How many of us have thought about giving useful feedback to our students and fallen short? Moreover, how many times have we given what we thought was extensive feedback, and seen no improvements in student performance? Or that some students were utilizing our feedback while others did not? How can we provide constructive feedback which will be useful to all learners in that it serves to both instruct as well as motivate students? One way might be to provide “wise feedback.”
What is Wise Feedback?
Wise feedback is targeted feedback which conveys high expectations, the instructor’s genuine belief that those expectations can be achieved by the student, and provides concrete information to help the student meet the expectations. Here, “wise” does not necessarily mean smarter or better. Instead, wise feedback refers to psychological interventions which are attuned to how people make sense of themselves, others, and social situations which may affect their learning.
How do I provide Wise Feedback?
“I am giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” or “The expectations in this course are high and I know you can do great work. The feedback here is designed to help you get there.” Using this framing when providing feedback to your students helps to build trust, signal belonging, and combine high standards with the assurance that people can reach them. Obviously, simple assurances and trust in the abilities of others are in themselves not sufficient to guarantee success. It is therefore essential to also include constructive criticism, clear pathways/specific directions, and guidance on how students can achieve success.
Who can benefit from Wise Feedback?
While all students can benefit from wise feedback, studies have shown that students from cultures which have traditionally suffered from race-based stigma, seem to get additional benefits from wise feedback (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999; Yeager et al, 2014).
Communicating high expectations and providing students with the support to meet them is crucial. Students can thrive when they are challenged. But they need to understand the expectations, know how to meet them, and feel that the instructor believes in their capabilities.
Cohen, G.L., Steele, C.M., & Ross, L.D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(10), 1302-1318.
Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., . . . Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804-824. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033906
Devshikha Bose is an Instructional Design Consultant at Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Image from pxhere released to public domain under Creative Commons CC0 license.
The library is a critical learning support for college students, but the challenge is to make students aware of all the library provides. Since many students are learning partially or fully online, Learning Management System (LMS) integration is a handy way to bring library resources and librarian help to your students where they learn: in your LMS course.
Integrating library resources into the LMS can make your students more successful by giving them easy library access. Linking to library content within a course has been shown to increase students’ use of materials. Including information about library services gives them access to learning support when and where they need it, in a way they can refer back to throughout the semester. This can be especially useful for connecting the library to distance students and hybrid online learners, many of whom seldom visit the library in person.
LMS platforms can connect automatically with systems used by academic libraries. Two common ones are Research Guides and Course Reserves. There are also simple best practices you can follow when linking to library resources that will improve your students’ connection to the library.
Research Guides
Research guides are librarian-authored web pages recommending library resources to help students get started on research for particular disciplines, courses, or assignments. At Temple University, research guides are automatically integrated into the LMS via the “Library” link, an item in the default Course Navigation menu located in the left-hand column of Canvas courses. When clicked, this link shows a matched guide from Temple Libraries’ Research Guides system. The guide shown varies depending on the Canvas course. In most courses, the Library link shows a generic guide that highlights commonly sought information and tools, such as building hours, book and article search, a chat widget for live librarian help, and an online scheduler for research appointments.
In courses where a faculty member works with a librarian to create a course-specific research guide, that guide is shown. In our pilot study at Temple, we learned that students engaged most with the Library link when it showed a course-specific library research guide!
Having library resources in the LMS helps students build research skills and get help, and automatic integrations like Temple’s Library link bring these resources to students without any extra work for the faculty member.
Beyond automatic integrations, faculty can also manually add smaller portions of research guides in other areas of a course. Once you identify a single box or page from a larger research guide that would help your students, you can manually embed it in the area of your course content where students will find it most useful. At Temple, this type of content can be added to Canvas as an “External Tool.”
Course Reserves
Another common library integration concerns course reserves: high demand materials related to a specific course that you can make available to students via your library. E-reserves are downloadable in the LMS, while physical reserves are available for short term lending at the library.
At Temple, faculty members can add the Course Reserves tool, which is separate from the default Library link, to Canvas’ navigation menu in the course Settings. You then request items be placed on reserve from within the tool by adding new requests or importing Reserves items from a previous semester. Library staff see and process the requests, and arrange any necessary document scanning, purchasing, or other additional steps. Once processed, the active reserve items show in the Canvas course.
