Author Archives: Cub Kahn

Exploring Resilient Teaching

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The concept of resilient teaching has come to the forefront in the 2-plus years since the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly and radically altered the landscape of higher education. As faculty, students, and administrators devise strategies to cope with the myriad changes brought about by the pandemic, questions are ubiquitous about how to best support students and colleagues; how to adapt to changes in perceptions, practices, and expectations regarding teaching and learning; and how to avoid burnout.

Definitions and Scope

What is resilience? Resilience, in the physical sciences, refers to “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress.” Resilience, in a psychological sense, is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” And a classic definition of ecological resilience states, “Resilience is the capacity of complex systems of people and nature to withstand disturbance without shifting into an alternate regime, or a different type of system organized around different processes and structures.”

How about resilience in teaching? In the early months of the pandemic, Rebecca Quintana and James DeVaney of the University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation posited an emergent definition of resilient teaching:

The ability to facilitate learning experiences that are designed to be adaptable to fluctuating conditions and disruptions. This teaching ability can be seen as an outcome of a design approach that attends to the relationship between learning goals and activities, and the environments they are situated in. Resilient teaching approaches take into account how a dynamic learning context may require new forms of interactions between teachers, students, content, and tools.

As Quintana and Devaney note, resilient teaching goes far beyond pedagogy per se. Narrowly, resilient teaching might be seen as coping with the pivot to emergency remote teaching. More broadly, resilient teaching stretches to encompass course design, and includes the well-being of students and faculty, the capacity of instructors to avoid burnout and sustain productive careers, all while attending to the importance of student success, equity, and inclusion.

Need

Because totally asynchronous online teaching–the mode of most Ecampus courses–doesn’t involve synchronous class meetings, it may receive less attention than on-campus teaching in conversations about resilient teaching. However, the manifold effects and overall disruption created by COVID-19, and the importance of instructor and student wellness are profoundly applicable to asynchronous online learning. Resilient teaching is essential in all teaching and learning modalities.

How serious is the need for resilient teaching and learning? Nationally, faculty report A Stunning Level of Student Disconnection, and both faculty and administrators see the value of supporting students through trauma-informed teaching practices. Many institutions are also concerned about The Great Faculty Disengagement and anecdotal evidence that many faculty are Calling It Quits. UC Irvine has even created a new position for a pedagogical wellness specialist both to support the well-being of faculty and graduate teaching assistants and to train them in teaching practices that support student well-being.

OSU Activities

An ongoing series of activities at Oregon State University is focusing on resilient teaching:

  • Inara Scott, Senior Associate Dean in the College of Business, has written about Increasing Resilience through Modular Teaching. Scott has proposed modular course design of on-campus courses as a way to build in future flexibility:

Modular teaching allows us to transition quickly from in-person to remote synchronous or HyFlex teaching; it also creates pathways for addressing quarantines and family emergencies–both our own and our students. Finally, it lays the foundation for future blended learning experiences, where students might learn in a hybrid format with both in-person and remote online elements. 

Scott’s modular approach is in keeping with Ecampus online and hybrid course design principles, using backward course design to align learning activities, assignments, and assessments with course learning outcomes. Scott urges instructors to rethink activities that are “modality limited” to synchronous classroom delivery, and to be prepared for the exigencies of asynchronous or remote delivery.

  • In April 2022, the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning sponsored a Resilient Teaching Symposium. In the keynote, Inara Scott discussed exhaustion, cynical detachment, and reduced sense of efficacy as distinct types of burnout that could affect teaching faculty. Scott offered the modular design approach as a tool to build teaching resilience.

Symposium participants reflected in small groups on their resiliency and evidence they’ve seen of possible burnout. Then they discussed potential strategies to avoid burnout and build resilience into their teaching and their lives. Their resilient teaching suggestions on a participant Jamboard included:

    • Taking stock at the beginning of each term to think about resilience. 
    • Remember to be kind! Being kind and flexible shows strength not weakness.
    • Finding ways to connect individually with my students, especially in my online classes where it’s easy to disconnect.
    • Curriculum planning with lots of options to pivot and adapt.\
    • Saying “yes” to most things and “no” to others.
  •  OSU instructional faculty have been exploring resilient teaching in term-long resilient teaching faculty learning communities. These professional development opportunities are co-sponsored by Academic Technologies and the Center for Teaching and Learning. Participants learn about flexible solutions for teaching challenges, techniques for integrating in-class and online learning activities, and strategies to build resilience in teaching. Sound interesting? See the call for participation for the Fall ’25 Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community.

