Teaching & Learning Blog - Magna Publications

Too Many Papers: Two Solutions

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I mostly teach basic technical writing, and I face the same problem that confronts many of us who teach writing. It’s hard enough getting students to do the assignments, and almost impossible to get them to do a first draft. But writing takes practice, and if you require students to practice, that leads to an inevitable mountain of papers to grade. At my college, the trend is toward bigger classes and fewer course hours in English. This makes giving students the chance to practice all the more important, and providing the necessary feedback all the more challenging. I’d like to share a couple of solutions I’ve devised that help me deal with both these problems.

I try to have students do at least one draft before they hand in a graded assignment. Some of my students refuse. They don’t do anything if it does not generate a grade. Arguing that submitting a draft and getting feedback will likely

Reciprocal Feedback in the Online Classroom

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Understanding learners’ experiences in the online classroom can help you improve your courses for current and future students and help build a strong learning community. Jill Schiefelbein, owner and guru of Impromptu Guru, a company focused on helping individuals and groups improve communication in both face-to-face and online environments, recommends using a reciprocal feedback process to elicit this valuable information from students.

Giving feedback about the learning experience might be new to some students. In order to get students on board with this process, Schiefelbein includes two videos in her courses: one that introduces the instructor and one that explains course expectations. “I make these two separate videos because they are for two very different purposes. I don’t want to put them together. I want them to be...

Teaching Strategies That Help Students Learn

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

What skills do you wish your students had prior to taking your course? Reading comprehension, time management, listening, note-taking, critical thinking, test-taking? Let's face it, most students could benefit from taking a course in learning how to learn. But who wants to take a study skills class?

My solution: sneak study skills into your class along with the content.

Course structure:

Select a textbook that has learning aids (study guides, online materials, and/or audiotapes) and encourage your students to use them. Point out features in the book that students can use to help them study and review...

How Does Temperament Affect Online Learner Success and Retention?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Do certain personality traits increase students’ chances of success in the online learning environment? It’s an intriguing question that has not received much attention, an oversight that Ben Meredith, director of the Center for Distance Education at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, has sought to remedy.

“We hear all the time that online education is not for everybody. If it’s not for everybody, who is it really for?” asks Meredith. The answer to this question can help higher education institutions improve course design and, in turn, improve online learner success and retention.

The study

In 2009 Meredith surveyed 149 students at Olympic College, a two-year institution in Washington State, to explore the following research questions using...

Cell Phones in Class: A Student Survey

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Cell phones in the classroom—it’s a topic that generates much consternation among faculty. Are policies that prohibit their use enforceable? Are students texting in class? If so, how many? If a student is texting, does that distract other students? Are students using their phones to cheat? Are there any ways cell phones can be used to promote learning? The questions are many and the answers are still a long way from definitive.

Most faculty have opinions about how much cell phone use is occurring in their classrooms, but those individual answers need a larger context and independent verification. A recent survey of 269 college students representing 21 majors from 36 different courses, and equally distributed between first-year students, sophomores, juniors, and seniors standing, offers this kind of benchmarking data. This student cohort answered 26 questions that inquired as to their use of cell phones as...

Frequent, Low-Stakes Grading: Assessment for Communication, Confidence

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

After going out for tacos, our students can review the restaurant on a website. They watch audiences reach a verdict on talent each season on American Idol. When they play video games—and they play them a lot—their screens are filled with status and reward metrics. And after (and sometimes while) taking our classes, they can go online to www.ratemyprofessors.com.

It may surprise us to think of it like this, but today’s students grew up in a culture of routine assessment and feedback. Yet when they click (or walk) into our courses, the experience is often quite different: there are few high-stakes grades, big exams, or one-shot term papers. Despite critiques of high-stakes testing – Wideen et al. (1997) said such “examinations discouraged teachers from using strategies which promoted enquiry and active student learning […] this impoverishment affected the language of classroom discourse”—teachers often still see...