Persistent links to library e-resources
Academic libraries offer many types of content that you can integrate directly into the LMS as course materials: articles, ebooks, videos, databases, and more — but use persistent links, not the URL in the browser window. A persistent link (a.k.a. durable link, stable link, permalink) is a URL that connects directly to a specific full-text source in a library database or electronic subscription. Using the persistent, library-linked, URL ensures all students (on-campus and off) can access the source. These links are stable over time, and they also eliminate the need to worry about potential copyright issues since students will be directed through the institutional login page if necessary for access. Different databases offer varying options for getting a persistent link to an item, depending on their interface.
At Temple, persistent links can be added to Canvas as an “External URL.” Intentionally linking to library e-resources is the way to make optimal use of your library’s collections. It also creates a bridge for students to library research support services, since many library e-resource platforms include embedded librarian help.
Want to get started connecting to the library in your LMS?
To explore options for integrating the library into your LMS course, contact your institution’s library staff. Librarians will consult with you on how to integrate library resources, and can let you know what automatic integrations are available on your campus.
There are many ways in which in-class instructional time can seem overwhelming, especially to first time teachers. During my first TA experience I remember opening up a word document with the intention of writing up an agenda for the first week’s discussion. I kept staring at the document like it was a vast open prairie, or an empty stage in a sold-out theatre. The time and space I had seemed expansive, full of possibilities and opportunities, but also shapeless and unstructured. In that moment, I found myself wondering: how am I supposed to fill every moment of face-to-face instructional time with meaningful, interesting, and valuable content, and how am I supposed to know after the fact if I’ve succeeded in this goal? In this post, I’ll argue that you can go a long way towards answering these questions for yourself by carefully crafting S.M.A.R.T. learning objectives, and by using these objectives to design and implement daily assessments.
First off, a learning objective is a brief, descriptive statement of one thing that a student will take away from a day’s lesson. They are typically determined by (and fit into) the broader “learning goals” that you set in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester, but are more specific, concrete, and active. Examples include: “By the end of class, each student will be able to distinguish between examples of substances and accidents, and to give an intuitive definition of each.” You might have just one learning objective for a class period, or, if you have more time or if the objectives are less ambitious, you may break it down into two, three, or even more. (For more helpful information on learning objectives, and the difference between a learning objective and a course goal, see this helpful handout. For a taxonomy of different kinds of learning objectives, and how to incorporate these into your course prep see this handout on class prep from the Kaneb Center.)
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym often associated with productive goal-setting in general, and I forget where I even first came across it (see here, here, and here). The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound, and I find these criteria immensely helpful in crafting good learning objectives. I won’t go through detailed descriptions for each criteria (for such descriptions see the links above), but to get an intuitive sense, consider the following two objectives:
By the end of class students will be able to analyze philosophical texts well.
By the end of class, students will be able to isolate Singer’s “Obligatory Giving” argument and distinguish its major premises, and give one reason why they agree or disagree with each premise.
Objective 2 is clearly better along each of our five dimensions.
S.M.A.R.T. objectives can help structure in-class time in at least two ways. First, they can help you determine what information you need to present and what sorts of activities you need to have your students engage in, and what to prioritize in the distribution of class time for any given meeting. If objective 2 was one of your objectives, for instance, you’d need to make sure to leave time for the students to read and mark-up a paragraph of text (3-5 minutes), share their thoughts with a neighbor (2-4 minutes), and collaborate on reconstructing the argument as a group (5-8 minutes). If you have three or four other objectives for that day, you might think about simplifying the task, or about giving them a little more help along the way.
The second way S.M.A.R.T. objectives can help you structure in-class time is in a more global, semester-level sense. S.M.A.R.T. objectives — if crafted well — naturally give rise to concrete assessment mechanisms (they are, after all, Measurable, Results-focused, and Time-bound). To expand upon our example: you could ask your students to write down the premises and conclusion of Singer’s argument on a half-sheet of paper and turn it in. If pressed for time, you could cold call on three students and ask each to offer a premise and a brief reason to agree or disagree with it. If the objective and content are crucial to the course as a whole, and directly related to your overall learning goals, you might hand out a worksheet at the end of class, or have students take an online quiz to ensure that they’ve attained proficiency. This feedback is an invaluable resource in helping you to determine where to spend valuable future class time.
As college instructors, we get precious little face-to-face instructional time with our students, so it’s important that we structure the time we have effectively. S.M.A.R.T. learning objectives can help us to do that, and in a way that isn’t overwhelming or overly time consuming. Moreover, I’ve found that pairing my objectives with daily assessment mechanisms, and even using the process of designing such mechanisms to clarify and evaluate these objectives, allows me to foster a more “communicative” classroom experience; i.e. one in which I’m getting feedback from the students that I can use to create future objective-based learning goals that are responsive to their needs.
