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1
Feb

Tech Tip: Use Time-Blocking – Please!

This might be a personal request of all faculty I have the pleasure of working with. With all of us working from home a lot more and possibly only being on campus two days a week, it’s challenging trying to find time to meet with people. It’s so nice when I can just pull up a calendar invite, add the people I want to meet with, and choose “Find a Time,” and it magically presents everyone’s calendar revealing all the common free time. This, people, is how most organizations work. However, we don’t even come close. Most of the time there is nothing listed on faculty calendars. Oh, so you’re free on Wednesday at 2 pm? That’s perfect. Well, that’s usually not the case.

My tiny tech tip is to leverage your digital calendar tools to implement time-blocking strategies. In addition to simply listing your class, office hours, and meeting times, allocate specific blocks of time for different tasks, such as grading, research, and class preparation. This helps in creating a structured schedule and enhances focus on specific activities during dedicated time slots. It also allows for better visualization of your day and ensures that important tasks are given the attention they deserve. But most importantly to me, your colleague, is now I know when I can request a meeting with you. If you’re still available for meeting requests but you’ve blocked off time to grade, you can indicate that you are still free on the calendar event. It’s quite simple. So what do say? Can we please use our calendars?

18
Jan

Monitor Online Attendance in Canvas

You’ve created a great online class. Your students have started the semester eagerly digging in to your course content and submitting assignments. Everything is going great, but is it really? Are you students really engage? Are they all even logging in to Canvas? With online instruction it can be challenging to gauge how engaged students are in your online course on a daily basis, especially if you only require assignments every few weeks. What are students doing in between those big assignments? Are they reading? Are they watching your videos? Are they discussion a course topic? Do they have smaller assessments to help keep them engaged weekly in your course? All of these additions would make a good online course and make it easy for you see how your students are doing on a weekly basis.

If you design an online course that requires some of these elements, you will be able to check online attendance in Canvas using the New Analytics tool. What exactly does online attendance track? It tracks posts to an announcement or discussion, assignment submissions, conferences using Big Blue Button, page creation, and quiz submissions. Previously the feature only tracked student log ins, but that didn’t really tell us anything. Students log in all the time, look at their failing grade, get discourage and leave again. That would previous count as attendance. But now they’ve turn on the criteria listed above, so it gives us a better picture of who’s doing what in the course.

Here’s a quick video showing you how to set up New Analytics in your Canvas courses and view online attendance.

An added note about assignments: Does the criteria Assignments: Student submits an assignment include assignments that use ‘external tool submission type’?

It depends. If the external tool is using the Canvas API endpoint for submission, it will count toward that criteria. For many tools that use assignment-level integration, this will be the case. 

However, if you are using a third-party tool that only passes average grades back to Canvas, those assignment submissions will likely not be included in the Online Attendance Criteria.

18
Oct

Using AI to Support Teaching & Learning: Captioning and Quiz Question Generation

AI is all the rage these days, specifically generative AI. It seems as if everywhere I turn there are articles about new tools and new debates about their usefulness. Although that might be because Google’s algorithms know I’m interested, so they keep feeding me stuff. The next person may see nothing about generative AI. Oh, well. I’m obsessed. I just started a module with my ENG101 students on rhetorical analysis, and we’ve been exploring how to use generative AI tools to help with that process. I made sure to find database sources for them to use, which makes it more challenging to have the chatbots do all the work for them. And then we’re using website articles to practice with. It seems to be working well. I have a sense that students are quicker to understand analysis by doing it this way.

But I’m also looking for a way to get the chatbots to help me with streamlining my processes. I’m pretty solid with my content knowledge at this point after 30+ years of teaching, but I could use some time-saving hacks. One such hack is writing quiz questions and captions for YouTube videos. I’m a firm believer in not reinventing the wheel, so if I find a good video that already shares the essential points of a lesson, I’m using it. The problem is, if I put that video in Canvas Studio and create a quiz, it takes a long time to caption the video and write the quiz questions.