Learn More

Want to learn more about resilient teaching? Recommended starting points:

Resilient teaching and learning will continue to garner much-needed attention as higher education moves through the long wake of the pandemic.

What are your strategies for maintaining resilience? Let’s talk about it.

Take Your Blended Course Design to the Next Level

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As described in an earlier post, Use a Mix Map for Blended Learning, the blended learning mix map is a widely used tool to visualize and design hybrid (or “blended”) courses that integrate scheduled face-to-face meetings with online elements. The two overlapping circles in this planning template provide space to list online learning activities, face-to-face learning activities and possibly activities that occur in both learning environments.

Blended Learning Mix Map

Where Does Learning Actually Occur?

Oregon State University faculty have found utility in drafting mix maps while in the early phases of hybrid course development. Many of those faculty suggested that the traditional two-circle mix map needed one improvement, namely a third circle! In response, the Center for Teaching and Learning and Ecampus created the Three-Disc Hybrid Design Mix Map.

Three-Disc Hybrid Design Mix Map

Does your blended course have learning activities that extend beyond the online and classroom environments (for example, service-learning, field or clinical experiences)? If so, this three-disc mix map is an ideal course planning tool. The “Other” circle is the place to list learning activities that principally take place somewhere other than the classroom and the online course site.

Sketch a Three-Disc Mix Map in Three Steps

You could create one mix map for your entire course, but many instructors prefer to focus on a single representative week of the course. There are three steps to sketching out your blended course vision on the three-disc mix map:

1 – List each learning activity in the appropriate circle. Consider these activities from the student perspective. For instance, collaborating on a group poster project, taking a quiz or making a presentation. Be sure to include “other” learning that occurs beyond the online and in-class environments. Consider the balance between learning activities in the three circles.

As to which learning activities fit where, that’s a topic to carefully consider and to converse about with your teaching colleagues as well as an instructional designer. For instance, think about the positioning of weekly discussions in your course. In terms of student learning outcomes, do discussions work best for you and your students in the classroom, online or possibly in both places? Can discussions be structured to bridge the gap between learning environments? Remember to consider how the timing of discussions will be woven into the broader, ongoing flow of blended learning in your course. And remember that classroom meeting time is finite and measured to the nearest minute in a hybrid course, so be judicious in using that time strategically!

2 – Use arrows to draw functional connections between the learning activities. For example, a weekly quiz is based on narrated online lectures, or an in-class discussion applies information from online readings. Aim to link every activity to at least one other activity. Be especially attentive to linkages between the online and face-to-face activities.

3 – List the average amount of time per week that you expect students will spend on each learning activity. For instance, two hours of reading or 90 minutes of problem solving. Check to see if the weekly total make sense in light of the Oregon State University credit hour policy, which states, “One credit is generally given for three hours per week of work in and out of class.”

Speaking of time expectations, 15 minutes is a reasonable amount of time for you to create a first draft of a mix map.

Mixing and Remixing

I recommend that you periodically revisit—and possibly redraw—your mix map, perhaps a week later, then a month later, to see how your blended course vision has evolved. A mix map is a malleable vision of a blended course at a given moment in the course design and development process; it’s not an end point. As the design and development process moves forward, remixing the map comes naturally.

In working with mix maps and more broadly with blended course design and teaching, focus on deeply interweaving the various course elements. Hybrid courses can truly be “the best of both worlds” of online and on-the-ground teaching and learning, by building on the strengths of each of these educational modalities, but only with intentional design that explicitly, and seamlessly, meshes the online, in-class and “other” elements of the course!

Resources

The OSU Hybrid Learning website provides downloadable mix map templates and sample mix maps. For more about blended learning, refer to these earlier blog posts: Blended Learning: What Do the Faculty Say? – Part 1 and Part 2, and Susan Fein’s excellent Blended Learning: What Does the Research Show?

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into blended learning, see the Blended Learning Toolkit and Kathryn Linder’s superb guide, The Blended Course Design Workbook.

Blended Learning: What Do the Faculty Say? – Part 2

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Oregon State University has more than 570 hybrid-designated courses. These hybrid (“blended”) courses integrate regularly scheduled on-site classroom meetings with significant online, out-of-classroom components that replace regularly scheduled class meeting time. In this blended learning format, face-to­ face meeting time is generally reduced by 30 to 80% compared to a traditional on-campus course.