“Articulating Learning Goals: A Path to Increased Efficiency and Improved Student Performance.” University of Notre Dame, Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2017. http://kaneb.nd.edu/assets/75457/learninggoalsho.pdf
EDITOR’S NOTE: Looking for more learning design-related EDvice? Check out our Course Design Series!
Paul Blaschko is the Assistant Director at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Image by Dungdm93 released under Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
For years I had the standard “come talk if there’s a problem” statement of bonhomie and support on my syllabus. I stated it explicitly at the first class meeting. And no one ever came.
I’ve been thinking about inclusivity in teaching in the context of my large (150 students) lecture. I have participated in a lot of really fabulous CAT seminars, courses, and workshops, and have been exposed to so many wonderful ideas, but let’s face it – lecture halls are not designed for much interaction between students or even, if we’re honest, between student and lecturer. So how do we develop human relationships in a large-scale situation?
It’s difficult to look beyond the limits of the situation, but it’s important to try because the student pool represents a deep resource of experience, a lens through which they can understand the course material and, if you manage well, help each other to understand it as well. Students often are unwilling to share from their own experiences in a large lecture format, and there is no chance that will happen if they are not comfortable interacting with the lecturer. Interaction isn’t automatic, and it can’t happen without trust.
As a result of participating in the Provost’s Teaching Academy, I designed what I now call the Index Card Exercise. I distribute index cards on the first day of class and ask students to take five minutes to write their preferred name, pronouns, and what they are most excited about for class. Like most large lectures, it’s mostly a captive population fulfilling a requirement, so I figure any attempt to limit the adversarial relationship between student and course material (and instructor) is worth the attempt. The final question I ask is: “Is there anything I should know about that might impact your ability to succeed in this class?”
It turns out there’s plenty that students want me to know. I’ve had students with babies, recovering from cancer, taking care of elderly relatives, working full time to pay their bills – in short, students in my class are experiencing a lot of life while they also try to keep up with a full course load. Most of them don’t want to appear to be asking for a favor and would never approach me, and many state outright that they don’t really expect anything, but because I ask, they tell me.
The benefit to me of this exercise is that I am more aware of their struggles, and I’m reminded of their humanity. The benefit to them is the proof that there is substance behind my claim to concern. I may not be able to match every name with a face, but I read those cards and I remember nicknames when we email. I reach out to students whose circumstances seem particularly precarious. And the students respond. I’ve never had a student express their preference for a non-cis pronoun, but quite a few have made a point of conveying their surprise and approval that I ask. Suddenly, with those four questions, I become approachable and relevant.
It’s tough to imagine ways to find common ground with students in a large lecture, but it’s important to try. With my science background, I have to fight daily against the notion that teaching in active ways, employing new pedagogical ideas, is simply babying the students. Building a relationship with them helps on so many levels, though: I see potential problems in time to be proactive, I enjoy teaching more, and I start with the students’ trust that they can come to me early and work with me to avert disaster. Does it work all the time? Of course not. Like all of teaching, there’s an element of trial and error; sometimes a great idea just doesn’t work out. You can tweak it next time, or you can abandon it in favor of a different exercise, but the important thing is to keep actively building those bridges. Even a failed exercise, if you practice transparency about what it was meant to achieve and how it went wrong, can foster a supportive learning environment where students can achieve significant personal and academic growth.
Angela Bricker is Assistant Professor in the Biology department of Temple University’s College of Science and Technology.
“All change happens through human relationships.” This is a central value of the social work profession, embedded in our Code of Ethics and weaved through our curriculum. The importance of relationships has been an integral component in my effectiveness as a therapist, a manager, and, currently, an educator. Students come to us with a myriad of personal, professional, and educational experiences, skills, and goals. Developing relationships with students allows us to know our students as human beings who have responsibilities and experiences outside our classrooms with thoughts and emotions that are connected to how they learn in our classrooms. Relationships increase our ability to support students’ learning and remind us of the joys of teaching as we forge deeper connections with fellow humans. Ingraham and colleagues (2018) found that the relationships between students and faculty is a fundamental factor in students’ success in undergraduate nursing programs.
