to everybody but nobody. Nobody cares about it in the way that I think work needs to be cared about to turn out well. I mean good work takes time. There's just no shortcut to anything. I mean any kind of quality work in any kind of discipline is going to take time and that's a big challenge. Nobody has lots of time and so in order to spend time on something, you need to to care about it. But it's hard to imagine someone really caring about a discussion board. You know the most likely person maybe to care about the discussion board would be the faculty member and so maybe spend lots of time at the discussion board. But that's not learning for the students.

Laura: [00:10:02] Whereas the approach I take in my class that I really like and I've been doing this for a long time with different platforms and different technologies but it is for the students to have blogs that belong to them, individual blogs that are then interconnected in a network. And how you do that networking and make those connections that's the technology that's very fluid and changing. But the idea, for me, is that students have something that's theirs, that belongs to them. So it's ownership. It's agency. It's presence. It's individuality. Openendedness. Like I said, because they can design the blog the way they want to. And that's just cool and fun.

Laura: [00:10:43] Again because the first thing they do in my classes is create their blog. And from then on out anything they do it's either happening at their blog or at the other student's blogs and it just grows and changes and looks cool and you learn about each student individually that way and in a way that I don't think can really happen at a discussion board. Maybe it can and if someone has an example that they want to share, that's great. I never figured out a way to make that happen, but with the blogs, it just happens.

Laura: [00:11:14] And so for myself that's been the solution that's worked great and once again I think it could work across all kinds of classes, all kinds of disciplines, all kinds of ages of students. There are some elementary school teachers that use blogs in powerful ways through edublogs. So that's the solution I really like.

Bonni: [00:11:33] With the discussion board, you talked about that perhaps if someone was going to care it's going to be the professor about what's happening there. And I certainly don't want to place labels though sometimes- laziness isn't maybe a fair one but just just trying to get the job done. Sometimes what we'll do is say well I want the reading to happen. So I need to come up with a discussion board question. And then I need some way of measuring that they got the job done, so the common thing is reply to three other people and your answers should be between 200 and 300 words long and it needs to be substantial, don't just say "I liked what you had to say," there's all these criteria. And then it sometimes becomes overwhelming for that person so oh my gosh there are these 200 to 300 word posts and I don't have time to read them all and reply to them all and have that Professor as the central hub of engagement such that they start to feel like it's transactional, the students the whole time has felt like it was transactionalbecause you put all these roles down for me.

Laura: [00:12:37] And so now I am so excited to transition out of these depressing topics of what goes wrong with many of our online and as you said in person classes to a class that focuses on engagement. So tell us how do you engage learners in your classes?

Laura: [00:12:55] Well and it's so funny that you talked about the rules just now because I I struggle with that too. You know that I have procedures I guess you could call them for my classes. But every time I put a procedure in place, I try to think why are we doing this? And for me it's about, like I said, the students creating something that is theres, that they care about, that they're proud of, that issomehow an expression of them, of what they're learning, of what they want to learn and share with the other students in the class.

Laura: [00:13:27] And for that to happen, yeah you need to do some reading, and you need to do some writing, and you need to think while you're reading and think while you're writing. But I like the fact that the reason I have those procedures in place and things to read and things to write about is so that we can do stuff we're really proud of and really want to share with the other students in the class through the network. Nobody is just writing anything for me at all. You know it's all in the blogs. And I read some of the blogs and some of the stuff I just see go by and my blog reader and I don't read it, I sort of skim it. And then other students are coming to your blog and they're reading some things, you're reading things in other people's blogs and it just is very active and also changing in a way that like a discussion board that has that kind of routine that you described can quickly become pretty monotonous.

Laura: [00:14:18] I try to make sure that there's a structure in my classes. In fact, they're highly structured. But I also try to avoid the monotony by giving students lots of choices. So yeah there's a weekly routine and there's a sort of workflow but there are also lots of choices built in. And so the students choose what they read and their writing style and other activities they do. And then when they visit each other's blogs, it's really cool because they see what the other students are choosing to do. So different things that the other students read, different designs that they're using at their blogs, different kinds of activities they did and they reported back in their blog what they learned from that activity. It just it has a kind of escalating, expanding, energizing feel to it. That I know I like a lot. And I think it really helps the students too because they're struggling with time. They're struggling with motivation and these are the kinds of things that I found over the years really can help with time and motivation is something meaningful, something they care about, something they get to choose, and share with others.

Bonni: [00:15:23] One of the things that you just described in terms of this weekly routine mixed in with lots of choices reminds me of the episode with Alan Levine. And I know that he has been someone who has been inspiring to you.

Laura: [00:15:37] Oh yes, DS106 is really how I created everything I do. So yes, absolutely.

Bonni: [00:15:42] Yes. So remind people who maybe haven't been listening for a while, remind them of what DS106 is and then how that's informed your approach.

Laura: [00:15:51] Well DS106 is this long running storytelling digital creation experience that exists as a class. But I benefitted from the fact that it was also this open thing on the Internet that people participated in who were not doing the class for credit that was originally offered I guess at Mary Washington. Because of Jim Groom and Alan Levine became his partner in crime. I'm not even sure how that happened because I knew Alan Levine from when he was at Maricopa in Arizona and the stuff he was putting online then. I honestly can't remember how I first found out about DS106.

Laura: [00:16:28] But anyway, it had a bank of activities that was run with WordPress magic by Alan Levine. It was just spectacular where students could go there and get ideas for Digital Storytelling things that they could do, and they could also contribute new ideas for new kinds of assignments into this bank of assignments and activities. That really resembled the classes that I've been teaching and evolving over the early years, like I started in 2002.

Laura: [00:16:59] So when I finally intersected with DS106 it was kind of like this doppelganger thing of like wow that's so much like what I'm doing. Different kind of technology, different student audience, all kinds of things that were different but that fundamental emphasis on creativity and choice was exactly what I was aspiring to as well. And then I saw a range of things he had in that bank at that point, all the things that he and Jim Groom had embedded and the things that students had contributed over the years.

Laura: [00:17:29] So that was a huge boost to my class. That's when I realized wow, I thought I was giving the students choices, I could give them so many more kinds of choices about styles of storytelling, and tools for storytelling, and on and on. So that was just a great gift to me to connect with the DS106 and boldly go where no digital storytelling is gone. Before I learned so much from from watching that whole DS106 thing happened and evolve over the years.

Bonni: [00:17:59] You talked about styles and tools of storytelling that sort of thing- when you come up with this list of choices, how do you organize this database if you will or this grouping of the choices? Is it by topic? Are there other ways that you group things together to make it easier then to come up with this weekly routine?

Laura: [00:18:20] Well and that's the thing. This is where what I do is a little bit different from DS106 because it was originally conceived very much around what are the digital tool possibilities, like what are the digital things we're going to do. I started out originally teaching writing and I realized like I said back in my first semester the traditional expository writing is just not going to work, I'm going to switch everything to creative writing.

Laura: [00:18:44] And so I switched over to creative writing with the idea that here I am teaching humanities, I'm teaching the storytelling arts of the world instead of having my students write essays about the stories they read. I should have them write stories that are inspired by the stories they read. That was my fundamental shift.

Laura: [00:19:03] And so obviously I needed to help people learn about ways of telling stories. And the first way I got at that, this was back in 2002-2003 when there weren't all these cool digital tools online to use other than images and text and you put those online and HTML and that's a web page. And so I focused on things like getting them to understand what is the difference between first person narration, third person narration, what can you do with timelines and narratives? What are prequels and sequels and flashbacks? And how do you do dialogue? And if you want to do first person, what are the ways that youre going to contextualize that first person voice so that it works? You can do interviews or diaries or letters. And on and on. So it was basically this huge collection of storytelling style and also language styles, like what are you going to do on a sort of word by word, sentence by sentence level to make your narrative effective?

Laura: [00:20:05] And so I had this list the things and sometimes supporting blog post to document how you do it. And I would put a randomizer in in the assignment. I would say, you're going to tell a story. And gosh there are all kinds of ways to tell a story, refresh the page to get a new idea at random. Random different ideas would pop up. And I don't use the same kind of databank that Alan does but I do use a tool that a student built for me or randomizer so they're all I have to do is put a bunch of ideas into an HTML table and presto, you can get an idea coming up at random every time the page reloads.

Laura: [00:20:45] And so that was a way to start inspiring students just about different ways of writing. And then as I built up an archive of student work, I had hundreds of student projects. Like for example here's a project, the fairy godmother thief and it was a storybook project a student had done about how the fairy godmother is this kleptomaniac and she steals people diaries just for fun. And so look at this, she has a collection of diaries, of Cinderella's diary, it's Snow White's diary, Sleeping Beauty's diary because she's a kleptomaniac and she has these diaries.

Laura: [00:21:19] So between my ideas and then the examples of student work, it was just about putting up all these ideas and just trying to inspire the students. So just heaping up those kinds of ideas and tools and examples of student work over the years means that I now can share that with the students so that they can find ideas and get excited and go their own way.

Laura: [00:21:44] And so just start collecting stuff like that in your discipline, whatever it is, that can inspire students to do the kind of work you'd like to see them doing, whatever that is. I mean that varies obviously from class to class and discipline to discipline, but if you start collecting that stuff and find a way to get that in front of the students. I use daily announcements, that is a big part of how I get stuff in front of them. Then it will just grow and grow and get better and better every semester cause you'll be heaping up stuff and the students will start bringing you ideas once they see what you're collecting. I get lots of ideas for tools and styles and stuff from what the students themselves come up with.

Bonni: [00:22:23] I'm curious on the daily announcements, to what extent do you carry those over from class to class? And to what extent are those unique to that particular semester or a term that you're teaching?

Laura: [00:22:34] They are very much carried over. So I have a giant Google Sheet with different sheets there and the sheet where you know here are all my little cute graphics about writing and so I've got a couple hundred graphics about writing and here are all my cool tools, here are all my great videos about writing and creativity. And so each day when I prepare the announcements, I just go through and pick one from column A, one from column B, and assemble the announcements. Sure I had news stops periodically like I get to find new things in the students blogs every semester, or new tools that I find from poking around on Twitter or following people like Alan Levine and Kevin Hodgson and the people who are really just out there experimenting with all kinds of great digital tools. And so some new stuff, but almost everything is recycled. But to the students it's new, ight so it's old for me. I've seen this graphic a hundred times, but they've never seen the 69 rules of punctuation poster before and it's really cool. So I'm able to dabble them with recycled goods. It's pretty easy.

Bonni: [00:23:44] We've talked so much and woven in so well. Your vision for teaching them you've talked about some of the approaches that you use. One of the things that I know as we start to try to emulate some of the things that you've done is that it can start to feel overwhelming and I wonder if you would tackle this from two different perspectives. One is, how do we dip our toe into this just to get started and start to experiment? And then after that, I'd love to hear about any practical techniques that you use to make this kind of teaching more doable for us? As we can't press a button and all of a sudden we're to where you are. So let's start out with how would we just start a little bit too to emulate some of this?

Laura: [00:24:28] Well I think that the principles I use, I apply them globally to my classes. I really believe in everything being creative, everything being open ended, everything being student choice. But there's no reason why that has to be applied globally. I mean you could do with something as simple like you said you would sort of dip into DS106 and it would just be this this one off thing that you did. And then you can reflect on and say wow you know what did I learn from that? How was that useful to me? If you can build in just one open ended activity with some kind of reflection that goes with it into your course, not only will you be giving your students an open ended learning activity. You can also get feedback from them about well is that the right way to go about it? As I make these changes in my class, find out from the students, is is this a good change or do I need to try to go at this a different way?

Laura: [00:25:28] Like right now I implemented a change in my classes this semester where I had this story writing thing they did every week because gosh it's great, you get to be creative every week and write a story every weekend. Isn't that fantastic? But some of my students really did find that exhausting and sometimes we just skip the story for the week and that's fine. Skip an assignment, make it up with extra credit. No problem.

Laura: [00:25:51] But I realize enough of them were skipping this story writing assignment just because they were kind of exhausted. And so I built in a new thing this semester where they could do a story lap every other week if they wanted, if they'd done a story the week before where I gave them a bunch of choices of things you can do to learn about storytelling and language and stuff like that. And so far it's going great. You know but there's a blog post that goes with it so I can see it is this useful to them or not? Are they glad they had this option? So as you tinker with classes, make sure you build in something you get some kind of a good, articulate, useful feedback for yourself from the students to find out if if what you're doing is a good change in your class.

Bonni: [00:26:36] Yeah and one of the other things is to be prepared for that once you do start experimenting, you're going to have some failures but also you're going to have some wild successes. And when you have a wild successes and you see what's possible it is going to make you want to tweak things in your classes and then you'll never stop.

Laura: [00:26:54] But honestly that is so true. And sometimes the things that you think are going to be the best experiments, they fail completely. Like I love Flip Grid. And so I was going to build in this whole Flip Grid dimension of my classes last year. I couldn't get any of my students interested in it. Like even my students were up for all kinds of experiments I asked them did you see this Flip Grid thing? Doesn't that look cool? I got literally no takers all year.

Laura: [00:27:29] My biggest ever failure. And it was clearly somehow I didn't find the right way to blend it into the class or whatever because Flip Grid itself is absolutely cool. But you know that that was that was good. I got the message and if I'm going to do Flip Grid again I need to rethink it and not do it the way it did last time. And that's cool . I mean and I think sharing with students that idea of experimentation, telling them when something's an experiment and getting their feedback, that's a great way to build you know trust and connection with your students.

Laura: [00:28:02] And I've never really had any problems with it. And I have to say it because we haven't mentioned the G word. I don't grade and that's a huge part of of how my classes work and how I can be really honest with my students in my feedback to them about their work and how they can be really honest with me back about the class is because we've set that all grading authority, who's in charge thing aside as much as possible in a college class. And if you are using traditional grading, then you have to spend some extra time thinking about how you can set up feedback from your students like anonymous feedback or something like that so you can get some honest feedback that you do need improve your class.

Bonni: [00:28:46] I'm so glad that you brought that up because I was actually going to be sort of my final question, which is if we're going to do these amazing kinds of things that you're describing, there's going to be some things that we don't do. And you've piqued people's curiosity I'm sure and we had some episodes about the ungrading movement and specifications grading and I'd love to have you back to talk even in more depth. But just for now to wet our whistle a little bit, you do enter in a grade that to your University, correct? But it's just the grade that gets entered isn't derived from what traditional grades are derived from, is that right?

Laura: [00:29:20] Right. And in a sense I don't even enter the grade, the students do it. But it's not A B C D. Yes I did well. Yes I did poorly. It's all based on completion. And so I've got this huge array of what I call micro- assignments. I don't know if other people use that term or not but it really describes well what's going on in my classes which is this huge array of micro-assignments, at any given week students would probably complete six seven five six seven at these micro-assignments. And they record their completion of them, each assignment has an objective checklist. There's not a rubric. There is not of this subjective and meets expectations staff. I published a blog post it has an image in it. There may or may not be a word count for the text, I linked to my image source, checklist of things. And if the assignment is complete, they say true in a quiz that I set up in Canvas. And they get the points right. Because true is the correct answer. And so they get how many points that quiz is worth and then at the end of the semester their grade is based on how many points they've got.

Laura: [00:30:29] So I don't enter anything into the grade book. I mean I pay attention to students who are on the edge of failing class because I worry about that. Beyond that, beyond hoping that everyone will pass the class. I honestly couldn't care less if they get an A or B or C because that's all about what's going on in their lives, how much time do they have to spend on my class, really not important to me and they don't need to ask me anything about it. You know they do the work. They record the points. Then at the end of the semester, I look at their total points and I put the grade into our Student Information System. So that's all the grading energy I spend, basically none. And instead I get to spend all my energy on interacting with them about the work that they do. And everybody is doing some kind of project in the class. And that's where our interaction takes place, is my feedback on their project.

Bonni: [00:31:23] And you have shared with me that you do, on occasion, it doesn't happen as regularly as we might think. But on occasion, you'll have someone who entered points for themselves and didn't meet that objective criteria. And you treated as an exception basis, not as that you have to go through every single one of them, you do but you'll go back to them and say oh you checked this off and I noticed that you didn't actually do this one thing that was there. And most the time you said it's a mistake and then they go back and they fix it.

Laura: [00:31:49] Oh and it's always a mistake. That's a thing. You know is that we all make mistakes. I'm a total believer in this growth mindset of learning from mistakes kind of thing. I make mistakes all the time, do something stupid it's like oh I can't believe I did that. And students make mistakes too. So you know they thought they put an image in the post and they didn't or they started the post, forgot to publish it, whatever. I mean mistakes, they happen. And so I just point out to them just like you didn't finish this assignment, you need to finish it and so they finish it.

Laura: [00:32:24] You know in all the years I've been teaching, I've had students make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes colossial mistakes. Whatever they just weren't thinking because I've honestly like thousands of students. I've never had a student who was a cheater. You know in that sense that I hear people talking about in academic misconduct and this that and the other. You know and I don't know if I'm just lucky or what. But at this point, after all that experience, my assumption is that this is just a mistake. Like why would I assume this is anything other than just a mistake?

Laura: [00:32:57] And the way it works with the blogs as I see everything that goes into the blog network through my blog reader. And so I see things go by and if there is like a post that doesn't have an image in it or something, I notice the image is missing. Or if there's a post that way short that should be longer. I notice. It's not a big deal. And the same way with the comments, there is a comments stream that comes out of the blog and so if somebody leaves the comment that's just like "hey this is really good." That actually never happens. But whatever, if there's something wrong with a comment, I will notice and contact the student and we figure it out. It's one of those things where I don't feel like I need to be a policewoman and I kind of resent the idea that university wants me to policewoman. I'm a teacher, so I'm trying to help students learn. If they make mistakes, that's a learning opportunity.

Bonni: [00:33:53] I'll never forget when I had James Lang all the way back on episode 19 and he talked about his book Cheating Lessons and that was one of the things he said in that episode so early on in this podcast where he said, if you really wanted to be a police officer, this is really not a good career choice.

Laura: [00:34:12] I love that book. I swear everybody I think at the campus community is so tired of me doing this, but there are these you know endless discussions that go on about the TurnItIn whatever LTI integration, blah blah blah at Canvas community and I always chime in and say "you know, if you haven't read James Lang's Cheating Lessons, you really should."

Laura: [00:34:34] I really believe it, I just wish that schools would take all the money they spend and TurnItIn and take that money and buy a copy of Cheating Lessons for every instructor. Because I learned a lot from that book and I already have this very let's all trust and learned together attitude. But just the research he did and the ideas that he brings to bear there for all kinds of teachers and all kinds of classrooms it's really powerful.

Dave: [00:34:59] Hi it's Dave Stachowiak here. Thank you so much for listening in on this conversation. Bonni has often discussed the work of James Lang here on the show and has welcomed him several times in the past. And his work is one of the many examples of great resources out there that we want you to know about to support you in your teaching. One of the things that Bonni and I care a lot about is creating more peace in our lives so that we can be more present for others. And in Bonni's case, for her students. You hear Bonni mention that at the start of every episode.

Dave: [00:35:33] And the sponsor of this episode is aligned with that goal of creating more peace in all of our lives as well. I'm pleased to tell you today about EveryPlate, the sponsor of this episode. EveryPlate allows you and your family to enjoy amazing chef designed meals for just 4.99 per serving. That's one of the advantages of EveryPlate over all the other meal kits services out there. Think about it this way, one meal is the same price as one cup of coffee.

Dave: [00:36:03] Speaking of bringing peace into our lives, it is not peaceful in our house when we don't have logistics ready for dinner or didn't get to the store, any number of reasons that we're sometimes planning dinner last minute. EveryPlate does the meal planning, shopping, and prepping for you, taking the time consuming guesswork out of cooking. They also solve that annoying problem of buying too little or more often in our house too much of what we need. Never buy more ingredients then you need because EveryPlates recipes come with everything already pre-measured. EveryPlate dinners are the cheaper, healthier alternative to takeout or delivery. With EveryPlate, you get to spend less time deciding what to cook and more time enjoying good food with family. EveryPlate has a special offer for you to benefit from this as well. For 50% off of your first box of EveryPlate, go to everyplate.com And enter promo code THIE, that's for Teaching in Higher Ed. 50% off is like getting two dinners for one cup of coffee right now. So again go to EveryPlate.com and enter promo code TIHE for 50% off your first box. And please let us know how you enjoyed your meal. We'd love to hear. Thank you so much to EveryPlate for supporting today's episode. And now a few more recommendations from Bonni and Laura.

Bonni: [00:37:28] Well speaking in recommendations this is the point in this show are we each get to give our recommendations for the episode. I want to just just quickly share about- Mike Taylor is more in the training and development field, he is not necessarily in academia, but I get so much out of his resources. And he wrote great- it's not a blog post, but it's on the on a website called ZEEF. And ZEEK is just a way of sort of bookmarking and collecting things around certain topics and so he has a ZEEK page on free design resources. And it's just a great collection for all of us says we're working to improve our own design skills and putting that into practice in our teaching and it is just a fun little set of resources to go check out. So my recommendation is to check out Mike Taylor's free design resources on ZEEF. And Laura, I get to pass it over to you now for yours.

Laura: [00:38:19] Well I want to recommend a book that I read pretty recently which is called Timeless Learning, and it has a really cool subtitle to which I should have looked up and memorized. But it's a book by Ira David Socol, Pam Morgan, and Chaf Ratliff, who are teachers and then Pams an administrator I guess now former administrator at Ablemarle schools in Virginia. It's about K through 12 learning that I wish everyone in higher ed would read this book. It's about what we can do to unshackle ourselves from all the kinds of things that we talked about earlier in the show about disposable assignments and transactional for the grade top down kind of learning to trade that in for timeless learning, which is inspired by stuff from the maker movement, Csikszentmihalyi's flow and the idea of when you're really learning something that is meaningful to you, you get into this timeless space, student autonomy, student agency, with example after example after example of all the things they've done in the schools to open things up for their students to learn, and make, and do, and explore. And it's honestly the most inspiring book about education that I've read in a long time.

Bonni: [00:39:41] It sounds phenomenal. You had me at the maker's spaces because I was intrigued on ways that can ignite my own imagination for how teachers can use that. And the subtitle by the way is How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools. And it sounds amazing.

Laura: [00:39:59] You said ignites so I'm going to use that as an excuse to share a quick anecdote from the book which is that at one point they've had a lot of people come in to look at their schools and see what they're doing. So they have observers coming in. And at one point an observer team had come in, I don't know if other teachers or whatever and they were doing something Ira's class that looked like it might be dangerous. It involved fire. And the observer person asked Ira, "it looks like they could set something on fire here." And Ira said "well that's why we have the sprinkler system" and I just thought that was so great. You know it's like yeah we know things are risky and you need to take risks enjoy count but you can't shut stuff down.

Bonni: [00:40:52] Oh my gosh that sounds amazing. You are truly- speaking of igniting, you ignite my energy, you ignite my imagination. Every time I get to talk to you, thank you so much for your time not just today but always you've just been a true inspiration for me and I so appreciate this chance to get to talk with you today.

Laura: [00:41:10] Well absolutely my pleasure. And I'm online all the time since that is where I live professionally. So if people have questions or whatever, just track me down, I'll be glad to brainstorm and chat.

Bonni: [00:41:22] Every chance I get to talk to Laura Gibbs is such a pleasure, I just leave the conversation feeling invigorated and inspired. Thank you Laura for being a guest on today's podcast and also just for being such a source of learning for me since I discovered your work years ago.

Bonni: [00:41:38] Thanks to all of you for listening. If you have been listening for a while and have yet to leave a review or a rating on whatever service it is you use to listen, that's a great way to help other people discover the show. And I did discover the other day if you're listening on overcast, that's an iOS app, you can even just press a little star right when you're listening whether that's on your phone or if you've got an Apple Watch, you can do it there too. So however you want to rate/ review, spread the word about the show. Thanks so much for listening and I'll look forward to seeing you next time. We've got some great guests coming up. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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How to Create Engaging Online Classes - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Laura Gibbs discusses how to create engaging online classes on episode 228 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

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Overloading on Slides: Cognitive Load Theory andMicrosoft’s Slide Program PowerPoint

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Overloading on Slides: Cognitive Load Theory andMicrosoft’s Slide Program PowerPoint

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Cutting the distance in distance education: Perspectives on what promotes positive,online learning experiences

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Cutting the distance in distance education: Perspectives on what promotes positive,online learning experiences

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(2012) Cutting the distance in distance education- Perspectives on what promotes positive, online learning experiences copy

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Cite this guide: Brame, C.J. & Biel, R. (2015). Setting up and facilitating group work:
Using cooperative learning groups effectively. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/setting-up-and-facilitating-group-work-using-cooperative-learning-groups-effectively/.

Many instructors from disciplines across the university use group work to enhance their students' learning. Whether the goal is to increase student understanding of content, to build particular transferable skills, or some combination of the two, instructors often turn to small group work to capitalize on the benefits of peer-to-peer instruction. This type of group work is formally termed cooperative learning, and is defined as the instructional use of small groups to promote students working together to maximize their own and each other's learning (Johnson, et al., 2008).