Hybrid courses range from large-enrollment general education courses to seminar-style graduate courses. Since 2012 when OSU formally established the hybrid course schedule type, the total enrollment in hybrid courses has exceeded 42,000 students.

OSU Portland Center

Ecampus has recently expanded hybrid course offerings through the new OSU Portland Center, including undergraduate hybrid programs in business, psychology, cybersecurity and human development and family sciences. Portland-based graduate programs include the Master of Arts in Teaching, MBA and graduate certificate in business analytics.

As Susan Fein noted in the previous post, Blended Learning: What Dose the Research Show?, the literature provides a wealth of evidence for the efficacy of hybrid education. But what can instructors who design and teach hybrid courses tell us? Here are some valuable highlights from posts of the most recent Hybrid Faculty Learning Community cohort in the OSU Hybrid Faculty Blog. The members of this cohort were each engaged in the redesign of a more traditional on-campus course into a hybrid course that will be offered during the 2019-20 academic year.

Collaboration: Jillian St. Jacques – Applied Journalism: “Our students are thirsty to work with each other because it is stimulating, plain and simple. . . . They find their own interpersonal relationships incredibly exciting, as they agree, disagree, admire and/or square off with each other in the Arena of the Intellect.”

Creativity: Alina Padilla-Miller – New Media Communications: “Through activities, experiments and use of everyday media, there are a lot of opportunities to fold in the creation process. The process of creating is not only necessary to include in active learning but it’s also incredibly engaging and dare I say it, fun! Whether the class is face-to-face, online or hybrid, incorporating active learning will enrich the course and ultimately the student’s experience with the curriculum. Let the creating begin!”

Excitement: Susan Rodgers – Writing: “This is what’s exciting to me about the hybrid format: instead of simply assigning readings and hoping the students will come in prepared, they’ll do quizzes, discussions, and collaborations before they come to class . . . we can take the conversation very quickly to a deeper and more meaningful level during our f2f time.”

Students working together in class

Flexibility: Dennis Adams – Business: “Students can more easily sort out the variance in their individual ability in this format. Students who require more time and exposure can reread/re-watch the material on their own time.”

Ownership: Michelle Maller – Forestry – “One of the most effective ways for a student to really master a concept is to present/teach that topic to their peers. . . . Creating ways for the students to interact with the content in a way that builds ownership of it can affect the overall learning. A good example of this is to use a discussion board to have each student “teach” their peers about a specific topic covered in that module.”

Roles: Irene Rolston – Anthropology: “Rather than students relying on their ‘sage’ to inform them, we have the ability to transform the classroom from unidirectional communication into multilateral communications between instructor to student and student to student. Approaching this from a hybrid design perspective, using the initial collection and deciphering of data online prior to use in the classroom as, for example, small group discussions, moves the omnipotent sage into the role of facilitator, one who directs the flow of the classroom rather than dominating the stage.”

Skills: Inara Scott – Business : “In a blended classroom, we have a unique opportunity to rethink the structure and content of our courses. . . . Rather than delivering content, we should be thinking about what unique skills we are building in students, and how we can engage them in the process of finding, interpreting, and creating their own content.”

To summarize, intentional hybrid course design and delivery afford opportunities for faculty to create engaging learning experiences that effectively interweave the classroom and online learning environments. This may involve rethinking the roles of the instructors and students, redesigning learning activities and even reconsidering learning outcomes to optimize the teaching-and-learning experience!

What are your perspectives on blended learning? How does this teaching modality compare to fully online or traditional classroom approaches?

Thank you!

Blended Learning: What Do the Faculty Say? – Part 1

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OSU Portland CenterOregon State University now has over 500 hybrid (“blended”) courses including the Ecampus hybrid degree and certificate programs offered through the new Portland Center.

What do OSU faculty say about blended learning? Since 2012, participants in the Hybrid Faculty Learning Community have been blogging about their approaches to blended course design and teaching. The resulting 200+ posts in the Hybrid Faculty Blog are a rich compendium of reflections on hybrid teaching and learning.

As they design hybrid courses, faculty from across OSU describe how they come to terms with a course format that has great potential to successfully engage today’s students, but that can be challenging to do well, especially the first time. Instructors celebrate the possibilities of a course mode that combines “the best of both worlds” of online and face-to-face teaching and learning. Here are selections from their writing about integration of online and face-to-face learning, flipped teaching and student-to-student interaction.

