Melissa and Janet’s article “Making an Online Summer Bridge Program High Touch” was recently published in the Journal of College Student Development. The article describes the creation of the Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience (CUBE), a hybrid program that includes 6 weeks of online programming during the summer and 10 weeks of face-to-face programming during fall term of the students’ first year.
Citation:
Eblen-Zayas, M. & Russell, J. (2019). Making an Online Summer Bridge Program High Touch. Journal of College Student Development 60(1), 104-109. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sarah Calhoun, Janet Russell, and Celeste Sharpe presented a poster (co-authored with Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Iris Jastram, and Kristin Partlo) titled “Perspectives on connecting SoTL across the (co-) curriculum at a small liberal arts college” at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Conference in Bergen, Norway. The poster presented three examples of overlapping initiatives at Carleton, and the ways in which these projects are surfacing gaps and providing critical foundation for a more concerted, campus-wide effort. These findings will also be presented at an LTC presentation winter term. The poster and bibliography are available at http://bit.ly/issotl2018-connecting. An image of the poster is below.
authors: Sarah Calhoun, Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Janet Russell, and Celeste Sharpe.
It’s important for all of us to get feedback and the timeliness of feedback matters too. Remember how it felt when you submitted something to your doctoral thesis committee to review and they took FOREVER to get back to you? Or when you posted that picture on Facebook and the folks you thought would love it didn’t even give it a like let alone a comment? Timely feedback to students is useful to their learning and could be that thing that helps them feel like they belong at Carleton.
When designing or revising your course, one way to situate the types of feedback you’ll give is by using the classic Backward Design model by Wiggins and McTighe. Specifically, it can be helpful to use their diagram for setting curricular priorities into alignment with the types of assessment you might use. We can imagine that quizzing might best align with the concepts or outcomes that are important for students to know or to have facility with in order to wrestle with the BIG ideas or “enduring understanding” of a course.
Diagram of curricular priorities and assessment types
Quizzing, and particularly multiple choice quizzing done outside the classroom (such as implemented via Moodle, auto-graded, and reported to the gradebook), can make frequent, meaningful feedback for students not only possible but efficient.
Frequent low stakes “testing” (i.e. the need to retrieve information whether in a quiz or otherwise) promotes learning (Roediger and Butler 2011). Moreover, frequent quizzing, besides promoting memory, increases the likelihood of transfer (Carpenter 2012).
You can also give feedback on these quizzes. The same Roediger and Butler–but this time in 2008–showed that while multiple choice questions improve student performance, feedback to students on their answers provides additional benefit. If that feedback is explanatory as to why an answer is wrong the transfer effect is stronger than simple feedback saying the answer is wrong (Moreno and Mayer, 2005). Crafting feedback is decidedly not efficient though! But…it may still be worth your effort in terms of student learning and if you reuse the quizzes your time investment will pay off. Moodle can help here too by making it easy to add feedback specific to each of the possible choices students can make in the quiz. And if you’re teaching a course that uses a textbook you should be aware than many textbooks provide banks of questions with answers and feedback and this can certainly lighten your load.
As always, AT is here to help you if you want to consider this pedagogical move. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me (jrussell@carleton.edu) or any ATer if you have questions or concerns or would like to work with us!
Citations:
Butler AC and Roediger HL III (2008). Feedback enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory and Cognition 36, 604-616.
S.K. Carpenter (2012),Testing enhances the transfer of learning, Current Directions in Psychological Science (Sage Publications, Inc), 21(5).
Moreno and R.E. Mayer (2005), Role of guidance, reflection, and interactivity in an agent-based multimedia game, Journal of Educational Psychology 97(I).
Roediger HL III and Butler AC (2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, 20-27.
Wiggins, Grant P., and Jay McTighe (2011). The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units. Alexandria, Va: ASCD.
I’m already excited to be a part of the team hosting this Instructional Video Workshop at Carleton in late July! Attendees will not only take-way a concrete and replicable process for creating process, but they’ll create [at least] 3 Instructional Videos they can start using right away. The seats filled-up so fast, there is no doubt we’ll be doing more of these in the future! More information on the workshop itself is available here. And if you’d like to be notified when we host another one, please complete this short form. — dann
Academic Technology has conducted short assessments of in-class clicker use across several 100 level courses in the sciences and social sciences in both the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years. For all courses surveyed, the students agreed that clickers made class more engaging by helping them participate more openly, increase their attention in class, think more deeply about their answer, and hone their critical thinking skills. Here are a few more details:
Podcasts are digital audio files which can be listened to by streaming or downloading.