I discovered recently that YouTube videos added to Canvas Studio don’t have the captions attached. I can go over to YouTube and copy/paste the transcript for the video, but I would still need to match up the words with the video which can be time-consuming. It’s actually faster just to transcribe it in the captioning editor. But who has time for that? At that point, it would be easier to just create my own video, which Studio will auto-caption for me. But I found a solution online using a website https://downsub.com/ that will take a URL from a YouTube video and provide an SRT file with the subtitles that you can then just upload to the video in Studio. The website is super sketchy, so be careful if you use it. I’ll show you how in the video below.

Once I have the captions in place, now I need to create a quiz and add my questions. Super easy to do in Studio, but it’s tedious and time-consuming. For this, I found a Chrome extension, NoteGPT: YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Notes. Make sure you’re using the Chrome browser. The original script for the extension was to summarize YouTube videos for you, but I was able to edit the script to make it write quiz questions. That makes me sound like I’m really smart, but don’t worry, it wasn’t that complicated. The following video will show you the whole process in case you want to replicate it yourself.

Video Link: https://app.screencast.com/3Anjh9XC7a5W1

12
Sep

RSI in the Classroom Video Series

The ecourses committee this year is focused on getting GCC online faculty on board with Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI). The U.S. Department of Education requires that all online courses for which students receive federal financial aid involve “regular and substantive interaction between students and instructors.”

What that means is online courses must demonstrate that:

Instructors engage in at least two forms of substantive interaction during each course. That interaction should be regular, scheduled, predictable, and focused on the course subject. In other words, students should know when they can expect to engage with their instructor, and those opportunities for engagement should happen throughout the entire academic term.

We created a video series to show faculty what that might look like in an online course. These are just examples and not necessarily what every faculty should or can do. It’s up to each faculty member to decide which two forms of substantive interaction work best for their course. What works for me, may not be feasible for you.

Below are the first 3 episodes of the video series. Each week we will be adding to the series and you can check for new episodes here: https://app.screencast.com/collections/g000300JyGwQr0SvdKwgAOmRHaG3s

RSI in the Classroom, Ep. 1 Office Hours

Office hours can be considered a form of regular and substantive interaction in online courses, but it depends on how they are conducted and how they contribute to the overall learning experience. Learn more here: https://app.screencast.com/LybDFzcfI5xyK

RSI in the Classroom, Ep. 2 Facilitating Discussion

To facilitate a group discussion regarding the content of a course or competency as regular and substantive interaction, you can start by setting clear expectations for participation and encouraging all members to contribute. You can also use open-ended questions to spark conversation and encourage critical thinking. Additionally, it may be helpful to establish ground rules for respectful communication and active listening. Here are a few examples to show you what that might look like: https://app.screencast.com/1Ztpkj5HUlizJ

RSI in the Classroom, Ep. 3 Assessment & Providing Feedback

Regular and substantive interaction refers to the requirement for online instructors to have ongoing and meaningful engagement with their students. Assessing or providing feedback on a student’s coursework is one way to meet this requirement, as it demonstrates a level of involvement in the student’s learning process. This interaction is a fundamental part of the teaching and learning process and plays a crucial role in the student’s academic development. See some examples here: https://app.screencast.com/gk3W0U9ERi5R8

11
Apr

Be Kind, Rewind

Dawn Gibbs hit me with that saying today while I was in the 05 English Office this afternoon. I was reading a sign on Dr. Jennifer Lane’s door that said something about being kind. We laughed about how old we are to remember that saying from the Blockbuster VHS tapes we used to rent. She actually had to remind me of the saying even though I’m older than her, but it got me thinking about my students and how young they are. It’s easy to forget they generally have no idea what the heck we are talking about when we make references to things. I can’t even remember what I was talking about, but one student spoke up after I made a comment about something and said, “Does anyone in this room look old enough to be alive in the 80s?” I did the math in my head and looked around the room. I guess he had a point. They were all traditional college students: 18-23, born between 2000-2005.