Cooperative learning is characterized by positive interdependence, where students perceive that better performance by individuals produces better performance by the entire group (Johnson, et al., 2014). It can be formal or informal, but often involves specific instructor intervention to maximize student interaction and learning. It is infinitely adaptable, working in small and large classes and across disciplines, and can be one of the most effective teaching approaches available to college instructors.

What can it look like?

Informal cooperative learning groups
In informal cooperative learning, small, temporary, ad-hoc groups of two to four students work together for brief periods in a class, typically up to one class period, to answer questions or respond to prompts posed by the instructor.

Additional examples of ways to structure informal group work
Think-pair-share
The instructor asks a discussion question. Students are instructed to think or write about an answer to the question before turning to a peer to discuss their responses. Groups then share their responses with the class.
Peer Instruction
This modification of the think-pair-share involves personal responses devices (e.g. clickers). The question posted is typically a conceptually based multiple-choice question. Students think about their answer and vote on a response before turning to a neighbor to discuss. Students can change their answers after discussion, and "sharing" is accomplished by the instructor revealing the graph of student response and using this as a stimulus for large class discussion. This approach is particularly well-adapted for large classes.
Jigsaw
In this approach, groups of students work in a team of four to become experts on one segment of new material, while other "expert teams" in the class work on other segments of new material. The class then rearranges, forming new groups that have one member from each expert team. The members of the new team then take turns teaching each other the material on which they are experts.
Formal cooperative learning groups
In formal cooperative learning students work together for one or more class periods to complete a joint task or assignment (Johnson et al., 2014). There are several features that can help these groups work well:

The instructor defines the learning objectives for the activity and assigns students to groups.

The groups are typically heterogeneous, with particular attention to the skills that are needed for success in the task.

Within the groups, students may be assigned specific roles, with the instructor communicating the criteria for success and the types of social skills that will be needed.

Importantly, the instructor continues to play an active role during the groups' work, monitoring the work and evaluating group and individual performance.

Instructors also encourage groups to reflect on their interactions to identify potential improvements for future group work.

This video shows an example of formal cooperative learning groups in David Matthes' class at the University of Minnesota:

There are many more specific types of group work that fall under the general descriptions given here, including team-based learning, problem-based learning, and process-oriented guided inquiry learning.

What's the theoretical underpinning?

The use of cooperative learning groups in instruction is based on the principle of constructivism, with particular attention to the contribution that social interaction can make. In essence, constructivism rests on the idea that individuals learn through building their own knowledge, connecting new ideas and experiences to existing knowledge and experiences to form new or enhanced understanding (Bransford, et al., 1999). The consideration of the role that groups can play in this process is based in social interdependence theory, which grew out of Kurt Koffka's and Kurt Lewin's identification of groups as dynamic entities that could exhibit varied interdependence among members, with group members motivated to achieve common goals. Morton Deutsch conceptualized varied types of interdependence, with positive correlation among group members' goal achievements promoting cooperation.

Lev Vygotsky extended this work by examining the relationship between cognitive processes and social activities, developing the sociocultural theory of development. The sociocultural theory of development suggests that learning takes place when students solve problems beyond their current developmental level with the support of their instructor or their peers. Thus both the idea of a zone of proximal development, supported by positive group interdependence, is the basis of cooperative learning (Davidson and Major, 2014; Johnson, et al., 2014).

Cooperative learning follows this idea as groups work together to learn or solve a problem, with each individual responsible for understanding all aspects. The small groups are essential to this process because students are able to both be heard and to hear their peers, while in a traditional classroom setting students may spend more time listening to what the instructor says.

Cooperative learning uses both goal interdependence and resource interdependence to ensure interaction and communication among group members. Changing the role of the instructor from lecturing to facilitating the groups helps foster this social environment for students to learn through interaction.

Is there evidence that it works?

David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Karl Smith performed a meta-analysis of 168 studies comparing cooperative learning to competitive learning and individualistic learning in college students (Johnson et al., 2006). They found that cooperative learning produced greater academic achievement than both competitive learning and individualistic learning across the studies, exhibiting a mean weighted effect size of 0.54 when comparing cooperation and competition and 0.51 when comparing cooperation and individualistic learning. In essence, these results indicate that cooperative learning increases student academic performance by approximately one-half of a standard deviation when compared to non-cooperative learning models, an effect that is considered moderate. Importantly, the academic achievement measures were defined in each study, and ranged from lower-level cognitive tasks (e.g., knowledge acquisition and retention) to higher level cognitive activity (e.g., creative problem solving), and from verbal tasks to mathematical tasks to procedural tasks. The meta-analysis also showed substantial effects on other metrics, including self-esteem and positive attitudes about learning. George Kuh and colleagues also conclude that cooperative group learning promotes student engagement and academic performance (Kuh et al., 2007).

Springer, Stanne, and Donovan (1999) confirmed these results in their meta-analysis of 39 studies in university STEM classrooms. They found that students who participated in various types of small-group learning, ranging from extended formal interactions to brief informal interactions, had greater academic achievement, exhibited more favorable attitudes towards learning, and had increased persistence through STEM courses than students who did not participate in STEM small-group learning.

The box below summarizes three individual studies examining the effects of cooperative learning groups.

What are approaches that can help make group work effective?
Preparation Articulate your goals for the group work, including both the academic objectives you want the students to achieve and the social skills you want them to develop. Determine the group conformation that will help meet your goals.
In informal group learning, groups often form ad hoc from near neighbors in a class.

In formal group learning, it is helpful for the instructor to form groups that are heterogeneous with regard to particular skills or abilities relevant to group tasks. For example, groups may be heterogeneous with regard to academic skill in the discipline or with regard to other skills related to the group task (e.g., design capabilities, programming skills, writing skills, organizational skills) (Johnson et al, 2006).

Groups from 2-6 are generally recommended, with groups that consist of three members exhibiting the best performance in some problem-solving tasks (Johnson et al., 2006; Heller and Hollabaugh, 1992).

To avoid common problems in group work, such as dominance by a single student or conflict avoidance, it can be useful to assign roles to group members (e.g., manager, skeptic, educator, conciliator) and to rotate them on a regular basis (Heller and Hollabaugh, 1992). Assigning these roles is not necessary in well-functioning groups, but can be useful for students who are unfamiliar with or unskilled at group work.
Choose an assessment method that will promote positive group interdependence as well as individual accountability.
In team-based learning, two approaches promote positive interdependence and individual accountability. First, students take an individual readiness assessment test, and then immediately take the same test again as a group. Their grade is a composite of the two scores. Second, students complete a group project together, and receive a group score on the project. They also, however, distribute points among their group partners, allowing student assessment of members' contributions to contribute to the final score.

Heller and Hollabaugh (1992) describe an approach in which they incorporated group problem-solving into a class. Students regularly solved problems in small groups, turning in a single solution. In addition, tests were structured such that 25% of the points derived from a group problem, where only those individuals who attended the group problem-solving sessions could participate in the group test problem. This approach can help prevent the "free rider" problem that can plague group work.

The University of New South Wales describes a variety of ways to assess group work, ranging from shared group grades, to grades that are averages of individual grades, to strictly individual grades, to a combination of these. They also suggest ways to assess not only the product of the group work but also the process. Again, having a portion of a grade that derives from individual contribution helps combat the free rider problem.
Helping groups get started Explain the group's task, including your goals for their academic achievement and social interaction. Explain how the task involves both positive interdependence and individual accountability, and how you will be assessing each.
Assign group roles or give groups prompts to help them articulate effective ways for interaction. The University of New South Wales provides a valuable set of tools to help groups establish good practices when first meeting. The site also provides some exercises for building group dynamics; these may be particularly valuable for groups that will be working on larger projects.

Regularly observe group interactions and progress, either by circulating during group work, collecting in-process documents, or both. When you observe problems, intervene to help students move forward on the task and work together effectively. The University of New South Wales provides handouts that instructors can use to promote effective group interactions, such as a handout to help students listen reflectively or give constructive feedback, or to help groups identify particular problems that they may be encountering.

Assessing and reflecting

In addition to providing feedback on group and individual performance (link to preparation section above), it is also useful to provide a structure for groups to reflect on what worked well in their group and what could be improved. Graham Gibbs (1994) suggests using the checklists shown below.

The University of New South Wales provides other reflective activities that may help students identify effective group practices and avoid ineffective practices in future cooperative learning experiences.

References

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (Eds.) (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Bruffee, K. A. (1993). Collaborative learning: Higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cabrera, A. F., Crissman, J. L., Bernal, E. M., Nora, A., Terenzini, P. T., & Pascarella, E. T. (2002). Collaborative learning: Its impact on college students' development and diversity. Journal of College Student Development, 43(1), 20-34.

Davidson, N., & Major, C. H. (2014). Boundary crossing: Cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25 (3&4), 7-55.

Dees, R. L. (1991). The role of cooperative leaning in increasing problem-solving ability in a college remedial course. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 22(5), 409-21.

Gokhale, A. A. (1995). Collaborative Learning enhances critical thinking. Journal of Technology Education, 7(1).

Heller, P., and Hollabaugh, M. (1992) Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. Part 2: Designing problems and structuring groups. American Journal of Physics 60, 637-644.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (2006). Active learning: Cooperation in the university classroom (3 rd edition). Edina, MN: Interaction.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Holubec, E.J. (2008). Cooperation in the classroom (8 th edition). Edina, MN: Interaction.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (2014). Cooperative learning: Improving university instruction by basing practice on validated theory. Journl on Excellence in College Teaching 25, 85-118.

Jones, D. J., & Brickner, D. (1996). Implementation of cooperative learning in a large-enrollment basic mechanics course. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference Proceedings.

Kuh, G.D., Kinzie, J., Buckley, J., Bridges, B., and Hayek, J.C. (2007). Piecing together the student success puzzle: Research, propositions, and recommendations (ASHE Higher Education Report, No. 32). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Love, A. G., Dietrich, A., Fitzgerald, J., & Gordon, D. (2014). Integrating collaborative learning inside and outside the classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 177-196.

Smith, M. E., Hinckley, C. C., & Volk, G. L. (1991). Cooperative learning in the undergraduate laboratory. Journal of Chemical Education 68(5), 413-415.

Springer, L., Stanne, M. E., & Donovan, S. S. (1999). Effects of small-group learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 96(1), 21-51.

Uribe, D., Klein, J. D., & Sullivan, H. (2003). The effect of computer-mediated collaborative learning on solving ill-defined problems. Educational Technology Research and Development, 51(1), 5-19.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Group work: Using cooperative learning groups effectively

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by Cynthia J. Brame and Rachel Biel Print Version Cite this guide: Brame, C.J. & Biel, R. (2015). Setting up and facilitating group work: Using cooperative learning groups effectively. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/setting-up-and-facilitating-group-work-using-cooperative-learning-groups-effectively/. Many instructors from disciplines across the university use group work to enhance their students' learning.

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Teach Online - Resources for Teaching Online

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Teach Online - Resources for Teaching Online

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I thought this was a good concise overview with links to other resources.

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A hybrid course is much more than just an online course with a face-to-face class session thrown in for good measure. It involves asking, "What is the best way for students to interact with course content, construct knowledge, engage in critical thinking and problem solving?" Purposeful decisions are made by the instructor as to what activities are best included in face-to-face class sessions, and which activities would work well in a virtual environment. The term hybrid, or blended course, signifies a new way of thinking about how to harness the power of technology to promote learning and identify the best strategies to help students master important course concepts. However, it is about more than just teaching an existing course in a new format.

" Blended [hybrid] learning inherently is about rethinking and redesigning the teaching and learning relationship. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, it is not enough to deliver old content in a new medium". ¹

Blended or hybrid learning capitalizes on an important paradigm shift in instructional pedagogy. The traditional role of instructor who was considered the "sage on the stage" has shifted towards one in which the instructor assumes the role of "guide on the side, sharing his/her subject matter expertise with students." This represents a significant shift from what Barr and Tagg refer to as an Instruction Paradigm to a Learning Paradigm.

Instruction Paradigm

Learning Paradigm

Improve the quality of instruction

Improve the quality of learning

Transfer knowledge from faculty to students

Elicit students' discovery and construction of knowledge

Covering the material

Specified learning results

Faculty are primarily lecturers

Elicit students' discovery and construction of knowledge

Any expert can teach

Empowering learning is challenging and complex

Achieve access for diverse students

Achieve success for diverse students

"Live" teacher, "live" students required

"Active" learner required, but not "live" teacher

Source: Barr & Tagg, From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education, Change, November/December 1995, pp. 13-25.

Hybrid or blended learning promotes active learning and increased student engagement. Classroom lectures, readings, and even demonstrations which would traditionally fill classroom time can now be delivered in the online environment. Instructional time is used for students to collaborate on course projects and participate in authentic learning activities. Class time is also devoted to in-depth discussions of important course concepts, allowing the instructor to clarify misunderstandings, and provide assistance to students who are struggling. Blended learning allows the instructor, or subject matter expert, to select the best environment for each learning activity while also affording the opportunity to also address multiple learning styles ².

In hybrid courses, "the mixture of online and face-to-face activities has no predefined format. The instructor decides which activities will take place online and which will take place face-to-face." ³ Regardless of the format, hybrid courses have several defining characteristics:

an emphasis on active learning and problem solving

student ownership of own learning

student centered

a focus on inquiry and dialogue

support from technology but not driven by it

You may be considering transitioning your traditional lecture-based course to a hybrid course. Or, you may be interested in developing an entirely new course using the hybrid, or blended model. No matter what the original intent, there are several important considerations to address before course development begins. As a start, consider reviewing the online resource, Ten Questions to consider when redesigning a course for hybrid teaching and learning from theUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

As with developing any course, regardless of format, the first and most important question to address is: what do you want your students to know (and be able to do) at the end of the course? If you can answer that essential question, you are well on your way to creating your first hybrid course!

Additional Resources

References

¹ Garrison, D. Randy, and Heather Kanuka. "Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education." The internet and higher education 7.2 (2004): 95-105.

2, 3 Ionas, Ioan, Matthew Easter, William Miller, and Gayla Neumeyer. "Using Open-Source Tools to Design and Develop the Online Component of a Blended-Learning, Instructor-led Course,." International Journal of Designs for Learning 3.1 (2012): 12-26. http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/index. Web. 14 Nov. 2012.

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Questions to Consider As You Prepare to Teach Your First Hybrid Course - TeachOnline

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A hybrid course is much more than just an online course with a face-to-face class session thrown in for good measure. It involves asking, "What is the best way for students to interact with course content, construct knowledge, engage in critical thinking and problem solving?"

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A podcast with topics related to hybrid teaching and incorporating active learning concepts. May be useful for those who like to learn on the run (literally)!

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Re-Designing Courses for Hybrid Learning

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Re-Designing Courses for Hybrid Learning

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Questions to consider when transitioning an established traditional course to a hybrid design

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The UWM Learning Technology Center (LTC) is the campus center that assists faculty, teaching academic staff, and teaching assistants in their efforts to use instructional technology to enhance teaching and learning.

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We are cognitive psychological scientists interested in research on education. Our main research focus is on the science of learning. (Hence, "The Learning Scientists"!). Our Vision is to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students, teachers, and other educators.

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Many of these can be modified for a synch session or discussion board

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Scroll thru this post to also see how to assign points to a SPR to get a grade

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Stick around.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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Another option for students to interact with course material and inquiry

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Below is a quick activity that is easily adaptable for most class settings. It maximizes the effectiveness of multiple-choice questions and is a wonderful way for students and teachers to assess student learning. I really like this activity, because unlike most involving multiple-choice questions, this template makes use of all answer choices and requires students effortfully work with all of the material.

Another reason I really like this is its ability to cover a lot of material in a few questions. If you have 10 questions with 5 answer choices, the students could feasibly interact with 50 different snippets of material. As you can see below, the student has to interact with the question stems in various ways:
How can you use this in your class? How could you modify the template for use as a study guide, for homework, or as a quiz grade in class? What other ideas do you have to help students interact with the answers?

With the correct answer the student must either provide a memory aid they used to help them choose this answer OR provide a sketch that illustrates the term or concept covered.

With the incorrect answers, students must:

Use the 'trickiest' incorrect answer to describe why this answer is most likely to trip up students and potentially lead students to choosing this answer.

Rewrite the question to make this incorrect answer the correct answer.

Give an example relating this answer to the student's life.

Link this answer to information from a previous lesson/unit or to information learned from another class.

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Maximizing the Effectiveness of Multiple-Choice Qs - The Effortful Educator

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Posted by Below is a quick activity that is easily adaptable for most class settings. It maximizes the effectiveness of multiple-choice questions and is a wonderful way for students and teachers to assess student learning. I really like this activity, because unlike most involving multiple-choice questions, this template makes use of all answer choices and requires students effortfully work with all of the material.

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Yvonne Randall                      What a 'flipped'classroom looks like

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Yvonne Randall                      What a 'flipped'classroom looks like

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This is a PBS video of a high school that adopted a flipped classroom model

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I personally use twitter to follow professionals in my field but haven't thought about using it in the classroom to ask questions post about assingments dates, or videos. Might be something worth exploring.

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Before hosting a Twitter chat, the class should discuss aspects of digital citizenship, noting the implication of having a permanent digital footprint and exploring the concept of privacy (protecting passwords, navigating privacy settings, etc.).

Because a classroom Twitter chat was new for me, I created was a checklist that comprised my learnings from meaningful chats I've joined, specific learning supports my students needed, and suggestions from articles on Twitter chats. I divided the list into three categories (pre-chat planning, implementation, and post-chat planning).

Pre-Chat Planning

1. Hosting: Join an existing chat as a participant to learn the ropes. Then decide whether you need a co-moderator (due to large class size or your level of experience with Twitter), and whether you want to invite a special guest or expert to provide a fresh perspective on the course content.

2. Privacy: Communicate the public nature of Twitter to parents. Consider an opt-out alternative for students or parents who are uncomfortable with participating in the classroom chat.

3. Chat objective: Communicate the rationale of the chat to the students. For example, determine if the chat focus is to introduce new information or to review. Articulating the purpose makes it easier to meet students' expectations.

4. Participant access: Offer multiple dates and times for the chat. Provide support for participants unfamiliar with Twitter, such as YouTube tutorials, articles, or an in-class demonstration.

5. Student voice: Ask your students for ideas on ways to evaluate what is acceptable and unacceptable chat behavior. Ask for student input on developing expectations related to the use of acronyms and abbreviations for names or concepts (such as IDK for "I don't know").

6. Student preparation: Provide chat prompts to students at least one week in advance. If the chat occurs outside of school hours, remind students the day before and the day of.

7. Content: Review the types of questions and hashtags typically used in a chat. Create open-ended and higher-order thinking questions, and a unique hashtag. We used #GoodBetterTest for our class chat on test-taking skills and later wondered if we should have made it shorter. Create images to accompany your chat questions, using software such as Canva or Pic Monkey.

8. Time: Allow yourself time to revise questions and identify online resources to supplement chat content.

9. Integrated learning: Plan questions that incorporate topics previously examined in class-for example, "How does _____ relate to _____?"

Implementation

10. Hosting: Model chat behavior such as retweets and mentions (using the names of participants within tweeted messages). Gently remind the participants of rules (use of the chat hashtag, use of the question number and answer number) as needed.

11. Comment intensity: To help focus on course-specific terms, assist students in moving back and forth between their own words and technical or course-specific terms. And help highlight particular content with the use of sentence starters.

12. Comment type: Remind students who struggle with character limits to break longer comments into multiple tweets. When all comments seem similar, prompt students to dig deeper: "What's a different take on this?" And when comments are vague, prompt students to share a bit more.

13. Content coverage: Consider ways to respond when there are lulls in comments, such as by reframing the question or offering a brief ice-breaker. Determine how to smoothly transition from one question to another. For example, if too much time is devoted to one question, tweet that it's time to move on to other topics.

14. Student voice: Encourage students to ask questions about the content. Prompt them to complete the sentence: "The one thing that I still want to know is _____." Invite them to ask questions of their peers, and welcome their direct questions to you.

15. Time: Monitor the pacing of the chat by reminding students how much time is left, how many more questions remain, etc. Consider the tools available to help manage time, such as the app Hootsuite for scheduling and automating questions.

16. Chat objective: At the close of the chat, comment on how well the chat addressed the objective.

Post-Chat Planning

17. Analytic tool: Determine apps that may assist with managing the chat (see items 7 and 15 above, for example).

18. Integrated learning: Help students make a connection between concepts learned through the chat and future course content. For example, incorporate items from the chat in future homework, class work, or class projects.

19. Student voice: Encourage student feedback via a brief survey or in-class debriefing. Survey questions may include:

Do you feel the chat's objective was reached?

What was the most useful part of the chat?

How might we improve the chat?

20. Social validity: Ask if the students would recommend a chat in the future. You can do this formally (in your survey) or informally (by talking with students one-on-one).

21. Confounding variables: Consider how factors outside of your checklist may impact the chat. For example, a large class size may affect participation levels. When looking at class size, determine if breaking the students into groups would make a difference. When looking at gender, determine how male and female student posts differed. When examining culture, determine if the chat content and questions were reflective of all types of students.

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Facilitating a Class Twitter Chat | Edutopia

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Before hosting a Twitter chat, the class should discuss aspects of digital citizenship, noting the implication of having a permanent digital footprint and exploring the concept of privacy (protecting passwords, navigating privacy settings, etc.).

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The association between physical therapist student performance in simulation and clinical practice adds support for simulation assessments being used to determine subsequent clinical practice performance. Educators may consider focusing on learner development in the domains of practice of “analysis and planning” and “risk assessment” in simulation as a way of assisting physical therapist student preparation for clinical practice and facilitating more effective implementation of simulation-based education practices.

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few nice things in here - questions to ask yourself.  step by step guide and a tips section

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Doing and Becoming Occupational Therapists

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Doing and Becoming Occupational Therapists

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This is one of my favorite articles about service learning with OT students.

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A flipped class (view image) is one that inverts the typical cycle of content acquisition and application so that: students gain necessary knowledge before class, and instructors guide students to actively and interactively clarify and apply that knowledge during class.

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Central Florida Students say NO to Hybrid Education 

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Central Florida Students say NO to Hybrid Education 

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Interesting article about the implementation of hybrid education at the University of Central Florida and why students petitioned to stop it. Lessons can be learned here when you decide to transition (at scale) from traditional to hybrid education.

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Students in the University of Central Florida's College of Business this week have gotten more than 1,800 signatures on a petition criticizing the college's recent shift to a blended and active learning classroom model that some students describe as onerous and not conducive to learning.

The business college, meanwhile, is standing behind its changes, arguing they're sound and well intentioned from a pedagogical perspective, and more well liked by students than the petition suggests.

Students who signed the petition, first reported by UCF's student newspaper Knight News, expressed frustration with the college's "reduced class time" format, in which students work on group projects during five in-person sessions throughout the semester and complete the bulk of their learning outside class by reading an online textbook, watching three-minute instructional videos created by textbook publishers and faculty members, and completing textbook assignments.

Under the previous model, professors delivered two weekly 75-minute lectures students could attend in person or watch online synchronously or asynchronously. The new model eliminates the lecture element and requires students to learn much of the course content on their own, with 75-minute face-to-face sessions five times during the semester, designed to apply what they've learned to concrete activities.

The petition was written by Michael Wensinger, a junior finance major who now serves as leader of the Knights of College of Business Administration Reform group on campus. (The college dropped "administration" from its name in 2016.)

The coalition formed in a GroupMe text thread that Wensinger started a few weeks ago to vent about the reduced class time format.​ Wensinger and other students said they were blindsided by the news this semester that all but two of the college's 14 core courses, required for admission to a major, will be taught exclusively in this format. The college started testing the modality in four courses last summer and has slowly spread it over the last year, according to Paul Jarley, who has served since 2012 as dean of the business college.

"A lot of students don't learn that way or retain" in the reduced class time model, Wensinger said. "Students are having to teach themselves."

Within a few days, more than 300 students had joined the ad hoc group, he said. Wensinger has established a "facilitating committee" of 12 students to "help lead the movement," he said. The group plans to attend a town hall meeting next week with the university's president and to begin posting fliers around campus this week, according to Wensinger.

The controversy around the new format points to deeper challenges for the enormous and still-growing university, which seeks to add teaching modalities to accommodate as many students as possible, but risks outpacing its capacity. Jarley said offering courses in multiple modalities and allowing students to choose, for instance, would be too costly for the institution to do without burdening students in other ways.

"The way that we're able to provide access and affordability to our students is we do things at scale," Jarley said. "If I were to lose that scale, I would lose some of that affordability for students, and I would lose some of that access. It would cost [students] more. Or I would have to really increase class sizes in upper-division courses and reallocate resources that way."
Origins of the Approach
Central Florida -- one of the country's largest institutions, with more than 64,000 students -- was one of the first universities to invest heavily in blended learning, with courses offered for the last two decades both in person and online via lecture capture. University administrators have long regarded the hybrid format as the most popular among students, according to Kelvin Thompson, executive director for the institution's Center for Distributed Learning. The university also has a mandate from the state government to offer diverse education options.

But according to Jarley, data reveal that many business students in blended classes who opt not to attend face-to-face also never watch the recorded lecture videos -- or they wait weeks after the recording to watch them, perhaps to cram for an exam. During the 2017-18 school year, an average of 46 percent of the 3,400 students enrolled in lecture-capture courses watched fewer than half the videos in their course, according to a university spokesperson.

Those classes tend to have between 800 and 2,000 students, Jarley said. The university doesn't collect attendance data on the in-person sessions because they're not mandatory, a spokesperson said, adding only that "faculty [report] lecturing to largely empty rooms." The business college also didn't provide to "Inside Digital Learning" data on student performance in lecture-capture courses.

The business college, which enrolls 8,500 undergraduate students and 1,000 graduate students, was the first of the university's schools to implement the reduced class time format, developed last year by the Center for Distributed Learning. Some professors have incorporated adaptive learning into the online portion of the classes so that each student's experience is tailored to their learning needs. Jarley hoped eliminating instructor-led lectures would let students spend more time engaging with their peers and gaining a deeper understanding of the material.

"It's important that our students get the soft skills and the decision-making skills they need in order to succeed in the workplace," Jarley said. "That was very hard to do in the lecture-capture format because they're just being lectured at. They're not actually doing anything."

But some students bemoan the drastic step of ending the weekly sessions with instructors altogether. They believe they learn more when they have more opportunities to engage with the professor in person about the learning material, rather than learning most of the material online and completing a group project they perceive as tangential.

Under the lecture-capture model, students could spend up to about 30 hours in a physical classroom with an instructor (assuming they actually went). Now the maximum class time is approximately 6.25 hours, and in some cases the professor might not be present for all of them.

"I've been in lecture classes and I've also been in reduced seat time classes," said Kelly Kennedy, another member of the COBA Reform group. "It was way more beneficial having face-to-face interactions than speaking to my professor five times in a whole semester."

Kennedy said students are balking at the group project assignment, which isn't directly connected to exams. She and some of her peers would prefer to use that time to discuss course content with the instructor.

Students in some classes also told "Inside Digital Learning" that online textbooks provided by McGraw-Hill Connect, which cost more than $100 each, have been glitchy at times, and that in some cases, the first face-to-face session this semester was run by teaching assistants.

"I'm a straight-A student now struggling to get B's," Wensinger said. "I'm very nervous and stressed out all the time about that."

In addition to offering more structured in-class activities, this format frees up the business college's 135 full-time faculty members for more sections with smaller class sizes in the business school's upper-level classes, Jarley said.

Wensinger and his peers say they know some students who like the reduced class time format. But students who signed the petition say they want the university to provide more than one modality option, or to listen to their suggestions for improving the reduced class time format.

John Nazario, a junior business marketing major, thinks the format could work with a few more class sessions focused on discussion, or if the courses were offered entirely online. He told "Inside Digital Learning" Wednesday that he was strongly considering scheduling an appointment with his adviser and switching out of the business school to a new major like digital media.

"If I would have known about this, I wouldn't have studied at UCF," Nazario said. "I would have gone to a private college to do something else."
Navigating Student Feedback
Jarley said he and his colleagues are thinking about ways to explain the reduced class time format more clearly to students during orientation, particularly for transfer students from community colleges, where class sizes are significantly smaller and engaging one on one with a professor can happen more frequently.

According to Jarley, two-thirds of more than 3,200 students who responded to surveys at the end of the last school year rated the reduced class time format "excellent" or "very good." The business school also trained student observers to evaluate the effectiveness of the group projects sessions and asked business school department chairs to sit in on several sections.

"We were pretty pleased with those outcomes," Jarley said.

Students have been agitating to air their concerns for meetings with business college administrators. Jarley said he's open in theory to holding such a meeting, but he's concerned about ensuring that the students in attendance represent the wide range of opinions.

"I wouldn't rule out down the road doing some focus groups with specific students," Jarley said.

Students who don't like the format have also taken to several Reddit threads in recent days to vent. Dean Cleavenger, a lecturer of management, on Monday spent time responding to students' complaints about his first in-person session of the semester. He told "Inside Digital Learning" that he's sympathetic to students' concerns about the new format and eager to learn from their feedback.

"Reduced class time" is something of a misnomer, he points out -- students previously could have watched all of the semester's lectures online, but now they're required to attend five in-person sessions. When he taught in lecture style with optional classroom attendance, an average of 50 students out of 800 or more in a class came in person each week. Several hundred attended the first couple sessions, he said, but the numbers dwindled significantly afterward.

Now he has fewer class periods per semester to manage, but each group project session has 200 students, and he oversees several sections throughout the week.

Still, he thinks mandating face-to-face class time is worthwhile, given that he often felt like students weren't paying much attention to his lecture videos or inclined to go above the minimum requirements.

"In my experience when I've done extra activities, I'll have 150 urgent hands in the air, 'Yes I'll do that,' then 30 come," Cleavenger said.

Students don't always avoid lectures out of laziness, according to Kennedy. She said she was turned away from the first day of a core class last semester because the 300-seat lecture hall was full. She continues to prefer attending class in person but was frustrated to drive from her home 30 minutes from campus only to find she'd have to watch the lecture online.

"Students shouldn't be turned away from classes they're paying for," Kennedy said.

Petition signees have also raised concerns about price. In-state undergraduates in the business college pay $212.28 per credit hour, and out-of-state undergraduates pay $748.89 per credit hour. Both groups also pay an $18 per credit hour distance-learning fee for hybrid courses. In accordance with Florida state law, the university can charge the distance-learning fee for reduced class time courses because less than 20 percent of instruction takes place face-to-face.

The need for teaching assistants to walk around class sessions with several hundred students means the reduced class time model costs the university more money than the lecture-capture format, Jarley said. He did not provide a specific cost comparison in time for publication.
Measuring Long-Term Outcomes
As of this fall, only two of the business school's core courses have not shifted to the reduced class time format. One of the two untouched courses is separately set to be revamped with a new content focus, and the other is the capstone course, for which engagement with lecture capture tends to be higher than average, Jarley said.

None of the university's other colleges have yet offered classes in this modality, according to Thompson -- though the College of Arts and Humanities has three reduced class time sections of one philosophy course in the works for next semester, he said.

Jarley said instructors haven't reported a significant increase this semester in students signing up for tutoring sessions or meetings during office hours.

Exam scores thus far in the reduced class time courses haven't been substantially different from those in the lecture-capture format, according to Jarley. He believes gains are likely to start showing up after four semesters offering the format, which would mean increases would appear after this semester.

Students involved in the petition might not be willing to wait that long. But Jarley thinks an experiment only takes shape over time.

"I think whenever you make a change of this kind, which is not only a change in format but a cultural change, you're changing the perceptions of what the student's role is in the classroom, and what the faculty's role is in the classroom. I think you have to expect that people are going to have an adjustment process to that, that it's not going to come naturally to them," Jarley said. "That's not a reason that should stop you."

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Blended learning model at University of Central Florida draws business student ire

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Students in the University of Central Florida's College of Business this week have gotten more than 1,800 signatures on a petition criticizing the college's recent shift to a blended and active learning classroom model that some students describe as onerous and not conducive to learning.

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I really liked this simple and easy to follow questions that you should ask yourself when designing a hybrid course. What stood out for me was that online courses have a tendency to have more assignments attached to them. Truthfully, when I began this coursework, I made a global assumption that online courses were easier than traditional courses

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The UWM Learning Technology Center (LTC) is the campus center that assists faculty, teaching academic staff, and teaching assistants in their efforts to use instructional technology to enhance teaching and learning.

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I really like this format in that it teaches complex science concepts with an emphasis on mastery and understanding. IT just makes the learning process fun! -Katie Pitt

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Over 1.1 billion simulations delivered

160interactive simulations

97language translations

3001teacher-submitted lessons

Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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https://kahoot.it/Kahoot is a fun interactive game environment that allows students to play real life (synchronous) academic based question answer sessions with each other. Each student signs in and let the game begin. This venue has preset topics for you to chose from. I saw this used at a University with the topic being upper extremity anatomy and function. -Katie Pitt

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Join a game of kahoot here. Kahoot! is a free game-based learning platform that makes it fun to learn – any subject, in any language, on any device, for all ages!

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Articles from Taiwan and beyond about how mobile higher learning in different cultures works

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Keeping learning focused on the "why"

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Professors tend to cover a lot of content over the course of one class session. Yet students will probably forget most of it by the end of the semester. Why? One reason is that we focus too much on teaching, and not enough on learning. Students, therefore, don't really get to grapple with the topic you just lectured about. They're too busy taking notes. And most times, they don't see a point to learning all this "stuff."

Enter the one-sentence lesson plan.

The one-sentence lesson plan helps professors focus on learning-rather than on teaching-by answering three simple things: The what, the how, and the why.

First, what do you want your students to know (or be able to do) by the end of class? Here, you identify the skill or the content to be learned.

For example, I want students to be able to evaluate the credibility of sources. That's a skill. Another example is: Students will be able to explain and apply Piaget's four stages of cognitive development. That's content.

More importantly, identifying your what forces you to narrow your teaching. This is the hardest part for most professors. Even if you have more than one what, this exercise still pushes you to prioritize. I recommend you "niche" your lecture topic down to one major concept.

Next, how will students reach this goal?

In other words, what method, strategy, tool, or activity will you employ to make sure they know what they're supposed to know or gain the skill they're supposed to gain? This is the hands-on part, where students grapple with the content.

Building on the first example, I might write: Students will be able to evaluate the credibility of sources by "triangulating" information. That's how students will be able to evaluate sources-the strategy. However, there are other ways to learn this skill. I could just have easily stated:
Students will be able to evaluate the credibility of sources by discussing in groups the pros and cons of each source.
In this case, the how is an activity or method.

Finally, why are students learning this?

This is the "so what?"-why do students need to know or do this? What's in it for them? How do they benefit? It's about understanding your audience. Usually, the why starts with the prompt, "so that . . ."

Continuing with the evaluating sources example, I might state:
Students will evaluate the credibility of sources by "triangulating" information, so that they make better buying decisions.
The why is the most important part of the one-sentence lesson plan. As teachers, however, most of us overlook it. Yet this is the part students care about. When they know the purpose, they will absorb the topic more deeply (1). Yet too often we just assume students know why they're learning a particular concept. Will students really know why they're evaluating sources? Not necessarily.

Another reason to articulate the why is because it can help you open your lesson. For example, if "making better decisions" is one of the reasons we learn to evaluate the credibility of sources, then I can use that as a jumping off point. I might start the class by posing the following:

Class, say you want to buy a new flash drive. You want to make sure it has enough space to hold not just your school work but also your media, whether it's pictures, videos, whatever. Also, the flash drive has to be reliable, because your last one died and you lost your paper! Finally, the flash drive has to be affordable, right?

I want you to take your phone right now and Google the words "best flash drive." Which specific sites do you visit and why? Jot down your thoughts and reasons.

Now, students are making decisions about what to buy, as well as activating prior experiences related to buying. This will motivate them to learn about your content; in this case, how to evaluate the credibility of sources.

Compare that opening with a more mundane, typical way one might start his/her lecture: "Today we're going to learn how to evaluate the credibility of sources . . ."

Professors do this all the time-we introduce the content up front: "Let's start by going over Piaget's four stages of cognitive development . . ."

When we start with the content first, rather than with the why, we rob students of the opportunity to contextualize the topic. Asking students about their experiences buying a new flash drive will help them relate to the potentially dull topic of "evaluating the credibility of sources." Research such as those by Ambrose et al. (2010) suggest that anchoring new topics to something familiar helps students learn more effectively (2).

Based on my one-sentence lesson plan, here's a simple breakdown of my lecture:

Opening: Ask students their experiences searching information on the Internet

Mini-lesson: Teach them how to triangulate information (or better yet, start by asking them better ways to find information)

Guided practice: Model your "think-aloud" as you demonstrate with a new topic (e.g., evaluating the credibility of sources related to climate change)

Activity: Students apply the triangulating strategy (using their smartphone)

Closing: Discuss why good judgement is important in the information age

All that from a one-sentence lesson plan.

According to marketing consultant Simon Sinek, the why drives behavior. In his bestselling book, Start with Why, Sinek argues that successful organizations understand that people won't buy into whatever is being sold unless they understand why they're doing it. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for instance, didn't just market computers (i.e., the what). He marketed the idea to challenge the status quo-to "think different" (the why).

Similarly, in education the why drives the desire to learn. Wouldn't it be great if you had the answer to the age-old student complaint, "Why do we have to learn this?" With the one-sentence lesson plan, you'll have the answer.

Here is the template:
In this class, students will be able to [accomplish Outcome X] by [using Method Y], so that [they will be helped in Z way].
Is this like a learning objective?

One question professors often ask me is: Isn't the one-sentence lesson plan really just a learning or behavioral objective?

Not quite. Learning or behavioral objectives may articulate the what, but they don't always define the how. More importantly, typical objectives never define the why. The one-sentence lesson plan prioritizes the purpose (the why) as well as the method of learning (the how), which makes it more learner-centered. Furthermore, the one-sentence lesson plan leads into powerful lesson openings (and closings) that traditional objectives do not do.

I realize that the why isn't always easy to find. Why, for instance, do students need to identify the slope of a line in math? You have to get creative. Maybe to help them understand the rate of change? The key is to make the concept concrete, like looking at how money can grow over time. Students will want to know about that.

So, when you plan, start with the what. It's the easiest. But when you teach, start with the why.

With a one-sentence lesson plan, I can go in each day with a clear idea of what I want to teach, how I'm going to teach, and why I am teaching it. That means everything to a busy professor-and the overwhelmed student.

(1) Yeager, D. S., Henderson, M., Paunesku, D., Walton, G., Spitzer, B., D'Mello, S., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). Boring but important: A self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, 559-580.

(2) Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Norman Eng, EdD, is the founder of EDUCATIONxDESIGN, Inc., which helps new professors teach more effectively through a system focused on students, rather than on content. Download your free quick start-guide, "7 Proven Steps to Planning, Teaching, and Engaging Your Students," at NormanEng.org.

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Focus Your Lectures with the 'One-Sentence Lesson Plan' - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Professors tend to cover a lot of content over the course of one class session. Yet students will probably forget most of it by the end of the semester. Why? One reason is that we focus too much on teaching, and not enough on learning.

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We have been having a good discussion about academic disciplines.

Does the intersection of learning innovation and postsecondary change qualify as an emergent academic discipline?

Does our desire to build an intellectual and physical home dedicated the scholarship and teaching around the work that we have been doing, and the questions that we have been asking, require the creation of something new?

To ground this discussion, I have been doing research about what exactly an academic discipline is. An excellent source that I found is Krishnan (2009), "What are Academic Disciplines? Some observations on the Disciplinarity vs Interdisciplinarity Debate."

Krishnan identifies 6 characteristics of an academic discipline. Below I enumerate each attribute, and then explore the fit of our contemplated discipline.
1 - "Disciplines have a particular object of research (e.g. law, society, politics), though the object of research maybe shared with another discipline."
Analysis: This "object of research" is at the place learning change and organizational change intersect. The founding hypothesis is that there is something unique in this intersection, a reality that can't be understood by coming at the question from either existing scholarship (theories, methods, findings) on learning or on postsecondary organizational change. The mandate is to study these two forces in relationship to one another.
2 - "Disciplines have a body of accumulated specialist knowledge referring to their object of research, which is specific to them and not generally shared with another discipline."
Analysis: This contemplated discipline requires a deep understanding of postsecondary learning and postsecondary organizational change. Curiosity and knowledge about either is inadequate, as the action is in the place that they intersect.

The work that people do in this field, what we both study and what we practice, includes leading institutional efforts to shift from traditional teaching methods to those that are more closely aligned with the research on learning. These efforts that are usually (if not always) mediated by shifts to blended, low-residency, online, and open education.

This new education shifts the dominant postsecondary model of teaching from a solo craft, where instructors are alone in the design and delivery and evaluation of teaching, to one where professors collaborate with non-faculty educators (instructional designer, media educators, assessment experts etc.) in the design and delivery of the courses, programs, and degrees.
3 - "Disciplines have theories and concepts that can organize the accumulated specialist knowledge effectively."
Analysis: It seems that the theoretical frameworks for this proposed academic discipline remain undeveloped. Existing theories of how institutions change, such as disruptive innovation theory, seem inadequate to explaining why higher education is changing as it is - and where it might go in the future.

This is particularly true for making sense of why postsecondary learning seems to be changing so rapidly, and what these changes may mean for understanding (and predicting) the future of higher ed.
4 - "Disciplines use specific terminologies or a specific technical language adjusted to their research object."
Analysis: The language of this proposed discipline is taken from both sides of the conversations about learning change and postsecondary organizational change. Concepts such as the move towards student-centered and active learning are integrated into discussions of institutional resiliency and competitive differentiation. Practitioners of this discipline must be fluent in both languages.
5 - "Disciplines have developed specific research methods according to their specific research requirements."
Analysis: Research questions for this contemplated discipline cluster around questions of learning change.

How is learning changing within individual institutions and across the sector? Why are these changes occurring? What will be the impact of these changes on the organization and culture of institutions where these changes are occurring? Why are some schools changing (innovating?) quickly, and others not at all? What changes should colleges and universities be making to both advance learning and grow institutional resilience?

The methods developed in this discipline will be created (or adapted) to answer these sorts of questions.
6 - "Disciplines must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges, respective academic departments and professional associations connected to it."
Analysis: It is in this 6th requirement that we identify the biggest gap.

Our contention is the work of 1 through 5 is already occurring. It is occurring at centers for teaching and learning, in schools of education, and in departments of instructional design. It is happening amongst the academics engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), in programs around postsecondary leadership, and amongst scholars of higher education studies and organizational change. What is missing is that consistent "institutional manifestation".

It is everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Where does one go to take classes in this subject? What is the place that a scholar interested in finding a critical mass of fellow researchers would gravitate? What is the path that an academic would take if she wanted to spend the majority of her energies and time doing scholarship and teaching at the intersection of learning change and higher education change?

We can't be interdisciplinary until we are first disciplinary. Without a home for this work - point 6 - we are left with what we have now. We need a home.

How would you analyze the fit along each dimension of the characteristics of an established academic discipline to our contemplated academic discipline?

Would you argue that the disciplinary structure to do this scholarship already exists?

What would it mean for some critical mass of those of us enmeshed in the paired work of learning and organizational change to come together around something brand new?

Would you want to join this academic department if it were to be created?

Could you imagine a PhD program in this discipline?

What would convince a university to create this department?

Is a better answer perhaps to evolve our existing units and departments, such as our CTLs, into homes for scholarship and teaching in this area?

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6 Attributes of an Academic Discipline | Learning Innovation

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We have been having a good discussion about academic disciplines. Does the intersection of learning innovation and postsecondary change qualify as an emergent academic discipline? Does our desire to build an intellectual and physical home dedicated the scholarship and teaching around the work that we have been doing, and the questions that we have been asking, require the creation of something new?

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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An analysis of more than 2,000 college classes in science, technology, engineering and math has imparted a lesson that might resonate with many students who sat through them: Enough with the lectures, already.

Published March 29 in the journal Science, the largest-ever observational study of undergraduate STEM education monitored nearly 550 faculty as they taught more than 700 courses at 25 institutions across the United States and Canada.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Marilyne Stains and her colleagues found that 55 percent of STEM classroom interactions consisted mostly of conventional lecturing, a style that prior research has identified as among the least effective at teaching and engaging students.

Another 27 percent featured interactive lectures that had students participating in some group activities or answering multiple-choice questions with handheld clickers. Just 18 percent emphasized a student-centered style heavy on group work and discussions.

The predominance of lecturing observed in the study persists despite many years of federal and state educational agencies advocating for more student-centered learning, the researchers said.

"There is an enormous amount of work that has demonstrated that these (student-centered) strategies improve students' learning and attitudes toward science," said Stains, the study's lead author and associate professor of chemistry at Nebraska. "It's not just that they understand it better, but they also appreciate science more. They're not as scared of it, and they engage more easily with it.

"When you see that kind of effect, it makes you say, 'Why are we still doing it the other way?'"

A breakdown of how teaching styles varied by STEM discipline. (Click to enlarge)

One potential culprit captured by the study: Faculty may lack the training necessary to take advantage of smaller class sizes, open classroom layouts and other strategies meant to reduce the reliance on conventional lecturing. Lectures did occur less often in smaller than larger classes, the study found, and open layouts did correlate with more student-centered learning. But about half of the courses with those advantages still featured more conventional lecturing than interactive or student-centered teaching styles.

"When you talk to faculty, you often hear, 'I teach in an amphitheater. I could never do group work; it's just not practical. But if I had a small class, I could do it,'" Stains said. "But just because you have the right layout doesn't mean you're actually going to (promote) active learning. You need to be trained in those kinds of practices. If there's not a budget for professional development to help faculty use those environments, they're going to default to what they know best, which is lecturing."

The study did show that many faculty adopt multiple teaching styles throughout a semester. Among the faculty who were observed at least twice, 42 percent demonstrated two styles. Based on its data, the research team concluded that three or four classroom visits are needed to reliably characterize an instructor's approach.

"If your institution is really focused on student-centered teaching and visits your classroom only once a semester, on a day that you're lecturing, then you're going to fare poorly," Stains said.
Perception vs. reality
Much of the previous research into STEM instruction has relied on surveying faculty about their practices. Though the resulting data has proven valuable, Stains said, the flaws of human memory and perception inevitably find their way into that data.

"Surveys and self-reports are useful to get people's perceptions of what they are doing," she said. "If you ask me about how I teach, I might tell you, 'I spend 50 percent of my class having students talk to each other.' But when you actually come to my class and observe, you may find that it's more like 30 percent. Our perception is not always accurate."

So the research team decided to monitor STEM classroom practices with a commonly used protocol that involved documenting many types of student and instructor behavior during every two-minute interval throughout a class. An analysis that accounted for the prevalence of those behaviors allowed the team to identify seven instructional profiles, which were then categorized into three broad teaching styles.

Those efforts also led to the development of an app that runs essentially the same analyses conducted in the study.

"People can do their own measurements and see how they compare to this large dataset - see how either their department or college is doing - and say, 'This is where we stand. This is where we want to go.'"

In the meantime, the study's scale and interdisciplinary nature make it a "reliable snapshot" of how STEM gets taught to undergraduate students in North America, its authors said.

"There are many universities that are interested in integrating student-centered practices into their undergraduate STEM curriculum," Stains said. "This could give them insights about what's probably going on in their classrooms if they're at a research-intensive institution."

Stains authored the study with colleagues from Auburn University; Simon Fraser University; the University of British Columbia; the University of Colorado Boulder; the University of Iowa; Armstrong State University; the University of California, Los Angeles; Otterbein University; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Michigan; the University of Calgary; the University of Virginia; the University of Maine; and Saint Mary's University (Halifax).

The research team received funding in part from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Scott Schrage is a science writer/editor with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Reprinted with permission from Nebraska Today.

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Massive Study Finds Lectures Still Dominate STEM Education

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An analysis of more than 2,000 college classes in science, technology, engineering and math has found that 55 percent of STEM classroom interactions consisted mostly of conventional lecturing, a style that prior research has identified as among the least effective at teaching and engaging students.

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By Linda S. Futch (Department Head, Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida) The next offering of BlendKit 2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer begins on Februrary 23, 2015, with a 30-minute orientation session at 2:00 p.m. (US EDT; -4 UTC) and lasts five weeks. The open course will be offered at no cost. ... Continue reading BlendKit2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer >>

Starting February 22, Join Rohan and Baiyun as we kickoff BlendKit 2016 - Learn more and enroll here: https://www.canvas.net/courses/becoming-a-blended-learning-designer-2/. Continue reading It's that time of year again! Enroll into BlendKit 2016! >>

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Blended Learning Toolkit | Just another WordPress site

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By Linda S. Futch (Department Head, Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida) The next offering of BlendKit 2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer begins on Februrary 23, 2015, with a 30-minute orientation session at 2:00 p.m. (US EDT; -4 UTC) and lasts five weeks.

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Impact of Hybrid Instruction on Student Achievementin Post-Secondary Institutions

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Impact of Hybrid Instruction on Student Achievementin Post-Secondary Institutions

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Effects of a blended learning approach onstudent outcomes in a graduate-level publichealth course

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Effects of a blended learning approach onstudent outcomes in a graduate-level publichealth course

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Class notes are epistemologically weird. On the one hand, they feel quite private, but, on the other, if your understanding of what went on in class is too idiosyncratic, then you're likely to do poorly on exams. (Also, to whatever extent a class is a shared intellectual enterprise, there should be at least *some* common understanding of what has gone on during our time together.) It can be hard to improve one's notetaking skills, because it's traditionally such an individual practice. Enter the wiki.

Working in groups, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining a wiki page with notes for each class.

Online notes SHOULD ABSOLUTELY NOT simply transcribe what's on the board. Instead, you are responsible for the following:

A 150 to 200 word summary of the day's activities / whatever the main point of the class seemed to be. How did the assigned readings for that day hold together?

Transcribe at least one passage that we talked about in class, and explain how it related to the main point.

Key terms that came up in class, plus a definition.

Three links to reputable sites that, in some way, clarify, extend, or correct something that was said in class.