Motivation: Intrinsic, Extrinsic, or More

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Motivation—there are two kinds: intrinsic, which involves doing something because we want to do it, and extrinsic, which is doing something because we have to do it. A negative relationship exists between the two. Extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation. Students won’t be attending class because they want to if attending class is required. As a result of this negative relationship, students don’t have much intrinsic motivation because it’s been beaten out of them by most extrinsic educational experiences. And that’s a nutshell version of how most teachers understand motivation.

Is that all there is to it? Steven Reiss doesn’t think so, and he has done lots of research that supports his view. But first he goes after the intrinsic-extrinsic dualism, which he says fails on three counts...

Ideas for Active Online Learning

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, strives to instill online courses with active learning, “providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject” (as defined by Meyers and Jones). To this she adds: “interact[ing] with realia, manipulatives, simulations, etc.”

Educators need to take into account the characteristics of the online classroom when trying to incorporate active learning into online courses, Beezley says. For example, the nonlinear nature of the online classroom and the lack of face-to-face interaction with its visual cues make it difficult to ensure that all learners are experiencing the course in the same manner.

Capstone Courses: Many Options

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Capstone courses are now a requirement in many departments, programs, and college curricula. They vary across different dimensions, indicating that although their value is universally recognized, they share few common features. For starters, they are offered at various levels; at the department level for students in a particular major, at the college level, say, for students in engineering, and at the university level as a general education integrative experience.

A survey of 24 Midwestern institutions offering capstone courses for accounting majors also found wide variation in how the courses were structured. Some were configured as individual courses; others as internships, volunteer or outreach experiences; still others as research projects; and some as a combination of these options. Definitions for capstone courses also vary...

Using Student Facilitators in the Online Classroom

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

If you’re trying to get your online learners more engaged in online discussions, consider turning over the facilitation responsibilities to your students. This approach, says Walter Woolbaugh, a professor in the master of science in teacher education at Montana State University–Bozeman, empowers students, increases participation, and improves learning.

Why have students facilitate?

There are several compelling reasons to have students facilitate. First, it engages students—both the individual who facilitates and the other students. Those who facilitate are typically more engaged than they might be ordinarily because they bear the responsibility of starting the discussion, keeping it on track, and putting it in the context of the course. “It’s a really nice engagement technique. When we release power to weekly facilitators, we’re bringing them into the class. We’re engaging them. We’re making them the instructor. We’re giving them the chance to offer...

A New Way to Assess Student Learning

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Authentic Assignments: What Are They?

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“I’ve heard several faculty mention the need for authentic assignments ... what are they?” I received that question recently in an email, and it is true that the combination of the two words has come to mean something more than what might be assumed by their association.

One of the best answers to the what-are-they question appears in a classic text—Understanding by Design. This is the text that lays out the principles of backward design—meaning you start with where you want to end and design assignments, activities, courses, and curricula working back from this final destination. Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe propose that a learning task (be it an assignment or activity) is authentic when it has the following six characteristics…

Recommendations for Blended Learning Course Design

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Blended learning course design entails more than simply converting content for online delivery or finding ways to supplement an existing face-to-face course. Ideally, designing a blended course would begin with identifying learning outcomes and topics, creating assignments and activities, determining how interaction will occur, and selecting the technologies to best achieve those learning outcomes. However, a variety of constraints often affect the way blended courses are developed, which can compromise their quality. In an interview with Online Classroom, Veronica Diaz, associate director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, talked about how to avoid common mistakes in blended course design.

Mistake 1: adopting an add-on model - Diaz recommends designing a blended course from scratch; however, a lack of time and resources often means that instructors will redesign existing courses. "Nine times out of 10 there are going to be pretty significant constraints, so you're likely to do this on the fly, where you will put some things online as a supplement rather than truly having an online component that is integrated with your face-to-face component. That's when the problems really start. You end up having...