Integration of Online and Face-to-Face Learning Activities

Our face-to-face meetings will be used to integrate all that they have been learning online and will use open-ended questions to engage students in discussions intended to broaden and deepen their thinking about the module’s content. – Ted Paterson, Business

The key method we are using to link the online material and the classroom time is the weekly case study.  Each case study will be tied to the learning objectives for that week, which in turn are mapped to course-level learning objectives…. This case study approach will both illustrate and reinforce the course concepts while also giving the students an opportunity to explore additional concepts. – Sue Carozza, Public Health

Flipped Teaching and Learning

Moving to a flipped approach provides an opportunity to really consider what types of learning materials and strategies deeply engage students in knowledge generation, while taking advantage of the expanding capabilities of electronic media. – John Bolte, Biological and Ecological Engineering (BEE)

Students using technology in blended classroomOnline and classroom experiences will be linked in a variety of ways. Specifically, the online activities will help students prepare for class by completing readings, video lectures, and quizzes prior to class meetings. Class time can then be used to focus on difficult concepts and to expand on current issues in nutrition. – Jennifer Jackson, Nutrition

The goal for the online content is that students arrive in class with a similar level of knowledge after reviewing and being quizzed on background materials. In-class content will then emphasize materials that are likely new to all students, emphasizing engineering design, example calculations, and content…. In this model, the online content will provide the theoretical foundation for diving deeper with in-class content on design. – Desiree Tullos, BEE

Student-to-Student Interaction

Integrating real-time discussion in class has been very fruitful in my hybrid course. I use a Just-In-Time approach where the students are asked a question prior to class, where they participate by posting in a discussion board and replying to each other. The discussion board closes a few minutes after the start of class. If there are points to discuss, I open a new discussion board and the students interact online for four minutes or so. I find that they have gotten to know each other very well in a short time by integrating their online presence with in-class discussions. In general, they are more open to verbally discussing material than previous classes I have taught. – Kathy Hadley, Astronomy

Students working together in blended classOne of the great things that online courses provide is the opportunity to have more transparency throughout a project compared to a non-hybrid class, because the digital material is available all the time and the entire class can have access. In a typical non-hybrid course … the students rarely see the daily or weekly progress and process of how other teams are working. Allowing teams to see one another’s process, progress and being allowed to contribute to other team’s process and progress may create a richer and more transparent experience for students. My hope is that innovative online team experiences will expand students’ collaborative toolkit, [and] help them gain confidence in peer learning. – Andrea Marks, Design

Understanding and fostering students learning from one another is a method of also avoiding the “sage on the stage” problem…. In our field it is important for each future public health professional to internalize that they will need to learn from the communities they will be working in. I believe one way to foster that is to make certain that students are learning from their peers and that we are continually learning from them as well. – Karen Volmar, Public Health

Want to find out more about hybrid teaching and learning? Check out the resources on the OSU Hybrid Learning webpage and review the effective hybrid teaching practices that OSU hybrid faculty have identified. Thinking of designing a hybrid course? Talk to an Ecampus instructional designer and learn how to use a blended learning mix map.

What’s Trending in Teaching and Learning?

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Great places to find answers to this question are the Lilly Conferences on Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning held annually at six sites from coast to coast. These conferences invite participants to engage in lively dialogue about the scholarship of teaching and learning, share best practices and hone teaching skills. Lilly Conferences are not specific to any course modality; they cover classroom, hybrid and online teaching. I found the three topics from August’s Lilly – Asheville Conference of particular interest: alternative approaches to traditional grading, faculty and student empathy, and strategies to enhance the effectiveness of lectures.

Alternative Grading Systems

Michael Palmer,  director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Teaching Excellence, challenged conference attendees to address the question “How does grading influence learning?” He then encouraged examination of alternative approaches to traditional grading practices, and explained specifications (“specs”) grading, which he personally uses. Briefly, specifications grading involves:

  • Grading assignments and assessments on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis, where mastery (passing) is set at a “B” level or better.
  • Bundling assignments and assessments together and allowing students to select these “bundles” based on the final course grade they are seeking. Bundles are aligned with specific course learning outcomes. Higher final grades require students to do more work and/or more challenging work.
  • Building in flexibility by giving students a few tokens at the outset that they can trade in for an extension on an assignment or an opportunity to revise/redo an unsatisfactory assignment.