Investing in relationships takes purposeful effort, the first of which is creating a supportive environment where students feel valued and respected. Granitz, Koernig and Harich’s (2009) conceptual model of faculty-student rapport consists of approachability, caring and shared ideas/values. More specifically, I have found this means sharing aspects of my own life outside of the classroom, including my interests, commitments, and mistakes. We can forget how intimidating our titles, with a plethora of letters after our names, can appear to students. Reminding students we were once in their seats–that we, too, have personal lives–is central to developing relationships that facilitate shared learning. Smith (2015) notes he found balancing sharing aspects of his personal life enhanced his effectiveness as a teacher.
Gremler and Gwinner (2000) note we develop rapport with students when we establish personal connections and share enjoyable interactions. Following are more specific suggestions we can integrate into our on-campus and online classes.
Start at the beginning
We never get a second chance to make a first impression, which speaks to the importance of our communication with students prior to the first class session.
Embed a 3-4 minute introductory video within our course Canvas site. These videos can include information on how to address us, why we enjoy teaching this class, tips for success, and a bit of personal information about our interests and hobbies outside of academia. The videos decrease student anxiety about the course and assist them in seeing us as approachable.
Send a welcome email to students at least one week before the start of class that invites students to contribute to the course syllabus and share information on challenges they are facing (i.e. caregiving responsibilities for family members, physical/mental health concerns, upcoming personal commitments) and how we may be able to support them. These invitations signal we are cognizant that they have lives outside the classroom which often impact their learning, and that learning is a social, communal experience. Using inclusive language signifies that all students are welcome in our classrooms.
Incorporate aspects of a promising syllabus. The syllabus is our learning contract; its language and tone communicates an invitation to students to join us on a common endeavor over the course of the semester.
First day of class
A quick google search yields an abundance of resources for first day of class activities, for both online and campus based classes. Ice-breakers do just that, breaking down barriers and forcing us to engage with one another. In larger classes, we can use small groups to engage students with each other, and circulate among the groups. I find that ice breakers also yield nuggets of information we can tuck away and, as the semester progresses, we can use these nuggets to demonstrate to students that we care about them and their learning as individuals. Introductory discussion boards on the learning management system, where students respond to a specific prompt, can also facilitate this process. I take notes on students’ interests and review them before each subsequent class as a reminder of what students have told me. This includes notations of who is caring for a mother in chemo, who has experience working in a hospital setting, and who noted she doesn’t know anything about policy. For example, this year a student mentioned in class that she enjoys rock climbing. When I happened to listen to a podcast about adventure-based social work, I made this connection and shared it with her.
Learn Names
Depending on our workload, we may hundreds of students, which can make learning names even more challenging. Yet, knowing our students’ names aids us in making connections between the individual emailing us and the individual participating in our class. Using names signals that we have taken the time to recognize the person as an individual with a unique set of experiences, knowledge, and skills to contribute to our class. Ice breakers that entail students’ sharing their names are helpful on the first day of class. Additionally, I have found using table tents the first few weeks of class to be incredibly helpful, where students write their names on both sides so they, too, can learn each other’s names. Since the table tents are there, I use their names when I call on them in class or invite them to share their name when speaking.
I also make a habit of arriving to class, in person or online, 10 minutes early and remaining present during breaks so that I can have mini-conversations with students. In small or large classes, these individual touch points afford me another opportunity to connect with them individually, which helps in remembering their names. I also have found that making notes about the pronunciation of students’ names, and when their preferred names don’t match what’s on the roster, is integrally important. I keep the sticky note with these notations with my class notes, so they are easily accessible.
Ongoing
Relationships need to be cultivated over time. While we are not our students’ counselors, caring about their learning coincides with caring about them as human beings. Lang (2016) notes that “emotions, attitudes, and other attributes intersect with both teaching and learning” (p. 161). In short, caring matters. Students who sense this are more likely to reach out to us with questions. I’m consistently reminded about how my small actions are meaningful to students and build the foundation for us to have deeper, more honest conversations about their progress and learning. For example, I had a student mention that she was moving from New York to Philadelphia over the summer break. When I asked if she had settled in the following semester, she noted how important this was to her. Another student in an online course commented during class that she was nervous about seeing her first client in counseling, doubting her ability to be a social worker and generally unsettled three weeks into the semester. I followed up with an email and we arranged a 15 minute phone call the following week. I then mailed her some old counseling materials I had sitting in my office. She sent a message thanking me for my time, sharing how useful the materials had been, and specifically noted she appreciated I cared enough to send them.