Why use podcasts?
Podcasts are sometimes used in lieu of a paper assignment or to augment a paper assignment. A podcast is devoid of visual material (think NPR) and this can be useful for focusing student attention. Continue reading Quickstart for Podcasts
Hey Folks, spring is on us. Here is a little of what I’ve been up to, and what I’m looking forward to.
Leaning on my MFA in Digital Cinema and 15 years of teaching experience, I’ve designed a stand-alone two credit course focused on Civic Engagement and Documentary Filmmaking that I’ll be co-teaching with the impressive Palmar Alvarez-Blanco here at Carleton. The curriculum can actually be coupled with nearly any course, pairing students with community organizations that need greater support and visibility. Students will spend the term researching, meeting with, and interviewing members of these community organizations, and then . . . giving a tangible video resource back to that community organization. We’ll cover topics such as bias recognition, visual storytelling strategies, interview techniques, non-linear editing, and social media marketing. This is going to be a fun and engaging class that results in rich civic engagement, valuable documentary filmmaking experience, and a concrete and useful video for several community organizations.
I’m also going to hit the road this spring presenting at conferences including OLC, the Online Learning Consortium, in Nashville Tennessee and at Innovate! Teaching with Technology conference at the University of Minnesota Morris. I’ll be presenting sessions on Planning, Producing, and Evaluating Instructional Video, and Creating Effective Instructional Videos, and I’ll be co-leading a discussion on Online Teaching and Learning for Small Liberal Arts Schools with my colleagues Janet Russell and Andrew Wilson.
Spring is also exciting because one of my personal projects–a compact teleprompter I call the Little Prompter, is ready to hit the market. Over the past year, I worked with a creative and crafty colleague on the design (Thanks, Eric Mistry up at St. Scholastica!); I then ran a successful fundraising campaign to get it manufactured, and am now ready to market and sell it. The Little Prompter is more than just a pet-project, too. It’s got great pedagogical value. Even for experienced instructors, delivering a lesson on camera can be a little intimidating–and even minor discomfort and hesitation on camera can greatly impact how a viewer perceives the speaker and how long a viewer stays engaged with the content. Now, with the Little Prompter and a little pre-planning, faculty can flawlessly deliver their lesson directly into the camera—improving eye-contact and viewer retention. Faculty here at Carleton (and around the world) can learn more about the Little Prompter—and even order one for yourself at www.littleprompter.com.
This Spring Term online teaching and learning is much on my mind.
I’ll be presenting at OLCInnovate 2018 in Nashville, Tennessee this April. OLC, Online Learning Consortium, pairs up with MERLOT (for those of you who remember this repository) for their big conferences. I’ve got a couple presentations but for this update I’m focused on the one titled “Is online teaching and learning relevant for small residential liberal arts colleges?” It’s in the session category ‘Conversations, Not Presentations’ which means I get to talk with attendees rather than at them and I’m hopeful for some interesting and useful conversation.
For the OLC conversation I’ll be pulling from my Carleton work with CUBE, Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience. CUBE consists of an online 6 week summer portion and a traditional Fall Term portion. Summer CUBE has two primary goals: 1) to strengthen the quantitative skills of incoming students and 2) to connect participants to the campus community before they arrive on campus.
CUBE in turn has heavily contributed to Carleton’s LACOL (Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning) work on the QLAB project and this will inform my OLC conversation as well. QLAB is the nickname applied to a multi-campus development and educational research initiative to assist our students with readiness for their quantitative work across the curriculum, and to investigate the role that online resources may play in this.
And all of this online teaching and learning work at Carleton is going easier for me because of my time at Georgetown University which was just prior to coming to Carleton. There, in my position as Director of Technology Enhanced Learning, I helped design and implement online courses and MOOCs, and in my position as adjunct professor, I taught an online course.
I won’t rely on my experiences alone though to pull off a good conversation at OLC! I’ll be tracking the current buzz about online T&L and that includes a few folks even talking about it in the context of small liberal arts schools:
