Posted on No Comments on Nurturing Effective Communication in Online Facilitation

Nurturing Effective Communication in Online Facilitation

While Belhaven’s online courses are pre-prepared, there are many ways our faculty can engage in effective communication to enhance the learning experiences of our students. It is this human element that you bring to your class and course that can have a profound impact on your students.  What strategies can you adopt to increase your communication skills and foster an environment of excellence within your virtual classroom?

Introduction and Availability:

Post a personalized introduction to the course, highlighting your availability to assist students. What is the best way for students to contact you?   Provide multiple ways for students to connect – can they best contact you via email, texts, comments in Canvas, or phone?  Let students know you are there to guide and support them as they move through your class.

Timely and Supportive Responses:

Respond promptly to student inquiries, providing clear, concise answers that address their concerns and keep them on track. Professors are to respond to student email requests within 24 hours of receiving that request and within 48 hours on weekends. It is highly recommended that you offer 1-3 live Zoom meetings during your course to help address student confusion and concerns as the issues arise.  Students can attend these sessions, and it is OK for you to offer a participation incentive by crediting participating students as having completed that week’s discussion assignment (they receive full points and don’t need to post anything!).

Guidance on Discussion Etiquette:

Offer guidance on respectful and constructive online discussion behavior, ensuring a positive and inclusive virtual classroom environment. Students can have differing viewpoints, but they must contribute respectful and constructive dialogue. Help guide the discussions towards a respectful exchange of thoughts.

Announcements and Reminders:

The minimum requirement for course announcements is to post one announcement per week. You are not limited to only one per week!  Post explanatory announcements if you have taught your course before and know where students typically struggle with the content.  You can share articles and supplemental materials through the announcement portal.  In your announcements, discuss the results of the previous week’s assignments.  Where did students show an overall strength or great insight?  Identify areas of weakness or misunderstanding that occurred throughout the class.  Offer words of encouragement when students appear to be struggling.

Virtual Office Hours:

Virtual office hours play a pivotal role in student success in the virtual classroom. Depending on your preference, you can establish set hours where you will be available to answer student questions or establish open hours where your students know you are available to help them.  My preference was to not have “official” office hours but to let students know to email me if they desired a phone conversation or Zoom meeting.  I know other professors prefer to establish a routine time when students can contact them.  The form your office hours take is up to you and your personal style, but virtual office hours are a “Must Do” for virtual instruction.

Feedback that Fosters Growth:

Provide feedback on assignments and discussions that highlight students’ strengths and suggest areas for improvement, fostering continuous learning. When working in SpeedGrader, please be aware of some limitations to students receiving your feedback.  Many, if not most, of your students rely on their phones and the Canvas app to keep up with their studies.  This practice makes much of your feedback ineffective because it is not read.  For example, many professors spend hours highlighting and posting comments within a student’s submitted paper.  These very helpful comments address content, construction of the paper, grammar and mechanics, formatting, etc.  But – these comments are not readily visible to students when they view their grades on the app, so they don’t read the comments.  The same is true when you post feedback within the assignment rubric.  Those comments are also not immediately visible to students.  BUT – if you post your feedback in the “Comments” box, that feedback is displayed along with the grade for the assignment, making it easy for students to view the feedback and hopefully understand why their grade is what it is.

Summarizing Discussions:

Summarize key points from online discussions to help students see their peers’ collective insights and contributions. But – do this as a course announcement, not a discussion post. Many students have told me that they just “check the box” for discussions and rarely go back to read what was said by their classmates.  By posting a summary of the class discussion as a course announcement, you can bring closure to the topic and highlight areas of insight or correct any misconceptions that arose within the discussion post.

Celebrating Milestones:

Acknowledge and celebrate student achievements, such as completing challenging assignments or engaging in thoughtful discussions.  While being careful not to publicly embarrass a student, let the class know when something was well done.  With the student’s permission, post an exemplary response, or present an insightful student’s idea or solution to a problem.  Milestones can also be non-academic.  When students share their personal achievements with you, with their permission, share these with the class.  Did someone recently complete a half-marathon?  Let others know!  New baby? Celebrate! Publicly recognizing student achievements elevates morale and helps develop a community mindset within your class.

To conclude, facilitating student engagement and maintaining clear and supportive communication can enhance the online learning experience and create a strong sense of community within your virtual classroom.

Posted on No Comments on Discussion Questions in Online Courses

Discussion Questions in Online Courses

In most cases online discussion questions in online courses fall into one of two categories. They are either essay posts, or true discussions. At Belhaven, the former is the typical format.