We teach because we believe in the importance of our disciplines’ content and our students’ abilities to apply the knowledge and skills into their lives outside of our classroom. To support them in this process, it’s integral we remember, our students are human beings, with complex and diverse lives. We need to treat them as such when we teach them.
References
Granitz, N., Koernig, S., & Harich, K. (2009). Now it’s personal: Antecedents and outcomes of rapport between business faculty and their students. Journal of Marketing Education. 31(1).
Gremlin, D., & Gwinner, K. (2000). Customer-Employee rapport in service relationships. Journal of Service Research. 3(1), p. 82-104.
Ingraham, K., Davidson, S., & Yonge, O. (2018). Student-faculty relationships and its impact on academic outcomes. Nurse Education Today. 71, p. 17-21.
Lang, J. (2016). Small Teaching. Josey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.
Smith, B. (2015). The evolution of my rapport: One professor’s journey to building successful instructor/student relationships. College Teaching, 63(2). P. 35-36.
Laurie Friedman is Assistant Professor of Instruction at Temple’s College of Public Health and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
As a newly-hired full-time faculty member at Temple in 2015, naturally I agreed when my Associate Director asked me to join a weekend-long teaching workshop. When I looked more closely at the email describing the event, however, I was a little daunted: I had committed to training to use “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP), a role-playing pedagogy in which students become immersed in elaborate, multi-week games set at major historical and ideological junctures. According to the email invitation, the best way to learn to use the method is to experience a game directly, so faculty would be playing an accelerated version of Greenwich Village, 1913. Players would assume the identities of women’s suffrage leaders, major figures in the Industrial Workers of the World union battles, or the artists who peopled the cafes of New York City at the start of the twentieth century. I was to be Emma Goldman, the anarchist firebrand.
Suspicious of what seemed like a gimmick and terrified of making a fool of myself in front of all my new colleagues, I spent the week before the workshop feverishly reading the gamebook, researching Goldman, and preparing for my (or rather, Emma’s) speeches to the bohemians of Greenwich Village (that is, Temple faculty in the Intellectual Heritage Lounge in Anderson Hall). When I began playing the game that Saturday morning, I was surprised to discover how much I had learned and retained about a thinker I had known almost nothing about a week earlier. By the end of the workshop, stunned at how engrossing and exciting RTTP could be, I was sold.
Since then, along with faculty in the Intellectual Heritage program and others across campus, I have committed to using RTTP games regularly in my classrooms each semester. We draw from the dozens of games published by the Reacting Consortium, each of which asks students to react to critical historical moments ranging from the collapse of democracy in ancient Athens, to the trial of Anne Hutchinson, to the succession crisis in 16th-century China.
Most games take between three and four weeks to complete, during which students are tasked with the traditional seminar work of reading critically, writing, and presenting in class. The twist with RTTP is that students do so entirely in role. The goals and ambitions of their historical figures and factions become the “victory objectives” that drive active learning and cultivate ethical reasoning, including the capacity to understand the perspectives of others removed by a (sometimes vast) geographical and temporal distance.
When I asked some of my colleagues why they use the method, they pointed to active learning, among other motivations. IH Professor Jim Getz does it for “two reasons: first, I’m convinced by the peer-reviewed data of the effectiveness of the pedagogy in teaching not just the what but the why and how of history. Second, I find it much more rewarding as an educator than simply standing in front of a lectern giving lectures or leading seminars.” For IH Professor Susan Bertolino, “Students complain endlessly about boring lectures. The games are not boring, plus they have to listen to their peers in order to construct arguments. If the group is cohesive, there is community, friendship, and a lot of fun.”
RTTP does present unique challenges. Professor Getz admits that “it is distinctly unnerving to cede the classroom to students. There is a lot that can (and does) go wrong. There is a robust community at Temple and online to help when things go sideways, but part of the beauty of this pedagogy is that it is often exactly when things go off the rails from the historical situation that students can learn the most—it’s at these moments when students are most able to see their own twenty-first-century biases.” Similarly, according to Professor Bertolino, “the games are wonderful to use, but they demand a lot from the instructor as students have to take active roles. Many are not used to this. They regard education as passive in which they receive information from the instructor.” “However,” counters Professor Getz, “the natural competitiveness of students mitigates this. Once RTTP starts and students start to perceive they are ‘losing,’ student investment shoots up.”
While RTTP began as a liberal arts initiative, many STEM games have recently been developed, teaching topics like epidemiology and germ theory through the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, or nutrition science and public health policy through the invention of the USDA food pyramid in 1991. Instructors interested in trying the method might begin with a one-class “micro-game,” available for free download on the RTTP website. With the support of CAT and GenEd, Temple is a Consortium member, giving all faculty access to the Consortium’s online resources after creating an account. Those new to RTTP can also join the growing community of hundreds of faculty across the country who meet annually at Barnard College (where the method was invented by history professor Mark Carnes) to train and share strategies. If you’re looking to increase active learning and inherent motivation among your students, consider RTTP. Just prepare for things to get active; as Professor Getz recalls, “I have never had students flip tables while talking passionately about the importance of democratic principles in a non-RTTP classroom.”
Genevieve Amaral is Assistant Director of Special Programs for Temple’s Intellectual Heritage Program.
If you’ve read about or attended workshops on approaches to teaching and learning with technology, chances are you’ve come across a few different terms to describe classes that have an online component. What are blended, hybrid, and flipped courses? Are they all describing the same approach to teaching, or are they different from one another? Are they just teaching-with-technology buzzwords–just fads–or are they worthwhile approaches to structuring your courses?
While these terms are often used interchangeably, in fact, they each have fundamental differences. However, all three of these approaches do involve teaching and learning online, and they are all legitimate approaches that have a track record of student success. Read on below to learn more about these approaches and their benefits for student learning.
Blended Courses
A blended course involves face-to-face class sessions that are accompanied by online materials and activities–essentially a “blend” of both live and online learning. A fundamental component of a blended course is that these online materials are not intended to “replace” face-to-face class time; rather, they are meant to supplement and build upon the content discussed in the classroom.
With the widespread use of learning management systems such as Canvas, the blended course approach has become very popular since class materials are easily accessible to students. (You may already be teaching a blended course and not even know it!) Instructors will often use their online courses to post articles, videos, podcasts, quizzes, and interactive online activities for students to engage with outside of face-to-face class time. Since these materials are readily available via multiple devices, students can independently review course content at their own pace, on their own time, and as many times as necessary. This is a key reason why students not only often perform better in blended courses, but they also often have higher motivation and lower anxiety.
Hybrid Courses
“Blended courses” and “hybrid courses” are the terms most likely to be used interchangeably, but hybrid courses differ in that their online components are intended to replace a portion of face-to-face class time. Online interactions can either be synchronous, meaning that students are interacting online in real time, such as through class sessions conducted via Zoom, or asynchronous, meaning that students interact online at different times, such as through online discussions or VoiceThread.
In addition to having many of the benefits of a blended course, the hybrid approach is ideal for students who are living in different locations or are part-time due to a busy schedule or a full time job. Students do not have to travel to the face-to-face classroom as often and can complete coursework when and where it is most convenient for them. As opposed to a fully online course, however, maintaining the face-to-face component of the course can also help support students’ sense of class community, one of the biggest struggles an instructor faces in a fully online course.
[Editor’s note: for on Hybrid teaching, visit this page.]
Flipped Courses
A flipped course also typically includes both face-to-face and online components, but the way in which students interact with course content is different than in a traditional course. In a traditional course, students learn fundamental concepts in the classroom, either through lecture or class activities, and engage with materials that build upon that knowledge outside of the classroom. In a flipped classroom, this approach is inverted: Students learn fundamental knowledge prior to class, such as through readings, podcasts, or videos, and expand upon that knowledge through activities conducted in-class with the support of the instructor. Flipped courses are thus usually also blended courses, since materials are often provided online, and they can also be hybrid courses, if some of the class interactions take place online. However, blended and hybrid courses are not always flipped.
A host of research supports the flipped course approach. It has been found to allow students to learn fundamental knowledge based on their preferences and strengths, provide more class time for active learning, increase opportunities for peer-to-peer collaboration and teacher-student mentorship, and encourage the instructor to consistently monitor students’ progress. A flipped course thus allows both students and the instructor to take full advantage of both online resources and class time.
[To learn about how one Temple engineering professor flipped his classroom, check out this EDvice Exchange post from September. -Ed.]
The Takeaways
Now that you know the difference between blended, hybrid, and flipped learning, you can accurately describe the format of your course, or perhaps explore a format that would better suit your course! If you are a Temple instructor and are interested in improving, designing, or converting a course to one of these formats, our team at the CAT is here to help! You can book an appointment with one of our teaching and learning specialists to talk about planning and reevaluating a course, as well as with our instructional technology specialists to strategize ways to maximize your use of online technologies to support your course. Visit catbooking.temple.edu or call us at 215-204-8761.