Advocates of specs grading tout its effectiveness in motivating and engaging students while restoring rigor, providing actionable feedback (Palmer gives audio feedback) and supporting deep learning. To learn more, see Linda Nilson’s book Specifications Grading. Regarding ways to provide feedback that enhances learning in online courses, see Wanted: Effective Instructor Feedback.

Empathy and Student Success

Katherine Rowell of Ohio’s Sinclair Community College spoke eloquently about “The Importance of Teacher and Student Empathy in Student Success.”

  • She noted that positive faculty-student relationships are a principal factor predicting student success. In fact, the 2014 Gallup-Purdue survey found that college graduates were far more likely to be engaged in their work and thriving in key areas of well-being if they had one or more positive relationships with faculty.
  • Rowell encouraged the audience to learn more about the role that empathy plays in student success, and to look at how empathy—by both instructors and students—is manifest in the college classroom, including the online classroom.
  • She recommended Christopher Uhl and Dana Stuchul’s book Teaching as If Life Matters which encourages teachers to nurture students in ways that make learning beneficial for a more meaningful life. In this regard, OSU Business instructor Nikki Brown’s recent post in this blog on meeting students where they are is a excellent place to start.

Improving Lectures

Todd Zakrajsek of UNC-Chapel Hill presented evidence-based strategies to enhance lecture effectiveness. His message can be applied to asynchronous online learning as well as to on-campus courses:

  • Lectures and active learning are not mutually exclusive. Using lectures, including short online lectures, plus active learning can reach more learners better than using either technique in the absence of the other. Think of strategies to get learners to interact with the lecture content!
  • “We have to stop thinking there’s only one kind of lecture.” Just as there are many varieties of active learning, there are multiple kinds of lecturing!  The classic college lecture model is continuous expository lecturing, which can effectively stifle student engagement when delivered non-stop in one-hour doses! It’s useful to consider how other approaches such as case-study, discussion-framing, and problem-solving lectures can be used in online and hybrid courses.
  • We all benefit from examining the research on how learners learn, and applying this knowledge  to inform course development and teaching, including lecture design. For more on this, see The New Science of Learning, co-authored by Zakrajsek and Terry Doyle. Also consider meeting students where they are.

What are your experiences with these topics: Have you explored alternative grading systems? How do you use empathy in your teaching? What are some strategies you use to improve lecture effectiveness and incorporate active learning? Please share your ideas here.

 

Use a Mix Map for Blended Learning

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Along with the vast growth of fully online education, a corresponding trend is the growing popularity of hybrid (or blended) courses and programs. OSU defines a hybrid course as one that includes both regularly scheduled on-site classroom meetings and significant online out-of-classroom components that replace regularly scheduled class meeting time.

The blended learning mix map is a widely used tool to visualize a hybrid course under design or redesign. This simple template of two overlapping circles provides space to list online learning activities, face-to-face learning activities and possibly activities that occur in both learning environments. For example, discussions may be a regular course activity online, in class, or in both environments.

Much of the real value of developing a mix map is gained from drawing arrows to connect each element of the course to one or more other elements. For example, an arrow may show that course videos are linked to weekly quizzes that assess student mastery of the video content. Arrows can also be used to add information about the the pedagogical purpose behind the connection of elements as in a sample mix map from Univ. of Central Florida’s Kathie Holland.

The OSU Center for Teaching and Learning Blended Learning website provides downloadable mix map templates and sample mix maps for inspiration.

If sketching out a mix map for a whole course seems daunting, then beginning with a mix map of a typical week of the course may be the place to start. A weekly mix map, as a representative chunk of the course may provide a conceptual template for many of the other weeks of the same course.

The mix map serves multiple purposes:

  • It gives a snapshot of the balance between online and face-to-face components. For example, does the proposed mix map for your course seem to show a classroom course with some online supplements? Or does it show an online course with an occasional face-to-face check-in?
  • The mix map is useful to diagnose whether a hybrid course under design is actually a course and a half. Use the Enhanced Course Workload Estimator to quickly approximate the weekly student workload in your course. Has a 4-credit course taken on the appearance and corresponding student workload of a 6-credit course? When you add a time estimate to each course element on the mix map (for instance, 2 hours to complete the weekly reading), what do all the activities in a week add up to?  See Credit Hours to learn how an OSU credit is defined.
  • The connecting arrows are helpful to assess whether the course elements are well integrated. Are the online and face-to-face learning activities deeply interwoven or will students perceive the hybrid course as two separate courses, one online and one in-class, running on parallel tracks?
  • The mix map can be used as well to check alignment of learning activities with course learning outcomes or with more granular weekly learning objectives. Ask yourself, how do specific activities and the forms of assessment connected to them on the mix map align with your learning outcomes?