For either format, student engagement in the course and satisfaction with the course and the Instructor is increased when Instructors post responses to student posts. Obviously, posting a response to every post is unrealistic and is actually less meaningful than purposeful responses.  Ideally, we would like to see Instructors respond to student posts in three ways:

  1. If the student’s post is excellent, then responding to that, especially pointing out any parts that were particularly on the mark can have a powerful effect in encouraging students and reinforcing engagement overall.
  2. If the student’s post is off-target or just plain wrong, then posting a response is a necessity to keep the student from assuming that since you didn’t reply they must have done OK. In this case, the best response is to post a question that has the effect of directing the student toward the right answer or thought process. Alternately, but less beneficial, the response should point out the error and provide the correct information.
  3. Finally, and this one should be a regular practice, the Instructor posts a reply to the discussion at the end of the week. This can be a recap of the discussion posts, pulling out the best comments from different students, but should at least contain a response that reinforces the correct information for that discussion post.

In some cases, the discussion question is reflective rather than asking for an answer to a specific question. Even in these cases, the Instructor’s engagement in the discussion has a positive effect on student engagement.

I know you are teaching because you care. Since we aren’t policing Instructor responses to discussion posts it might seem like this is an area where you can slide. While there are some who do that, those who are taking their role seriously do not. Just checking the post responses for the last few weeks it is clear to me that more than half of those teaching are making an effort to engage with their students in the discussion posts. I’d love to see that number climb to 100%.

Blessings,

Rick

Posted on No Comments on Strategies for Improving Student Performance

Strategies for Improving Student Performance

The information below comes from a whitepaper released by McGraw Hill regarding the devastating effect procrastination can have on student performance.  Here are some of the strategies they share from their research to improve student performance. I encourage you to read through the list and pick at least one or two of the ideas shared and begin to implement in your courses.

Instructors, remind students not to delay starting assignments! Make it a point to detect the early signs of procrastination and intervene with students who are lagging. If you’re using online learning management systems like Connect, you can use the system to look at patterns of student activity and engagement with the course that can help identify
which students may need a little extra assistance. Additionally, by taking some extra teaching steps and employing a few simple strategies, you can likely help the procrastinators before it becomes too late:

Intervene early: Intervene with struggling students before things go too far and grades suffer. Meet and work with them to develop a plan to successfully complete assignments and the course. Pay attention to early warning signs of struggle: late assignments, poor assignment quality, lack of communication, not responding to feedback, and displaying apathy. It also means being proactive and reaching out to students showing these signs and asking if and when, they started an assignment.

Use the data: The fact is, many students may not even know the unintended consequences of procrastination. Kick off the class with a short lecture or video presentation on procrastination. . . .  Let them know that while procrastination is a natural behavior, those not staying on top of when they start an assignment have a greater likelihood of receiving a poor score and course grade.

Stay in touch: Ask students to notify you via email when they start an assignment. When about 75 percent of students have emailed you, reach out to the ones you haven’t heard from and encourage them to get started.

Measure progress: Administer mini-surveys to students to assess their progress on assignments and get involved with those who are not tracking to deadlines, or the assignment start threshold.

Monitor: Actively monitor student assignment start times in the online learning management system. When about 75 percent of them have started an assignment, contact the remaining 25 percent to get them started.

Nudge and repeat: “Nudge” them to start assignments with plenty of time before the due date. Repeat this message throughout the course, weaving it into weekly emails,
discussion posts, or any time you’re communicating with students. Use the carrot and not the stick and nudge them with extra credit for early assignment submissions.

Manage time: Integrate and lecture on-time management strategies in the first class. Listen to their ideas, provide feedback, and be clear that an important strategy is starting assignments early enough to do well on them.

Practice reflection: Early in the course, ask students to write a self-reflection paper or email on how to avoid procrastination in this course and in their college career. Have them be specific in identifying their habits and recommending specific solutions.

Text and call: Send a group text to the class reminding them to start an assignment. Or give them a call if you think they are starting an assignment late—it might just help to light a fire and get them moving on an assignment. One-on-one conversations might also reveal a student who needs assistance and an opportunity for you to help get them on the right track.

Make a timeline: Ask students to turn in a short project timeline outlining when they plan to start an assignment, meet deliverable milestones, and their strategies for staying on track. Review assignment grades and contact students who received less than a “B+” and discuss how they did the assignment work relative to their timeline. Provide helpful feedback for the next assignment and timeline.

Check-in regularly: Touch base with students, get them thinking and talking about starting assignments and making progress. Reminders can happen via text, email, when soliciting feedback or commenting on their work, or even dropping a thoughtful “don’t
procrastinate” note in the student chat room. Be proactive and show students that you’re interested in setting them up for success.