It may be hard for us as faculty to admit to ourselves that many assignments end up being forgotten—dumped in an actual or virtual trash can—once we’ve graded them. Educator David Wiley has dubbed these assignments “disposable” because they “add no value to the world— after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away.”
Wiley instead encourages faculty to craft “renewable assignments” that add value to the world (in and/or outside of the course) after they are completed. What the students produce through their coursework can be useful to and usable by fellow students, the instructor, and others. Examples include:
Students write or edit articles for Wikipedia.
Students conduct a research project (rather than just planning one) and present their findings at a conference or in a publication of some kind.
History students use primary sources to produce historical research about their local area, which proves useful to community groups.
Students create learning objects (including videos, PowerPoint slides, and diagrams) to help teach course concepts to others.
Students in a course on open education put together an Open Education Reader, a collection of readings and commentary on open education. They released it as a free, open, online book that anyone with access to the internet can use.
Why renewable?
Wiley says, “Students tell me that they invest significantly more time and effort in these assignments and enjoy doing them more.” It is understandable that if students are working for a wider audience, and if they think the work is valuable to others, they might have a larger buy-in than disposable assignments. In addition, higher education institutions might be able to connect renewable assignments to the University’s broader learning outcomes. As for improving student learning, if authentic assessments are valuable in that regard, what could be more authentic than actually doing work that one might otherwise be asking students to simulate?
Finally, students must be given a choice as to whether or not they want their work to be public, and if so, whether they wish to give their work an open license. After all, the copyright for their work belongs to them.
Bob Casper is an Instructional Design Consultant at Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning
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Let’s face it: most of our students just do not do the pre-reading or homework that you want them to do prior to coming to class. Why? Those who research this sort of thing would suggest that it is because they do not see the need or value in doing so. And, they do not have the intrinsic motivation to overcome this perceived lack of value. Unfortunately, simply telling students that something is important and that they will need it later – either for the test or in the workforce – just does not carry enough weight to increase intrinsic motivation and get them to do the pre-reading and/or other pre-class assignments. So, how can we help them find a little more motivation? By creating extrinsic motivation and helping students find value in the assignment by making them routinely accountable for it.
There are many options for increasing accountability and encouraging students to do the pre-reading and many incorporate some sort of assessment – usually at the beginning of the class in which students will need and use the information. Making these assessments periodic and random is more useful than a routine schedule (Ruscio, 2001). One such tool that students seem to value and enjoy is Fernald’s Monte Carlo Quiz (MCQ). Fernald (2004) originally developed the MCQ for upper division undergraduate psychology courses to not only inspire students to do the reading, but to also encourage them to read at a deeper level, to truly try to understand the content, and to enhance retention.
Design
In Fernald’s original iteration of the MCQ, he wrote five standard questions that could be applied to all assigned readings: 1) Knowledge of the content, 2) Comparison of two ideas in a reading, 3) Application of the concepts to the student’s life, 4) Critique of an idea within the reading with a rationale for agreeing or not, and 5) Passion in which students identify some passage from the reading that elicited an emotional response. Students were routinely assigned six chapters or articles for pre-reading. The Monte Carlo name of the method comes from the way in which randomness was determined – by up to three rolls of a die.
Implementation
At the beginning of class, a student rolls a die. An odd number on this first roll means “no quiz” and class proceeds. If an even number is rolled, there will be a quiz and the student rolls the die a second time to determine over which of the assigned readings the quiz will be. The student’s third roll of the die then determines which of the five previously mentioned questions students will address, with six being student’s choice. Student question responses were limited to one paragraph of no more than eight sentences and graded on a four-item scale from Exceptional to Unsatisfactory.
Results
Fernald reported that students reported increased motivation, doing more pre-reading, and preparing more deeply than they might otherwise. In addition, they liked the format and felt as if they had more control of the process. He also stated that his teaching transitioned to more active learning and problem solving because the students were better prepared.
Modifications
The MCQ format can be modified to fit almost any instructor’s needs by adjusting the question types and formats, the pre-class assignments, and who generates the questions (students vs. instructor). Others have found similar student and teaching outcomes.
References
Carney, Amy G, Sara Winstead Fry, Rosaria V Gabriele, and Michelle Ballard. 2008. “Reeling in the big fish: changing pedagogy to encourage the completion of reading assignments.” College Teaching 56 (4):195-200.
