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Here's our chat transcript with "Silver Linings" included.

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Transcript_Session Threshold Concepts in Remote and Hybrid Course Design[1][2]

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In her latest book Linda Nilson puts forward an innovative but practical and tested approach to grading that can demonstrably raise academic standards, motivate students, tie their achievement of learning outcomes to their course grades, save faculty time and stress, and provide the reliable gauge of student learning that the public and employers are looking for.

She argues that the grading system most commonly in use now is unwieldy, imprecise and unnecessarily complex, involving too many rating levels for too many individual assignments and tests, and based on a hairsplitting point structure that obscures the underlying criteria and encourages students to challenge their grades.

This new specifications grading paradigm restructures assessments to streamline the grading process and greatly reduce grading time, empower students to choose the level of attainment they want to achieve, reduce antagonism between the evaluator and the evaluated, and increase student receptivity to meaningful feedback, thus facilitating the learning process - all while upholding rigor. In addition, specs grading increases students' motivation to do well by making expectations clear, lowering their stress and giving them agency in determining their course goals.

Among the unique characteristics of the schema, all of which simplify faculty decision making, are the elimination of partial credit, the reliance on a one-level grading rubric and the "bundling" of assignments and tests around learning outcomes. Successfully completing more challenging bundles (or modules) earns a student a higher course grade. Specs grading works equally well in small and large class settings and encourages "authentic assessment." Used consistently over time, it can restore credibility to grades by demonstrating and making transparent to all stakeholders the learning outcomes that students achieve.

This book features many examples of courses that faculty have adapted to spec grading and lays out the surprisingly simple transition process. It is intended for all members of higher education who teach, whatever the discipline and regardless of rank, as well as those who oversee, train, and advise those who teach.

Specification grading promotes the following values and outcomes. It:

1. Upholds High Academic Standards
2. Reflects Student Attainment of Skills and Knowledge
3. Motivates Students to Learn and to Excel
4. Fosters Higher-Order Cognitive Development and Creativity
5. Discourages Cheating
6. Reduces Student Stress
7. Makes Students Feel Responsible for Their Grades
8. Minimizes Conflict Between Faculty and Students
9. Saves Faculty Time and Is Simple to Administer
10. Makes Expectations Clear and Simplifies Feedback for Improvement
11. Assesses Authentically
12. Achieves High Inter-Rater Agreement

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grading and marking (students);united states.

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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grading and marking (students) - united states

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grading and marking (students);united states.

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time

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Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time [Nilson, Linda B., Stanny, Claudia J.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time

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I re-thought how I incorporated writing into my first-year seminar. We have 10 week terms. I broke the term into 3 units. In each unit, we read and discussed material for two-three weeks (with formative writing assignments along the way) and then spent an entire week writing and re-writing a formal paper. By pausing new material to focus on writing, I saw *much* better writing outcomes this term. (Anticipating Question #3, I'll probably take this with me into the post-pandemic times.)

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My fall was a bit strange -- the first week, my first-term, first-year students were all in quarantine, so we had to get to know one another remotely. I used Flipgrid to have students introduce themselves (they had several questions to answer in their videos), and then they had to respond to one another's videos as well. It made the transition to in-person classes relatively smooth. I turned several think-pair-share activities to weekly Reading Partner meetings in which student pairs could schedule for themselves. They met in the same pair for several weeks and then switched. That helped them build and cement their new friendships.

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Integrated Course Design (aka IDEA Paper #42)

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Integrated Course Design (aka IDEA Paper #42)

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This distillation of Creating Significant Learning Experiences + short readings were foundational to our flexible redesign process.

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Recent Conversation on Pandemic Pedagogy/Lesson Learned

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Recent Conversation on Pandemic Pedagogy/Lesson Learned

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The development of the internet and video-streaming services has prompted many educators to reimagine instruction. Salman Khan began Khan Academy by teaching his cousin and then making videos, which people have watched hundreds of millions of times. At the same time, researchers have recognized that "teaching by telling" is ineffective, and new models of instruction have emerged that promote more active engagement among students.

The flipped class/course model is one prominent example that colleges are widely implementing. This approach requires an instructor to interact with students but to behave more as a coach to help with problem solving or another concrete skill development, rather than being a sage on the stage during class time.