Posted on No Comments on Rubric for Writing Assignments & Final Papers

Rubric for Writing Assignments & Final Papers

Grading is one of the most challenging parts of teaching. This is even more complicated when you want to be fair and objective, but the quality of the work submitted is so uneven. The best way to solve that is to use a standard rubric for assessing writing assignments/final papers. According to Wikipedia: “In education terminology, rubric means “a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students’ constructed responses”.[1] Rubrics usually contain evaluative criteria, quality definitions for those criteria at particular levels of achievement, and a scoring strategy.”

There are several ways to construct a rubric, but doing so can seem overwhelming and time-consuming. So, I’ve built you a rubric that is extremely easy to use.  You can find it at this LINK.

The Directions for using the Rubric are on one of the tabs of the file you will find on blazenet.  If you are inquiring from outside of Belhaven’s system, send me a request at rupchurch@belhaven.edu.  Keep in mind that the criteria language on the rubric are not original, nor do I have any idea where it originated.

Here are the Directions:

1 Review rubric and tweak as necessary, including adding course name and number along with the points for the assignment.
2 Save the blank rubric as a .pdf and attach to an announcement to students indicating that the rubric will be used to grade the assignment.
3 When grading the assignment, open the rubric in Excel and enter the appropriate number in the Faculty Score column. If you have entered the total points for the assignment, the spreadsheet will calculate the final points.
4 Save the completed rubric as a pdf for each student
5 Upload to the assignment under Speedgrader (at the bottom of the right column) – under comments. Add a comment letting the student know there is a grading rubric attached along with any other comments desired.
6 Repeat for each student

I want to encourage you to give this a try. Once your students get over the shock, they will perform better and you will have a better ability to communicate more objectively and evenly.

Posted on No Comments on Irreducible Minimum meets Collaborative Learning Strategy

Irreducible Minimum meets Collaborative Learning Strategy

When these two concepts intersect, powerful learning can occur.  However, for there to even be an intersection, the Instructor must accept a few basic premises:

  1. That student learning is different than teaching.  I have heard it said that “teaching is an art.”  I can believe that, but what makes it an art is whether or not learning occurs.  Teaching experiences designed without consideration of how or even if it impacts student learning are empty experiences, which can be equally frustrating for Instructor and student.
  2. That adults learn differently than traditional age college students.  Because of their life experiences the studies show they are better at synthesizing material, particularly if it is presented in a way that allows them to grasp relevance.
  3. That there is more than one way to “skin a cat” as my Mom used to say, i.e. there are other ways to teach besides lecture.
  4. Finally, that there are some things about any subject which are more important than others and which are crucial to mastery of the whole (this is the irreducible minimum c.f. The Seven Laws of the Learner by Bruce Wilkinson).

When these premises are accepted, the Instructor can look at the material to be covered for the class session and, because of experience and education, determine which topics are crucial.  With that knowledge, it is easy to arrange the class session to focus on the crucial topics first, before moving on to the other topics, which are still important but don’t qualify as crucial.

Once the irreducible minimum has been identified, now comes the choice of how to present the material, i.e. what learning strategies will you employ to insure these crucial topics are not just taught but learned.  While those activities include lecture, it is probably the most over used  and least effective technique employed by Instructors.  There are other articles in this blog which talk about collaborative learning activities and any search engine will turn up hundreds if not thousands of ideas, so I won’t include those in this blog post.    Suffice it to say, to contemplate what it will take to achieve student learning will require more time and energy as well as some creativity.  It will mean becoming comfortable with a certain amount of creative chaos in the classroom, something may Instructors find uncomfortable.  On the plus side, this intersection of Irreducible Minimum and Collaborative Learning Strategy will dramatically improve the learning of the students in your class and may have an unexpected consequence of re-invigorating you love for the “art” of teaching.

Originally posted November, 2014

Posted on No Comments on Creating a Team Project Covenant

Creating a Team Project Covenant

This is a repost with updated links

Many of the courses in the Adult Studies Programs for Belhaven University include a Team Project.  The inclusion of the Team Project is valuable on many fronts:  It provides the opportunity to learn to work together, maximizes group resources, allows for synergistic achievement, just to mention a few.  It is also one of the most frustrating experiences for many students who complain about “freeloaders” who don’t do the work and either drag everyone’s grade down or force others to carry the extra load, often without the Instructor noticing or seeming to care.

