Group items tagged

This article has a follow up major piece in the June 24 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I cannot send that one to you because it is "locked." However, this piece describes what two very famous psychologists, Gosling and Pennebaker, are doing at UT Austin with online psychology classes. They describe here a synchronous massive online course in which (as now described in the Chronicle, they have 1500! students registered. Twenty four students are invited to attend F2F classes twice per week and the rest are online live. This SMOC, as they term it, allows faculty to interact live with an audience while teaching but affords huge enrollments. This seems to me to be a way of maintaining the "feel" of F2F while benefiting from the usefulness of technology. This is a very interesting development and, with these two psychologists being so well known, teachers of large lecture classes will take notice. I would love to explore the idea further!

This is pretty amazing! I wondered to what extent this was also a flipped class - did students do their readings and watch lectures before coming to class, and in the synchronous sessions, mostly focus on solving problems through group discussion? It seems to require a lot of technological and instructional support: TV studio, laptops, apps, and tutors serving as group advisors, but the better learning outcome may make it all worth it! Of course, at 500 students a class, it could save cost in a big way, too. So, are we all prepared to face the camera? :)

Over the last decade, larger student numbers, reduced resources and increasing use of new technologies have led to the increased use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as a method of assessment in higher education courses. This paper identifies some limitations associated with MCQs from a pedagogical standpoint....

Trying to catch up and get ahead as I leave town this week :) I teach beginning undergraduates in typically large (150+ students) classes, often with little or no (or ineffective) TA assistance. Multiple choice questions are an absolute necessity as a management tool. I find that many of my colleagues in traditional liberal arts colleges think that multiple choice questions are unacceptable as a means of student assessment. However, I've noticed that many of the online adaptive learning tools and licensing exams required by many professional programs (nursing among them...) are also based primarily on multiple choice questions. I looked for an article to rebut the reading from the flaguide website (http://www.flaguide.org/) which stated, "...the multiple choice test..... [is] usually most effective at measuring fact-based knowledge and the ability to perform algorithmic problem-solving...However, if our goals include different student outcomes than these....then this assessment technique will not provide useful feedback about attainment of these goals." The above article gives several ideas for creating and using multiple choice questions to assess higher order thinking, my favorite being the idea of assigning scores based not only on student answers to the questions but also their confidence in their answer. I also liked the idea of the self-tests that students can take repeatedly to check their mastery of concepts, which seems to play into the instructional design loops that we were studying in M3.

faculty development specialists must pay close attention to the aspects of course development that are critical to the success of student learners. The likelihood of success is greatly increased when instructional design is integrated with the course's delivery tool. At ISU such integration is facilitated through the use ofWebCT, the course management system (CMS) supported by the university. Does Emory have such a tool?

Authors: Lehman, Rosemary M. and Conceicão, Simone C. This volume highlights the need for creating a presence in the online environment. The authors explore the emotional, psychological, and social aspects from both the instructor and student perspective. It provides an instructional design framework and shows how a strong presence contributes to effective teaching and learning. Contains methods, case scenarios, and suggested activities.

Quick read, reputable source.

This is a link to an article written by a Debbie Morrison who is an instructional designer trained at George Washington University. The two salient points made in this article are that students want group activities that are meaningful to them, in other words a project about a subject, in which they have a passion or at least strong interest. The other point addressed avoiding "social loafing" which was defined as individuals believing that less work is required on their part because of they are in a group. Some of her suggestions included a group charter and keeping the group size small, such as three participants per group.

This article investigates the gap between instructional training and technology training when it comes to second language teachers.

A Blog about Open and Online Education (by Debbie Morrison) I really liked her entry, Start Here, because it discussed the PROS and CONS of some of the various instructional models presented in other resources. She made the connection between design and higher education - much of what I've been seeing relates to training in a corporate or business setting. I can more easily see how to use these models as tools to build my course now.

This speech by the late, great David Foster Wallace speaks to the matter of "awareness" discussed in the course reading, "What Everybody Ought to Know About Instructional Design."

Chart-Form of Instructional design theories, theorists, models, etc.

Faculty learning communities provide their members with both information and support as they move toward utilizing digital technology tools, learn new skills, and share meaningful instructional practices... This is off-topic for M3 , but it occur to me that we have established a learning community among ourselves with the above goals.

Brief article by online instructor sharing tips on managing online courses. Two tips I think would be especially useful include: 1) using a "What's New" section for adding content so students can find it easily and 2) for large classes to keep personalized grading assignments and high tech features to a minimum.

Kristy, thanks for this good resource, I think that author has several good points. There are ways to think about the "What's New" area. There is a module page within the site that can be used, I've added one in our class, just so you can see. Learners can also use the Global Navigation at the top right of the Bb site to see all (or to filter specific courses) of all new and up-to-date happenings. There are definitely strategies of workload management including team and peer-review assignments. You can also have student-led discussions. Large online classes are there own beast - and I think SON is facing it. I believe that we can come up with some solid solutions that still meet the instructional goals without burning out the faculty.

This is Florida Gulf Coast's site for online coursework design which includes their guidance for the steps in coursework development (instructional design, goals and objectives, etc...) as well as advice on media and technology use and other factors. I saw a few items which mimicked items from our readings.

This article looks at how Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (1987) can be applied to the online classroom.

This is a succinct summary of the UDI goals in creating a course.

Yes, yes, I know, the title suggests that this webtext is only relevant for a few people, perhaps only Jane and myself. However, if you browse this webtext - it is indeed not an article, but like all work published in Kairos, a multimedia artifact or well, a webtext - you will find a lot of important insights on student-professor-staff interactions in an online environment. The webtext highlights, for example, the importance of the lack of physical cues in an online class, a facet of online instruction that may necessitate a higher awareness of the effect our formulations, terms, and even typed characters can have in any written communication such as blog posts, emails, chats, and messages. We thus learn quite a bit about communicative techniques and etiquette in an online class (and in a virtual environment more generally). Another webtext in the same Kairos issue reflects upon teaching graduate students how to teach online: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/pedagogycourse.html. Leah, this webtext might be interesting for you - but it should be interesting for others as well because it also addresses questions about assignments and exercises in online classes. By the way, Kairos is an important open-access online journal that has existed since 1996. It publishes scholarship that "examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media." ("The Kairos Style Guide", n.d.)