This needs to be started by the next class. Over the course of the semester, you will be responsible for updating the page as concepts recur or develop over time.

Here's how to do it:

1. On your class's main page, find a link that includes the magic words, "class notes," like so:

Click the link.

2. On the resulting page, either someone will have made a page for your group's date already (it'll look like a link) or they won't (the date will just be text). If the latter, click Edit. (If you're not already logged in, you will need to be to do this part). Like so:

3. To make a page for your group's notes, highlight the date's name, and select the "Make a Link" button. Like so:

When you click the "Make a link" button, a dialog box will come up that asks you what to call the page. It will have already filled in the page name with the highlighted text--just insert the 3 digits of your course number before the text. Here's what it will look like:

Click save:

Congrats! You just made a link. Now, click the link you just made.

4. On the ensuing page, leave the "page name" field alone, but pick the "Class Notes" template from the big list. Then, click "Create Page."

5. If you've followed these steps, when you click "Create Page" the result will be this:

From this point on, you can treat this document as if it were in a word processor. Click "Edit," and replace the template's text with appropriate text from your class. As the CommonCraft people said, working with a wiki is basically all about the "edit, save, and link" buttons.

It's very easy to do this assignment badly. ("Ooh--we'll divvy up the different required parts, and just slap it all online.") But the point of a wiki really is to try to collaboratively draft, revise, and rethink material. Remember the umlaut! Change stuff. Use the "comments" feature. Don't be afraid of the site: There's nothing you can break.

I'll give you feedback each Saturday on the notes for the previous week; these grades will be *draft* grades until the end of the semester. (That is, you can make your notes better until Saturday, May 16.)

Here's the template I'll use for feedback: Class Notes Feedback.rtf

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Class notes are epistemologically weird. On the one hand, they feel quite private, but, on the other, if your understanding of what went on in class is too idiosyncratic, then you're likely to do poorly on exams. (Also, to whatever extent a class is a shared intellectual enterprise, there should be at least *some* common understanding of what has gone on during our time together.)

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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"I'm sorry to bother you, but..." was the opening line of every email I received in the first week of this semester. This line was usually followed by nothing that would actually bother me: a question about the week's materials, a link to an interesting resource, a discussion about a potential research topic, and the like. This was all despite my many attempts to ensure that students did not feel like they were imposing whenever they contacted me: a pre-semester introductory email, a video welcoming them to the course, my biography and teaching philosophy, virtual office hours, and multiple reminders about my contact information. Yet, with all of my entreaties to reach out, I was still dealing with the real issues of isolation, fear, and frustration that results in students leaving their online courses. To combat these feelings, professors-myself included-have to deliberately, consistently, and relentlessly work to build student-faculty and student-student relationships in online courses.

As educators, we know that building community in the online environment increases the likelihood of student success. Finding ways to concretize something as ephemeral as "a sense of belonging" can be difficult; however, here are five places where you can start:

1. Make yourself available. As the professor, you are the touchstone of your online course community, which means you need to model citizenship in your course. Upload a photo and provide instructions for students to do the same. Personalize your course wherever you are able by using original video announcements, overviews, and lectures. Establish the tone of the community through class correspondence, discussion board replies, and assessment feedback. Often, this also requires you to give students some of yourself (an anecdote about your weekend or a link to something you found interesting). When students are comfortable with you, they are more comfortable learning, participating, and sharing in the learning environment.

2. Create a communication plan. Communication is essential to any relationship, and before you ask students to put themselves out there, you have to show them that it's safe to do so. Before the start of a semester, create a calendar of when you will reach out to each student individually. After the first week, reintroduce yourself and let them know that you're available to them. Before and after midterms are great opportunities for confidence-boasting. And before finals is a good time to remind them that your door (or inbox!) is always open. These communications reinforce the importance of individual attention and personalized education.

3. Encourage interaction. Classroom interactions happen by proximity in the brick-and-mortar classroom, but in the online classroom, you have to be more deliberate about student-student and student-faculty exchanges happen. "In" the classroom, you can use synchronous sessions, communal discussion boards, group projects, student presentations, wikis, and peer review groups. "Out" of the classroom, you can help create study groups and establish crowd-sourced notes. Like all interactions, these should be meaningful, relevant, and theorized to avoid confusion or resentment that can sometimes result from group interactions. When done successfully, however, these interactions create not only a community of learners but can also become lasting friendships.

4. Build "outside class" spaces. Unlike the brick-and-mortar classroom, online classrooms can feel all encompassing, lacking the traditional space and time borders that demarcate the classroom. This often means that there is no "before" or "after" class when much of community-building often occurs. In an online course, you have to consciously build in these "outside" spaces that are free from content delivery and assessment. Make "water cooler" or "café" discussion boards where the class can talk about current events and common interests. Create a social media page for the class where ideas can be shared. Watch a virtual event together and discuss it afterwards. Deliberately creating social moments acknowledges this fundamental aspect of education.

5. Bring the outside in. Paradoxically, online courses can also feel compartmentalized and isolated from the wider campus community. In our courses, we need to remind students that they are a part of large campus culture. Post announcements about events happening on campus. Assign attendance at webinars and live-streaming events for course credit. Encourage them to take part in campus organizations that are especially friendly to distance and continuing education student. Explain how to access student support and resources. As possible the only touchstones to campus, faculty members have to be ambassadors for the college community.

Being deliberate, consistent, and relentless, we can build communities in our online courses that help students to connect with not only with the course materials, but with one another. And by working to create these relationships, we can turn "I'm sorry to bother you" emails into "I'm glad I have someone to reach out to."
References
Bawa, P. (2016). Retention in online courses: exploring issues and solutions- a literature review. SAGE Open, 1-11. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244015621777

Donovan, J. (2015) The importance of building online learning communities. Colorado State University. http://blog.online.colostate.edu/blog/online-education/the-importance-of-building-online-learning-communities/

Erickson, A. & C. Neset. (2014) Building community and creating relevance in the online classroom. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/building-community-creating-relevance-online-classroom/

O'Malley, S. (2017) Professors share ideas for building community in online courses. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/07/26/ideas-building-online-community

Stone, K. (2016) Building community in online courses. American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. http://www.aaace.org/news/272788/Building-Community-in-Online-Courses.htm

Talbert, R. (2015) How student video presentations can build community in an online course. Wired Campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/how-student-video-presentations-can-build-community-in-an-online-course/57435

Williams, G. (2011) Use GoogleDocs for crowd-sourced notes. ProfHacker. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/use-googledocs-for-crowd-sourced-notes/31644
References Consulted
Angelino, L.M., Williams, F.K., & Natvig, D. (2007). Strategies to engage online students and reduce attrition rates. The Journal of Educators Online, 4(2).

Covelli, B. J. (2017) Online discussion boards: The practice of building community for adult learners. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education. 65:2. 139-145.

Infande, A. (2013) A dozen strategies for improving online student retention. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/a-dozen-strategies-for-improving-online-student-retention/

Park, J., & Choi, H. (2009). Factors influencing adult learners' decision to drop out or persist in online learning. Educational Technology & Society, 12(4), 207-217.

Reed, A. (2015). Online student retention requires a collaborative approach. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/online-student-retention-requires-collaborative-approach/

Dr. Melissa Wehler serves as the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Central Penn College. She has published on topics of teaching, pedagogy, and student success. Melissa co-manages the open educational resource, The Online Lecture Toolkit, developed to support the needs of educators who want to create effective online video content. She enjoys teaching classes about writing, literature, culture, and film and has won two teaching awards for her student-centered approach.

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Five Ways to Build Community in Online Classrooms - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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"I'm sorry to bother you, but..." was the opening line of every email I received in the first week of this semester. This line was usually followed by nothing that would actually bother me: a question about the week's materials, a link to an interesting resource, a discussion about a potential research topic, and the like.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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"Are students getting it? How do I know?" Instructors answer these questions through a variety of assessments, from small, informal methods such as asking students if they have questions, to formal, graded methods such as multiple-choice exams and research papers. These assessments provide cognitive feedback, whether in the form of a score, a correction, lack of an answer, or an abundance of questions. But is that the whole picture? While these assessments can help us gauge how well students are "getting it," it often fails to explain why or why not.

The conditions around learning, such as students' emotional experience, are often invisible to instructors-and sometimes even to students themselves. This type of feedback can be understood as affective feedback. Hardiman (2002) calls this "testing the emotional temperature" of the classroom and it involves getting a sense of the underlying conditions influencing students' ability to learn effectively. Cognitive feedback tells us Student A scored a C- because she skipped nearly half of the quiz questions for a psychology course; affective feedback might tell us she struggled to process questions on trauma due to a painful connection to the subject matter. Cognitive feedback tells us Student B has missed most Friday class sessions; affective feedback might tell us he skipped these classes due to anxiety about group work. Affective feedback has the power to help instructors understand why students are going off track and help them course-correct.

You can "take the class temperature" by evaluating how often you receive both cognitive and affective feedback. We evaluate our feedback collection methods in three ways: frequency, form, and function.

Frequency: How often do you solicit feedback?

Form: In what way do you solicit feedback?

Function: Is feedback optional or mandatory? If mandatory, are the stakes high or low?

For example, in a freshman composition course, we found that cognitive feedback was collected every week through quizzes, problem-based learning activities, discussion forums, and projects leading up to a research paper. The stakes for most of these was low, many of which directly built toward two high-stakes assignments. Looking at affective feedback in the same course, we found that there was one optional, weekly opportunity to collect feedback; two mandatory activities; and two other optional opportunities. Here are a few examples of the affective feedback activities we identified:

Weekly Social Forum - Every week, the instructor provided an online forum prompt aimed at building a community of learners in different ways: sharing study behaviors and tips, discussing course concepts' real-world application, and reflecting on learning experiences in previous classes, among others. This forum often shed light on the experience of learning within the class and the life circumstances surrounding the class experience. Students received extra credit for participating in the forum.

Beginning of the Semester Survey - During weeks 1 or 2, students completed a survey about their experience with course concepts and format (e.g. have they taken an online course before, used a discussion forum, engaged in web-conferencing, worked in teams?). At the end, students answered whether they had concerns about their ability to succeed in the course. The instructor then followed up with any students who indicated they had concerns.

Progress Report Journal - Before the official midterm point, students were asked to report their grade and attendance, reflect on their course performance, provide course feedback, or ask questions. The details of this reflection are further discussed in one of the author's previous Faculty Focus articles, "Assignment Helps Students Assess Their Progress." This assignment is not graded but students must complete it before moving onto other graded work.

Help! Line - At points in a larger project where students often get stuck-what has been referred to as a procedural bottleneck (Hinds, 1999)- a Help! Line can help bring those often-invisible issues to light before students fall too far behind. It is a simple text journal placed in the learning management system (LMS) where students are invited to ask questions or simply say "I'm stuck. I don't even know what to ask!" A response to this assignment automatically triggers an email alert to the instructor. This can be done in print form as well by asking students to briefly report their status on a project on a notecard and collecting these notecards at the end of class. This activity is optional.

Reflection activities are a common affective feedback opportunity, as students are asked to think about their experience learning in the class and how learning behaviors and life circumstances have likely influenced their course experience. We share these ideas to illustrate that affective feedback can be collected in a variety of ways, some as brief as a two-question survey or rating level of comfort with material at the end of a class (e.g. 1 = "Yes, I totally get it." to 5 = "I'm totally lost."). Especially when working with large classes, consider how technology can help. For example, a University of Michigan professor developed a tool that allows students to send "confusion alerts" during a live class session, and most learning management systems have ways to track how students are interacting with online content, such as what links they have opened or how often they have logged into the course page.

No matter what tech tools are at your disposal, there are always opportunities to take the emotional temperature of your classroom. Doing so has the potential to build learner confidence, improve faculty-to-student relationships, and ultimately help students succeed.

References
Hardiman, M. (2012). The brain-targeted teaching model for 21st century schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Hinds, P.J. (1999). The curse of expertise; The effects of expertise and debasing methods on predictions of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 205-221. doi: 10.1037/1076-898X.5.2.215

McKenzie, L. (2018, Feb 5). The 'Huh?' button: A lecture-capture platform with a 'confusion alert' button is changing the way some instructors teach. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/05/confusion-button-alerts-professors-struggling-students

Moore, C. (2017, Feb 6). Assignment Helps Students Assess Their Progress. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/assignment-helps-students-assess-progress/
Christina Moore @fontanamoore is the virtual faculty developer in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. She has also taught composition courses at OU. Her work focuses on student writing in digital media, educational technology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dan Arnold is the manager of support services for e-learning & instructional support at Oakland University. He has also taught graduate-level courses in organizational and higher education leadership. His work focuses on faculty development in online teaching, instructional design, and student performance.