Fernald, Peter S. 2004. “The Monte Carlo Quiz: encouraging punctual completion and deep processing of assigned readings.” College Teaching 52 (3):95-99.
Ruscio, John. 2001. “Administering quizzes at random to increase student reading.” Teaching of Psychology 28 (3):204-206.
Simonson, Shawn R. 2017. “Modifying the Monte Carlo Quiz to increase student motivation, participation, and content retention.” College Teaching 65(4):158-163.
Shawn Simonson is Professor of Kinesiology at Boise State University.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Photo by Gaz, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
Critical thinking is hard. Like other important cognitive skills, critical thinking requires practice. We don’t learn to think critically by memorizing a set of rules. We must practice these skills in a variety of contexts and learn to think critically about a variety of contents (Nelson, 1999). Moreover, because critical thinking creates intellectual and emotional challenges for students, they may resist adopting critical thinking skills, just as they resist other threshold concepts (Land, 2014).
College students often begin their studies as dualist thinkers, who believe that knowledge is certain and learning is a matter of accumulating the corpus of “facts” which authoritative sources determine to be true (Perry, 1970). These students arrive on campus with experiences and expectations about learning that emphasize memorizing and repeating facts without questioning their credibility.
Some students resist thinking critically because dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty is uncomfortable. The notion that scholars accept knowledge tentatively, depending on the current state of evidence, including criteria such as what “counts” as evidence, can be disconcerting, especially for students accustomed to a culture that expects authority to be believed and followed without question.
Critical thinking requires that students evaluate the quality of evidence based on specific disciplinary contexts. They must learn to apply these criteria to specific models and theories. Moreover, students must develop a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Most disconcerting of all, they must determine when to continue using a model known to be “wrong.” For example, Nelson (1999) notes that Newtonian laws of motion make accurate predictions when applied on a small scale but are clearly wrong when applied on a large scale. Students are often puzzled and might even be disturbed when an instructor requires students to learn and apply a model and also tell them that the model is flawed.
Nelson (1999) offers several strategies that instructors can use to overcome these challenges and support student acquisition of critical thinking skills.
Confront uncertainty head-on. Devote class time and exam questions to the nature and process of reasoning in the discipline. Discuss the evolution of thought about models and what scholars currently believe in terms of how alternative explanations and perspectives have been evaluated and defended. Make the process of critical thinking in the discipline explicit as part of your discussion of content. Discuss why scholars describe the state of the world as they now do rather than just present the current thinking.
Articulate the disciplinary criteria used to construct an argument and support an interpretation. These discussions may include criteria for evidence, disciplinary values (what are important questions to try to answer), and how scholars in the discipline construct and evaluate arguments.
Make big ideas accessible to students.Complex material can be daunting to novices. Experts can zero in on key details rapidly, but novices have difficulty deciding which details are important and which ones are marginal. Create outlines or guiding questions that direct student’s attention to the most important concepts.
Help students learn to appreciate the value of learning from mistakes. Create low-stakes assessments or allow students to retake early exams to enable them to directly experience successful acquisition of a new skill or mastery of a challenging concept after experiencing an initial setback. These experiences promote a “growth” mindset that supports internal motivation (Dweck, 2008).
Create opportunities to practice through structured small-group discussions. Create a reading assignment that students complete before the small-group discussion in class. Ask students to summarize the author’s argument, evaluate the support for the argument the author provided, determine criteria for evidence and the amount of proof required, and decide whether the author’s argument was adequate (Rabow, Charness, Kipperman, & Radcliffe-Vaslie, 2000). Structure the small-group discussion around the completed assignment. Grade the work based on student preparation (completeness of the reading assignment) and participation in the discussion. Give students explicit guidelines on expectations for the discussion, which might include assigned roles such as note taker, devil’s advocate, facilitator who ensures that every student contribute.
Resources
Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Rabow, J., Charness, M. A., Kipperman, J., & Radcliffe-Vaslie, S. (2000). Learning through discussion (3rd ed). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Nelson, C. E. (1999). On the persistence of unicorns: The trade-off between content and critical thinking revisited. In B. A. Pescosolido B. A., & Aminzade, R. (Eds.). The social worlds of higher education: Handbook for teaching in a new century. (pp. 168-184). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Perry, W. G., Jr. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Claudia J. Stanny is Director of the Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at the University of West Florida.
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