Consider using a mix map! Faculty developing blended courses frequently find that spending even 10-15 minutes sketching out their planned hybrid courses on these “magic circles” can lead to significant insights about course design.

Two Ways to Apply the New Science of Learning . . . Online

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Books about teaching and learningThe New Science of Learning is a slim but instructive volume designed to guide college students to better attune their learning efforts with how their brains function. Authors Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek apply the findings of neuroscience to the daily learning that takes place in higher education. Though the book is written for students, it’s a valuable quick-read for everyone involved in blended and online teaching and student success efforts.

As you look ahead to spring term, let’s consider two ways you can employ Doyle and Zakrajsek’s advice in online and hybrid teaching environments:

Tip 1 – Learning is significantly strengthened by encountering the content in multiple formats or modalities.

  • Problem: Much of the information we encounter online is still largely presented in the form of text. This is unfortunately true even in some poorly designed lecture videos, which are principally a narration of wordy PowerPoint slides, bullet point by boring bullet point.
  • Online teaching strategy: Quality online learning has moved well beyond “text under glass.” Your students will benefit when they are guided beyond text to view visually rich videos, listen to podcasts and other audio, to talk, write, think, reflect, respond and explore content in tactile or kinesthetic ways. Learning is enhanced in  a multimodal environment that helps students build connections by experiencing subject matter in diverse forms. The learner may not initially comprehend a difficult concept from reading it in a text, but may “get it” by interacting with peers in an online discussion or by watching an instructor-created video. Engage your students in online interaction–with the content, with each other and with you–to ensure that they are not merely passive consumers of course materials.

Tip 2 – The distributed practice effect (or “spacing effect”) refers to learning through study of content multiple times, with time gaps between these learning episodes. Extended periods of time with repeated exposure to the content helps form stronger memories. What duration of distributed practice is optimal? See the research on Optimizing Distributed Practice.

  • Problem: In a traditional college course, a student sometimes encounters a particular piece of content only once or twice, say in a lecture and then perhaps a brief mention in a textbook. There can be a tendency for both instructors and students to move through topics rapidly and superficially to get everything on the syllabus covered before the term ends. And, worse yet, study may be compressed into harried late-night sessions before a big exam. Cramming is not a pathway to true learning that endures over time.
  • Online teaching strategy: Facilitate distributed practice by designing assignments and pacing learning activities that encourage repeated engagement with course material over a period of many weeks. By skillfully staging assignments, for example, a term-long group project to develop a collaborative presentation, you guide students to interact with the content many times over a substantial time period. Interim deliverables, such as an annotated bibliography or lit review, an outline or storyboard, and a rough draft, will foster distributed practice. Clear rubrics and ample timely feedback on these various stages increases the probability of more students achieving the course learning outcomes.

Do you use these or similar techniques in your hybrid or fully online teaching? How does the science of learning inform your teaching strategies?

References

Cepeda, N. J., Coburn, N., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., Mozer, M. C., & Pashler, H. (2009). Optimizing distributed practice: Theoretical analysis and practical implications. Experimental Psychology, 56(4), 236.

Doyle, T., & Zakrajsek, T. (2013). The new science of learning: How to learn in harmony with your brain. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Eberly Center – Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). What are best practices for designing group projects? Retrieved from https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/design.html.

Diving in to Adaptive Learning

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Colorful pie chart illustrates student's mastery of various math topics.
The dashboard in McGraw-Hill’s ALEKS courseware shows a math student’s progress on a learning path.

The just-released 2017 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium identifies adaptive learning technologies as one of the most important developments in technology for higher education. The report notes that adaptive learning technologies “can adapt to a student in real time, providing both instructors and students with actionable data. The goal is to accurately and logically move students through a learning path, empowering active learning, targeting at-risk student populations, and assessing factors affecting completion and student success.”