The best solution to this and one which falls in line with our goals and mission is the Team Project Charter.  Unfortunately, it is often ignored because it takes time to work out and many Instructors and even team members fail to see the value, wanting to jump straight into the project.  This is almost always a mistake leading inevitably to the complaints mentioned above.

The Team Project Covenant is important because it outlines the basic expectations and is signed by each member of the team.  The basic parts include:

  • Group goals and/or purpose.
  • Planned meeting time, place, and agenda.
  • Clearly understood attendance requirements and penalties for absences.
  • Discussion of responsibilities of members within teams.
  • Discussion plan for meetings.
  • Conflict management and resolution, penalties for constitutional covenant breaches, and plan for constitutional covenant changes.

When these items are spelled out it is much easier to pull the document back out at the beginning of a Team meeting and address any problems and the potential penalties for covenant breaches.  It empowers teams to function smoothly and to stay focused, while avoiding freeloading.

There is an example of the Team Project Covenant on Blazenet under Student Live/Services – you can find it HERE  (you must have a Belhaven login to access this document).

If you haven’t wanted to take time for this in the past, I strongly encourage you to make time going forward.  It will provide a better experience for the students, less frustration and grousing for you to deal with, and, more importantly, allows students to see how to deal with situations if a positive format that they can use in the future.

Here is another article which also describes the importance of the Team Project Charter:  Creating an Effective Team Charter

Posted on No Comments on Team Projects – Student Actions

Team Projects – Student Actions

I posted the material below to the Adult Learner Blog but I thought you would like to see it as well. If you use this process you can hopefully cut down on the problems which arise from team projects.  Note the italicized comments which were not included in the post the Adult Learner Blog. 

Team Projects are often the most dreaded part of a course. While not all our courses include a Team Project, there are still several which do. So, the question is, “What can I do, personally, to make the team experience a positive one (and also get a good grade)?”  I’m glad you asked. Here are several ideas for improving the outcome of your team project:

  1. Make sure you complete the Team Covenant the first meeting of your team. This can be found on Blazenet under StudentLife/Services in the Documents. While completing this may take a few minutes, the value comes in having everyone on the same page – especially when it seems like some in the group are dropping the ball. Calling out those who aren’t complying with the Covenant expectations may be necessary, but it is much easier if the Covenant exists. If you make time for this in the first or second class session it can help the whole group succeed.
  2. Make sure everyone has a copy of the Team Evaluation rubric. This can be found in the same place on Blazenet. The important thing here is to make clear to everyone up front that you are going to be brutally honest in completing this form at the end of the project. Help the students understand that you are going to pay attention to these evaluations.
  3. Do your best to stay engaged in the Project, completing the expectations assigned to you. Don’t hesitate to check in with other team members on their progress.
  4. I HIGHLY recommend you use either a Google Doc and/or Google Slides for your project and include the Instructor.  Both of these are free, and it can easily be determined who contributed and how much they contributed.  The team leader should start the Document/Slides and then share it with the rest of the team members.  That way you can all work from different locations at the same time on the same presentation or document. Both also have chat capabilities built in so you can “talk” in real time about the project.
  5. You may not have tried it before, but Canvas has a Zoom link on the left panel which can be used for video conferencing and screen sharing. This means you don’t have to set up another time to get together, you can video conference. This is a simple product and it works great – you can also record the session to further prove who participated and who didn’t. Just identify who will be setting up the meetings.

Team projects, when done effectively, can enhance your knowledge and skills. If you incorporate group software like I describe above it can also make you more valuable at work.

Posted on No Comments on Poll Everywhere – What, Why, How

Poll Everywhere – What, Why, How

WHAT?

Poll Everywhere is a web-based tool which easily builds into powerpoint presentations to allow students to respond from their mobile devices. It presents the results in real time, allowing for evaluation of knowledge, or as a prompt for discussion.

Here is a short video which demonstrates it’s use.

https://youtu.be/QzX2ZtjhSwY

WHY?

Using Polleverywhere is relatively simple and can definitely liven up a presentation.  It also allows individuals who rarely speak in class to contribute in a low threat environment. Using this type of tool makes the discussion more relevant and students experience a greater sense of understanding the material

HOW?

The video above describes the process pretty clearly, but here is an article which also goes into detail about how to use Poll Everywhere:

Great ways to use Poll Everywhere in the classroom

Posted on No Comments on What Do Modern Learners Expect from their Instructors

What Do Modern Learners Expect from their Instructors

I was reviewing some of the videos available through Mentor Commons to find one I thought you would find helpful and I ran across this one.  It is about 18 minutes and I definitely think you will find something useful here.

You can access it at this LINK.

Blessings,

Rick