Dead Ideas in Teaching

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

In her 2010 presidential address to the Midwest Sociological Society (a published version of the speech is referenced below), Diane Pike proposed three ideas about teaching that she says are dead. She borrows the concept of “dead ideas” from a book by Matt Miller, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash New Prosperity (2009). Pike explains, “Ideas are dead because they are no longer correct, if they ever were. They are tyranny because we cling to them despite the evidence. Thus, we fail to act as we should.” (p. 2) Here are highlights from the three dead ideas Pike discusses in her speech.

Students are not as prepared as they used to be. According to Pike, “The problem is not so much the idea is untrue as it is that the idea is tyranny.” (p. 3) She says she first heard the claim made when she was a student and has regularly heard it since. “If this perception of student decline in college readiness has…

Brain-Based Online Learning Design

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Abreena Tompkins, instruction specialist at Surry Community College, has developed a brain-based online course design model based on a meta-analysis of more than 300 articles. In this study, she distilled the following elements of brain-based course design:

Low-risk, nonthreatening learning environment
Challenging, real-life, authentic assessments
Rhythms, patterns, and cycles
Appropriate chunking or grouping
Learning as orchestration rather than lecture or facilitation
Appropriate level of novelty
Appropriately timed breaks and learning periods
Purposeful assessments
Learning that addresses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners
Active processing with mental models
The use of universal examples, analogies, and parallel processing

Tompkins offers the following succinct definition of brain-based...

An Assignment that Prevents Plagiarism

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A qualitative study of plagiarism (which was highlighted in the February 2010 issue of the newsletter) reported that although students know that plagiarism is wrong, most are quite confused about what actually constitutes plagiarism. The availability of so many online resources has exacerbated the problem. Cut-and-paste features expedite using the material of others.

Studies are also showing that students do not think the principles of ownership apply to online resources the same way they do to published material. Finally, many faculty are still struggling to master the rules of referencing that apply to Web-based resources, which does not excuse but certainly explains why students find referencing these materials so confusing

Practical Advice for Going from Face to Face to Online

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Developing an online course based on an existing face-to-face course requires more than learning how to use the technology and loading the material into the learning management system because, as Catherine Nameth, education outreach coordinator at the University of California-Los Angeles, says, “not everything will transfer directly from the face-to-face environment to the online environment.” This transition requires the instructor to rethink and reconfigure the material and anticipate students’ needs.

Roadmap to the course

Nameth recommends beginning the course design process with the syllabus—the “roadmap” both for the instructor when designing the course and for students when they take the course. “There is a lot that we do as instructors face to face that perhaps we don’t realize we do and don’t realize its importance. In an online course, particularly in an asynchronous online course, there’s not that real-time feedback or guidance. Because of this, I came to regard my syllabus as a roadmap that really defines the course both for myself and my students,” Nameth says. “As students read through it, particularly before...

Not Just for Introductory Courses

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Most professors want students to know how to research and write in their fields. In fact, many degree programs now have introductory courses for majors with content that addresses these research and writing basics. However, the assumption that students learn everything they need in one course is a faulty one. All of us who teach courses for majors need to regularly revisit this content if students are to develop these research and writing abilities. Let me be specific and suggest six things professors can do that help students improve in both areas.

Show them how to find appropriate research sources and methods.
Introductory courses do a fine job of giving students an overview of research; however, in subcategories within disciplines, research can be conducted very differently. Students writing papers on Chaucer will approach research one way, while those examining contemporary literature will tackle their subjects differently. Thus, professors need to show students how...

Simplifying Online Course Design

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Good course design is essential to effective online learning. In an interview with Online Classroom, Richard Smith, associate professor and coordinator of the instructional technology program, and Caroline Crawford, associate professor of instructional technology, both at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, talked about online course design principles that can improve learning and minimize extraneous work on the part of the students and instructor.

Don’t try to do too much.

A common mistake of new online educators is to include more content than is necessary, which takes more work to design and facilitate. “They tend to put too much content into the course. They include too many assignments, and they soon find that they are overwhelmed. So the first challenge is to be able to control your impulse to include too much content and too many...

Teachable Moments - The Grading Conference

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Grading student papers may be the college instructor’s least pleasant duty. Most of us carefully mark each page, noting problems, questioning assumptions, and offering additional information, many times on the final version of the essay when it is too late to make improvements. I have colleagues who spend up to an hour on each paper, despite the distinct possibility that their feedback may not even be read, much less understood.

Still, careful and thoughtful grading is worth our time and effort. Students deserve feedback on the quality of their ideas and the clarity of their writing, if only to hear a different perspective, and certainly to improve their next written assignment. Although I try to achieve these goals with my marginal notes and end comments on every paper, I rarely find out whether these comments helped. However, things change considerably when I deliver my feedback in person. I invite my students to sit with me while I grade their papers. These voluntary “grading conferences” achieve three mutually beneficial goals.

Building Learning Communities beyond the Online Classroom

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Many online instructors strive to create a community of learners within their courses. But once the course is over, this community typically disbands. Robert Zotti is working on projects to sustain these communities.

Zotti, assistant dean of Stevens Institute of Technology’s WebCampus, is charged with designing a video teleconferencing/webcasting and podcasting facility specifically for producing content for a variety of the institution’s constituents, with the goal of promoting learning communities that go beyond the online classroom. In Zotti’s view, the goals of these online learning communities are to:

Long-Term Benefits of Learner-Centered Instruction

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Often these questions are raised about courses using learner-centered approaches: What if this is the only learner-centered course taken by the student? Is one course enough to make a difference?

There is growing evidence that courses with learner-centered approaches—those approaches that use active learning strategies to engage students directly in learning processes—enhance academic achievement and promote the development of important learning skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and the ability to cooperatively work with others. But does the experience of being made responsible for learning transcend that individual course?

That’s not a question that has been answered empirically, at least not until recently. But it was the question that biologists Derting and Ebert-May aspired to answer. Specifically they wanted to know...

Group Work, Discussion Strategies to Manage Online Instructor Workload

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Shrinking budgets and increasing enrollments are putting online instructors in the position of teaching larger classes. Accommodating more students means rethinking how you teach your courses. Otherwise your workload can quickly become overwhelming.

Strategies that work in relatively small online courses do not necessarily translate when enrollments increase. Without a change in instructional strategies, doubling the number of students doubles the instructor's workload on things such as grading and feedback.

To address this issue, Keith Restine, associate director of distance education, and Allison Peterson, senior instructional designer, both at Texas Woman's University, recommend addressing instructor workload in two key areas...

Metacognitive Pestering for Beginning Students

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Watching my own son spend his first semester in college struggling with meeting deadlines was an up-close reminder of something I have learned after 30 years of teaching. Beginning college students are often spacey. They have lots on their minds and need help in that commonplace of contemporary pedagogy called metacognitive thinking.

Most of us know what metacognitive thinking is. John Flavell, the psychologist who coined the term in the late 1970s, defines it as “one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes and products or anything related to them, for example, learning relevant properties or information or data.” More simply, it can be described as “thinking about one’s own thinking” or, as a colleague of mine likes to say, “making thinking visible.”

How can college teachers “make thinking visible” for harried, busy, and not always terribly mature freshmen who…

Understanding the Online Learning Experience

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Barbara Zuck, assistant professor of business at Montana State University–Northern, was teaching a 100-level online course in business leadership and wanted to understand her students’ experiences in the course. So at the end of the course she asked students three open-ended questions:

What are the two greatest difficulties you had taking this course in an online environment?
What three things surprised you most by taking this course in an online learning environment?
What three things would you change about this course, assuming it were also taught in an online learning environment

Despite the small sample size (19), Zuck has gleaned some useful information that has ...

Five Habits—Easy but Often Neglected Practices That Improve Outcomes

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Given the daily grind of teaching, it is easy to forget that little practices can make a big difference when the goals are more learning and better teaching. Here is a reminder of five easy habits to practice mindfully ("mindfulness" comes from the Latin word for having a good memory).