To raise campus awareness of adaptive learning technologies and their potentials, last spring OSU held an Adaptive and Personalized Learning (APL) Open House featuring 12 adaptive software providers and hosted an Adaptive Learning Systems Workshop with Arizona State University adaptive learning expert Dale Johnson. OSU is now in the first year of a multiyear grant from the Assoc. of Public and Land-Grant Universities to accelerate the adoption of adaptive learning technology.

Are you interested in finding out more about the possibilities for adaptive learning in your online and hybrid teaching? Suggested resources:

What sorts of potential do you see for adaptive learning technologies in your teaching?

Liven Up That Intro Discussion!

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Bright red and orange maple leaves against a blue skyResearch supports the value of online student-to-student interaction and building community among learners. Week 1 intro discussions—Let’s get acquainted. Tell us about yourself!—are a staple of interaction among students in online and hybrid courses. Can a Week 1 intro discussion that introduces students to one another also actively engage them in learning course content while building community with peers?

Karen Holmberg, Assoc. Prof. of Creative Writing, uses an “Interview Haiku” exercise in her hybrid WR 241 Introduction to Poetry Writing course that combines students introducing themselves and introducing peers while practicing the popular three-line poetry form.

After being introduced to haiku, syllable counting and marking stresses in the first week, Prof. Holmberg’s students interview partners during an in-class session. (In a fully online course, this step could be done through other means, for instance, in a Google doc or by text or email.) For these intro interviews, she provides a set of six questions such as “Describe your preferred environment: urban, woodland, seaside, desert, etc.?” and “What is your favorite animal and why?”

Text showing portions of interview questionsFollowing the interviews, students write haikus to introduce their interview partners to the class as well as haikus to introduce themselves. Imagine the challenge of introducing someone else, or yourself, in three brief lines!

Each student posts these two intro haikus in an online discussion. Then each student replies to another student by copying and pasting the other student’s two haikus in the reply box and counting and marking the syllables and noting the stressed syllables in the haiku. The instructor can follow up with her students by offering timely feedback individually and collectively through the discussion forum, through comments in the grade book, and in subsequent in-class discussions.

Looking for ideas and effective practices for online discussions that enable learners to share, comprehend, critique and construct knowledge?  Try The Art and Science of Successful Online Discussions.

Do you have an intro discussion assignment that engages learners in course content?

References:

Al-Shalchi, O. N. (2009). The effectiveness and development of online discussions. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 5(1). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no1/al-shalchi_0309.htm

Palenque, S.M., & DeCosta, M. (2014, August 11). The art and science of successful online discussions. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/art-science-successful-online-discussions/

Rubin, B., & Fernandes, R. (2013). Measuring the community in online classes. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 17(3), 115—136. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1018304.pdf

Test Drive This CAR

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Looking for a simple way to evaluate whether your teaching practice is staying on track or jumping the rails?

Mark Francek, a Central Michigan Univ. geography professor, has devised a simple mnemonic to look at his teaching: CAR. Try it out; see if it works for you! There are three elements:

word cloud: community, accountability, relevance, CAR1 – Community: Building community within your class can pay dividends in terms of learner engagement, positive collaboration, and a supportive environment in which to work toward shared learning goals. Francek says, “promoting camaraderie and mutual respect in the classroom should be a teaching priority,” and that it’s incumbent on instructors to foster community. He also encourages instructors to consider how student learning can be applied to the broader community through service learning projects and activities.

2 – Accountability: The use of formative assessment throughout a course can aid in student accountability for learning. Frequent low-stakes assignments, such as weekly quizzes or brief reflective writings, not only help motivate students to move forward through the course content, but also give you significant feedback on student learning. This continual feedback gauges student learning is valuable information for a nimble instructor who can make course adjustments and intervene as needed to support learning.

3 – Relevance: It’s natural for learners to be drawn to subject matter and learning activities that appear relevant to their lives, their interests and their future careers. And course content can be more engaging to your learners if you take the extra step of showing them or, better yet, challenging them to show you, how the subject matter relates to their prior learning.

Although Francek’s CAR model is oriented primarily toward classroom teaching, it is every bit as meaningful in online and hybrid courses. Explore the ways that other recent posts here in the Ecampus CDT blog illustrate this by considering how each of these learning activities can build community, increase accountability for learning and/or make a course relevant to students:

Community, accountability, relevance. These three elements can benefit your teaching practice and your learners.

Reference: Francek, M. Let CAR drive our instruction. Tomorrow’s Professor eNewletter, 1449. Retrieved Dec. 15, 2015, from https://tomprof.stanford.edu/mail/1449