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Taking the Class Temperature: Cognitive and Affective Feedback

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"Are students getting it? How do I know?" Instructors answer these questions through a variety of assessments, from small, informal methods such as asking students if they have questions, to formal, graded methods such as multiple-choice exams and research papers.

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Assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice

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Assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice

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The effects of video on cognitive load andsocial presence in multimedia-learning

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The effects of video on cognitive load andsocial presence in multimedia-learning

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The effect of using a talking head in academic videos

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The effect of using a talking head in academic videos

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The effect of using a talking head in academic videos 

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The effect of using a talking head in academic videos 

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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For most of us, there's a gap between how we aspire to teach and how we actually teach. To help us better understand what it means to be learner-centered, I've generated a set of questions, which can be used for personal reflection or to prompt discussion among colleagues.

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Special issue of New Directions in Teaching & Learning

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Hybrid Teaching and Learning: New Directions for Teaching and Learning: Vol 2017, No 149

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Fundamentals of Hybrid teaching and learning

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Fundamentals of Hybrid teaching and learning

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Multi-tasking, distractions, and boundary management by grad student in an online environment

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Multi-tasking, distractions, and boundary management by grad student in an online environment

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Framework for the growth of teaching expertise

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Framework for the growth of teaching expertise

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Active learning with liberating structures

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Active learning with liberating structures

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course: active learning with liberating structures

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Active Learning with Liberating Structures

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"Liberating Structures is a toolkit with 33 facilitation strategies that can be customized and used in your classrooms, meetings, strategic planning sessions, workshops, presentations and more. These strategies are open, inclusive and designed to help unleash, engage and harvest the best ideas from everyone." -BCcampus

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Best practices for use of blended learning

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Best practices for use of blended learning

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Rubrics are an invaluable addition to any assignment because they promote student success while also benefiting instructors. A well-designed rubric will not only set a clear blueprint for an assignment, but by defining and clarifying expectations and demonstrating the importance of individual components, it encourages authentic self-assessment by students.

Rubrics are also an important tool in teaching students about their learning. Because rubrics provide specific and consistent feedback on work submitted, use of rubrics can be used as a tool for providing feedback during self-assessment and peer review. Both of these practices will help to improve students' metacognition and skill at assessing their own work and the work of others.

Having predetermined the expectations will allow for faster grading of assignments and provides greater consistency over time and amongst graders. Rubrics also allow instructors to easily identify weak points and re-teaching opportunities, while offering powerful feedback.

Continue exploring this page, or request assistance from the Center for Instructional Technology and Training.

Best Practices

Carefully consider the language used. Always use objective indicators for performance levels that are constructive from the bottom up (For example, excellent, good, acceptable, and needs improvement make use of constructive and positive language). When establishing and differentiating performance level criteria, avoid using negative language that focuses on failure and does not coach for improvement.

Limit the number of components you wish to provide feedback on. Pick only the most important components of the assignment and develop performance levels for these criteria that will show students what they have accomplished in their work, rather than what they have failed to do. Avoid creating rubrics that are simply checklists of items that should be included.

Invest the time necessary to describe the processes and skills that would be observed in a successful submission. Distinguish between levels of mastery you expect to see for each quality rating, and to ensure maximum student effort, weight the criteria in a manner that matches the effort required.

Provide rubrics ahead of time for students to self-evaluate. Students will submit higher quality work if they are provided with a rubric along with assignment instructions. It can also be helpful to provide exemplar submissions when appropriate.

References and Additional Resources

Further Exploration

Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center: Grading and Performance Rubrics

Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Texas: Rubrics

University of Hawaii Manoa: Creating and Using Rubrics

Durfee, A.W. (2010). How rubrics help students learn. The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28.

Myers, S., (2017). Research Starters: Education (Online Edition)

Reddy, Y.M., & Andrade, H. (2010). Assessment & Evaluations in Higher Education. A Review of Rubric Use in Higher Education.

Roblyer, M. D., & Wiencke, W. R. (2003). American Journal of Distance Education. Design and use of a rubric to assess and encourage interactive qualities in distance courses.

Stevens, D. D., & Levi, A. (2005). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning. Sterling, Va: Stylus Pub.

Additional Instructional Development

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Rubrics are an invaluable addition to any assignment because they promote student success while also benefiting instructors. A well-designed rubric will not only set a clear blueprint for an assignment, but by defining and clarifying expectations and demonstrating the importance of individual components, it encourages authentic self-assessment by students.

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Sample rubric for video projects from Animoto

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Sample rubric for video projects from Animoto

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Doesn't dive into the instructional aspect, but may be good to assess some early video content on low-stakes topics.

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ALL THE RUBRICS!

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Assessment of student mastery of content takes many forms. This pages includes support materials for assessments that work with the Common Core State Standards and rubrics for many different assessment products. It also contains some information on the creation of rubrics and assessment in general.
If you find a link that is not working, please let me know the title and I will fix it. Thank you!

Common Core State Standards rubrics

1. K-5 rubrics for writing standards: K 1 2 3 4 5 (more)

2. Text-based writing rubrics K-12

3. Checklist for critical areas in K-2 math

4. Common Core checklists K-6

5. EQuIP rubric for lessons & units: Math

6. EQuIP rubric for lessons & units: ELA

7. EQuIP rubric for lessons & units: ELA (K-2)

8. Grammar & mechanics self-assessment rubric​

9. Multimedia rubric for projects to inform

10. PARCC analytic and narrative writing (3) (4) (5)

11. PARCC analytic and narrative writing (6) (7) (8)

12. PARCC analytic and narrative writing (9) (10) (11)

13. PARCC PLDs: ELA all grades

14. PARCC PLDs: Math all grades

15. Rubrics for evaluating OER resources 4 | 5

16. Writing: Content rubric, one passage (Gr.3)

17. Writing: Content rubric, two passages (Gr.3)

18. Writing: Content rubric, one passage (Gr.4-8)

19. Writing: Content rubric, two passages (Gr.4-8)

20. Writing: Informative rubric (Grades 3 | 4 | 5)

21. Writing: Narrative rubric (Grades 3 | 4 | 5)

22. Writing: Opinion rubric (Grades 3 | 4 | 5)

23. Writing: Style rubric (Gr. 3-8)

24. Writing: High school style rubric 1 & 2

Presentation rubrics from BIE: CCSS

Student Web page rubrics

1. Group project Web page rubric

2. Personal Web site rubric

3. Rubric for evaluating WebQuests

4. Rubric for classroom Web pages

5. Rubric for student Web pages

6. Student designed Web page rubric

7. Student Web page rubric

Student research self-assessment rubrics & information

1. Research project self-assessment

2. Research project: Student self-assessment

3. Student self-assessment article

4. Self-assessment rubric for research process/project

5. Evaluating the research process article

6. Research paper reflection questionnaire

7. How to write a reflection paper

S ubject-Specific and General Rubrics

Large rubric collections and information

1. Authentic assessment and rubrics

2. Benchmark assessment rubrics (K-12)

3. Rubric to assess a rubric   1 | 2 | 3

4. Rubric gallery

5. Rubric tutorial

6. Rubrics from Read, Write, and Think

7. Teacher-created rubrics for assessment

8. Understanding rubrics

Collaboration rubrics

1. Collaboration rubric

2. Collaboration rubric: Grades 6-12

3. Discussion rubric for an online class

4. K-2 teamwork rubric

5. Online discussion board rubric

6. Primary teamwork self-evaluation rubric: K-2

7. Teamwork self-evaluation rubric: Grades 3-6

General and subject-specific rubrics

1. Artificial intelligence design rubric

2. Arts assessments

3. Autobiographical writing rubric

4. Blended learning course rubric

5. Cause and effect rubric

6. Compare and contract essay rubric

7. Comparison rubric

8. Cooperative learning: Group participation

9. Creative dance rubric (elementary)

10. Creativity rubric

11. Critical thinking rubric K-2

12. Critical thinking rubric 3-5

13. Critical thinking rubric 6-12

14. Data analysis rubric

15. Data and graph rubric

16. Description rubric

17. Diorama rubric

18. Distance learning instruction rubric

19. Electronic portfolio rubric ​

20. ​Electronic scrapbook rubric

21. ePortfolio rubric

22. Evidence-based writing rubric

23. Graphic organizer rubric (Inspiration)

24. Historical fiction story rubric​

25. How-to essay rubric

26. Independent learning skills rubric

27. Infographic design rubric

28. Infographic rubric

29. Information skills rating scale

30. Information summary rubric

31. Instrumental performance rubric

32. Interview paper rubric

33. Kindergarten writing rubric

34. Library media and information literacy rubrics (K)

35. Library media and information literacy rubrics (1)

36. Library media and information literacy rubrics (2)

37. Library media and information literacy rubrics (3)

38. Library media and information literacy rubrics (4)

39. Library media and information literacy rubrics (5)

40. Library media and information literacy rubrics (6)

41. Library media and information literacy rubrics (7)

42. Library media and information literacy rubrics (8)

43. Library media and information literacy rubrics (9-10)

44. Library media and information literacy rubrics (11-12)

45. Literature Search Rubric

46. ​Maker project rubric

47. Math jigsaw rubric

48. Open Educational Resources (OER) rubrics

49. Oral presentation assessment rubric

50. Oral presentation rubric

51. Performance assessment links in science

52. Persuasive essay rubric

53. Physics lab rubric

54. Poster rubric

55. Primary source analysis rubric

56. Professional development rubric

57. Project-based learning checklists

58. Research paper grading rubric

59. Research project rubric: Elementary

60. Research project rubric: Middle

61. Research project rubric: Secondary

62. ​Reflection assessment rubric

63. Reflection paper rubric

64. Reflective writing rubric

65. Response to literature rubric

66. Rigor rubric

67. Science lab rubric

68. Scientific experiment rubric

69. Secondary assessment tools

70. Student technology competencies rubric

71. Student observation rubric

72. Student oral presentations

73. 3D printing challenge rubric

74. 3D printing rubric from Blueprint

75. 3D printing rubric from Canvas

76. 3d printing rubric from iRubric

77. 3d printing rubric 3 from iRubric

78. Timeline assessment rubric.

79. Timeline rubric from Read, Write, Think

80. Timeline rubric for illustrated timeline

81. Visual literacy rubric: Effective presentations

82. Virtual simulations and student learning rubric

83. Web-based learning environments rubric

84. ​WebQuest grading rubric

85. WebQuest rubric

86. ​WebQuest assessment rubric for teachers

87. Writing rubrics (6+1 Trait: K-12)

Copyright: Kathy Schrock. All rights reserved.
Republishing of these lists of links without express and written permission from this site's author is not allowed.
Links to this page  may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kathy Schrock and Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything with appropriate and specific direction (via the URL) to the original compilation of information on this page.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the creator.

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List of assessment and rubric information

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Microstructural elements of 1-2-4-All in motion

Differences between Conventional Microstructures and Liberating Structures

Agreement Certainty Matrix - We can just talk about how we might expand a conversation that started with the spectrogram into the A/C matrix.

Agreement Certainty Matrix - We can just talk about how we might expand a conversation that started with the spectrogram into the A/C matrix.

Just mention

Note:
"Where is your 15%?" Where do you have discretion and freedom to act?"
Mention because so many teachers feel they don't have this power

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Liberating Structures for Online Learning - OZ E-Live Series

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Microstructural elements of 1-2-4-All in motion Differences between Conventional Microstructures and Liberating Structures Agreement Certainty Matrix - We can just talk about how we might expand a conversation that started with the spectrogram into the A/C matrix. Agreement Certainty Matrix - We can just talk about how we might expand a conversation that started with the spectrogram into the A/C matrix.

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Online graduate students' perceptions of best learning experiences

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Online graduate students' perceptions of best learning experiences

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Peer observation in online learning environments

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Peer observation in online learning environments

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Best Practices for Creating Social Presence and Caring Behaviors Online

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Best Practices for Creating Social Presence and Caring Behaviors Online

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Design & implementation of synchronous blended learning environments

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Design & implementation of synchronous blended learning environments

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meta analysis

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No references, but some simple tips for sync sessions

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Digital Learning | Educational Innovation Across Northwestern

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Faculty innovation utilizing technology to enhance pedagogy and better engage with students, deepening the digital learning experience across Northwestern.

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Faculty Focus report on Synchronous & Asynchronous learning tools

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Faculty Focus report on Synchronous & Asynchronous learning tools

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Strategies for creating a community of inquiry through online asynchronous discussions

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Strategies for creating a community of inquiry through online asynchronous discussions

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Liberating Structures - Adult Learning Strategies

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Liberating Structures - Adult Learning Strategies

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http://www.liberatingstructures.com/