Wait - After asking a question in class, most teachers know they need to wait, but they do not accurately perceive how long they wait. Often, in less than a second, they call on someone, pace nervously, or rephrase the question. With mindful practice, teachers can increase wait time to three to five seconds. When they do, more students...

Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Which online instructor characteristics help students succeed? It’s a rather basic question that has not been adequately answered. We did a literature search to find if anybody had done any research from the students’ perspective on what constitutes a quality online instructor. There were perhaps 10 articles by professors speculating about what they thought defined quality online instruction, but nobody had asked students.

We decided to pursue this question at our institution, Anne Arundel Community College. We asked students in 27 sections of online psychology courses to answer the following multiple-choice question How quickly should faculty respond to any student posting (i.e., email, quiz, written assignment, etc.)?

A Course Redesign that Contributed to Student Success

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Required introductory courses, especially those in math and science, offer special teaching challenges. Frequently, these are courses that must be completed before students can proceed to their chosen majors. Many of today's college students struggle with these courses. A recent article in Change describes an algebra course like this offered at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In 2002, the success rate in this course (a C- or above) stood at 55 percent. Three years later, 75 percent of the students were succeeding in the course without any diminution of course standards, as measured by performance on a final exam that contained the same types of problems.

Instructors attribute the change to a thorough redesign of the course. They went from three 50-minute lectures a week to one lecture plus two computer lab sessions. In the lab students used a software program to complete homework assignments. Students had to find...

Online Learning and Service-Learning: How They Can Work Together

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The benefits of having students engage in service activities to help create richer and more meaningful connection to course material have been well documented and utilized in higher education. However, using this tried-and-true practice is relatively new in the online classroom, so as educators and administrators we're still learning how we can implement this method of education in the online environment to its fullest extent.

If you have been thinking about implementing service-learning in your online class, here are some best practices and helpful tips that I've established based upon my experience with this endeavor. This certainly is not an exhaustive list but is a good starting point of some issues and suggestions to think about if you're interested in adding service-learning to your online courses. The future is bright for incorporating service-learning into...

Daily Experts: A Technique to Encourage Student Participation

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

If you're interested in approaches that encourage students to speak in class and develop their public-speaking skills, as well as techniques that help you learn student names, then my "daily experts" strategy may be of use to you.

What are daily experts?

I list five or six students' names on a PowerPoint slide at the beginning of my classes (which are large, 65-150 students). These individuals, assuming they are in class, then become my daily experts—the first ones I ask questions to or opinions of before opening discussion to the whole class. The approach provides for one-on-one dialogue in the midst of a larger class creating an environment that encourages interaction. In my first-year class, I tend to pose questions that...

Effective Online Grading

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Using online tools in student assessment is an important strategy for today's faculty. These grading tools offer faculty and students many efficiencies and enhancements that allow for success and satisfaction in the assessment process. Online gradebooks allow for quick feedback in a logical format. Students can access their grades at their leisure. The online gradebook allows for connections between numerical grades and narrative feedback (e.g., instructor comments on a quiz). The gradebook can save faculty time in organization and communication to students.

Blended Learning

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

I took apart the first watch my parents bought me as a birthday present. As I remember it, I was more curious than perverse. I have always liked seeing how things work, how they are put together, in order to grasp the possibilities of design and function. Much later as a university professor, I wanted to see and experience just how technology could be used to make online assignments work. Attending various workshops in the university's teaching center gave me some sense of the potential for using technology as a pedagogical tool. However, it was not until this summer at Oxford College of Emory University, when I helped lead a track on blended learning (for liberal arts faculty), that I experienced a sort of epiphany of new possibilities of design and function through this pedagogy. I saw this pedagogy work across the curriculum as professors of chemistry, biology, foreign languages, music, composition, allied health, and anthropology developed projects for their own classes.