A different approach that takes advantage of internet/video resources is massive open online courses, in which most of the course content is asynchronous and anyone in the world can enroll for free and work through the materials at their own place. Popularized more than a decade ago, many observers touted MOOCs as harbingers of the end of institutions of higher education. MOOCs would require a few "star" instructors worldwide, and each institution would no longer need classrooms or "duplicate" professors. But so far, we have not seen those dire predictions for higher education come to pass. Only a small percentage of the people enrolled in MOOCs actually complete their courses, and they are generally students who already possess a college degree and are highly self-motivated.

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic was highly disruptive to higher education, forcing institutions, instructors and administrators to make rapid choices about how to continue to educate students while remaining physically separated. This unusual situation enabled a natural experiment to take place in which many faculty members implemented a flipped course structure but varied other factors, such as how they evaluated students' work.

Toward the end of fall 2020, we conducted individual hourlong interviews with 37 students who were science majors at the University of Pittsburgh about their experiences with remote instruction. We asked them to elaborate upon what they felt worked or did not work in their remote science classes. Our interviews suggest that policies related to grading of the out-of-class and in-class work was the most important determinant of whether many students kept up each week with both the out-of-class and in-class components of the flipped course as expected and whether they found their flipped classes effective. The findings are so clear and striking that the academic community should be aware of them as we prepare to continue instruction in the spring 2021 term.

We found overwhelmingly that when students had no grade incentive for doing out-of-class or in-class activities in a flipped course, and if solutions were posted on the course website after each class, many students simply stopped doing the weekly activities early on in the term. They only watched the relevant videos and browsed through all assessments right before each exam. They admitted that lack of grade incentive led them to deprioritize the weekly course activities.

A negative feedback loop occurred: students quickly realized that going to the class was "useless" if they had not done the out-of-class work involving watching videos and engaging with the corresponding assessments because the instructor immediately put them in a Zoom breakout room and expected them to discuss their answers with their peers in small groups. A handful of students who had done the out-of-class work dominated the discussion while the unprepared majority was disengaged. Since prior engagement with video lectures was expected, the general discussions after each peer discussion in the Zoom breakout rooms were not productive for them, either.

In essence, flipped courses without a grade incentive to read the materials devolved into a course akin to asynchronous MOOCs but with a few high-stakes exams for most students. Many students did not keep up with the course and crammed a few days before each exam, something that has been shown to be detrimental for long-term retention. By contrast, most students found flipped courses in a remote format that were otherwise similar yet had a grade incentive were effective, and they kept up with those courses.

Interviewed students also noted that some instructors had made their course completely asynchronous with video lectures and had turned their allocated class time into office hours. All that counted toward a grade in their course were a few exams. Many students confessed that they did not go to the office hours because they did not keep up with the video lectures and crammed the material right before the exams. In general, these students were very dissatisfied with their learning in the asynchronous course. The dissatisfaction did not stem from lack of effort on the part of the instructors, who in good faith spent a tremendous amount of time and effort to make customized flipped videos for their course. Rather, it resulted from the structure of the course, which was not conducive to effective instruction.

Thus, the unplanned remote instruction this past term, in which instructors had different grading policies for flipped courses but otherwise had similar course structure, confirms that many students have difficulty with self-regulation and keeping up with course materials without a grade incentive each week. This lack of incentives to encourage students to effectively manage their time and be self-disciplined throughout is a major reason why the current MOOC framework has not succeeded in replacing traditional instruction.

What are the lessons going forward for remote instruction next term based upon these findings?

We urge faculty members to keep a synchronous component in their courses as in the flipped courses and incentivize students with many low-stakes grade incentives interspersed throughout the course. Such incentives are vital for ensuring that instructors' efforts in remote instruction bear fruit and students learn and benefit from engaging with course materials throughout the term. At the same time, we also encourage instructors to be flexible and accommodate a handful of students who cannot keep up with the course material each week due to the adversity caused by the pandemic. They should find ways to assess those students' performance using flexible approaches that differ from those they use for the rest of the class.

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Lessons learned during the pandemic about how to teach flipped classes most effectively (opinion)

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The development of the internet and video-streaming services has prompted many educators to reimagine instruction. Salman Khan began Khan Academy by teaching his cousin and then making videos, which people have watched hundreds of millions of times.