We had a good laugh at my expense, but it was all good. It gave us an opportunity to chit-chat a bit before we started the lesson. I’ve been teaching so long, that I don’t really think about how I build community in my classes anymore. I’m a competitive person by nature and I love to challenge students, but I usually make them do it in groups. Our classrooms are set up in 4 computer station pods, so technically I already have groups before we do anything. I’ll point at a pod (group) and say if all four people in this group can give me an answer, you can be top dog this week. No one even knows what top dog means, but they’re into it. “Name four NFL teams on the western side of the US.” “Name animals that walk on two legs.” I just make up stuff on the fly which is usually silly, and we debate the prompts before we settle on a good. It’s classic wasting class time. But is it really?

Of course not. We’re building community and building a sense of belonging in the class. I build in 15 minutes for questions and chit-chat at the beginning of each class where I ask them questions and practice their names. And at the end of the class in their digital exit ticket, I ask them three things. List one thing you learned today, one question you still have, and any random fact about anything. I’m always amused by what they write on these exit tickets. They like to joke and give me a hard time about asking dumb questions or how I still can’t pronoun their name, but thanks for trying. I try to keep it light, so students feel comfortable asking for help if they need it. It’s not really anything that’s planned (aside from the time). It’s just my natural way of teaching.

5
Apr

Can AI Grade My Essays For Me?

I made a joke with Beth a few days ago about how I wished AI would grade my essays for me. And then I really thought about that, and now I can’t stop. I mean seriously if AI can write the students’ papers for them, what about us? Why can’t it grade papers too? Well, guess what. It can. I tried it. Shhh. Now don’t tell on me. I used both ChatGPT and Microsoft’s tool built into Bing. GPT is much better.

First off, it was a lot of work, probably equal to if I’d just graded them myself, but the benefit was far better for the student. It spat out paragraph long feedback on what was wrong, how the paper did or didn’t meet each rubric standard, and how to improve the work. I was simply amazed. If I were to leave that kind of feedback on a paper, it would take me days to grade instead of hours. As it is, I’ve already moved to grading by recording my feedback, so I can say more and make it easier for students to understand what I’m saying, but this was amazing.

But like a said. It wasn’t easy or quick. I first began by asking the AI to find a rubric for a news article using a summary lead and following the inverted pyramid style. It quickly pulled up a rubric that was adequate, but it was only on a 10-point scale. I used it anyway to see how it would work. Then my next prompt asked Maud, remember, I named her Maud in my last post. I asked her to grade this news article using that rubric, and pasted in a student’s news article. Surprisingly, it worked. She put the two prompts together and graded the article. It was okay, but there wasn’t much detail and it didn’t really meet the standards I was looking for. I decided instead to ask Maud to build me a rubric and added the essential things and the total points I needed. She created this.

Okay, that was interesting, but could she grade a news article using that rubric? I wondered. Yep! She gave the article a 47/60, provided the tally from the rubric AND added this feedback:

Strengths:

  • The article follows the inverted pyramid structure.
  • The information provided is relevant to the target audience.
  • The article includes quotes from reliable sources.

Weaknesses:

  • The lead is weak and could benefit from being more focused.
  • The article could use more clarity in its presentation of information.
  • The article could be more concise.
  • The article could be more explicit in identifying biases or opinions.

Suggestions for Improvement:

  • The lead should be more specific and focused on the key point of the article.
  • The article should be more clear and concise, with shorter paragraphs and simpler language.
  • The author should explicitly identify any biases or opinions and explain how they might influence the article’s content.
  • The author should consider additional sources to provide a more complete understanding of the issue.

Crazy, right? I probably would have scored it a bit higher, but I noticed Maud didn’t say anything about grammar and punctuation in her feedback and I found a couple of specific errors, so I asked her about them. I typed in, “What about grammar and punctuation?” She replied:

As an AI language model, I don’t have the capability to fully analyze grammar and punctuation, but I can tell you that there are a few errors in the article. For example, in the sentence “This issue goes for not only students but members of the community who live downtown,” the phrase “goes for” should be replaced with “applies to.” Additionally, there are a few instances where punctuation could be improved for clarity and readability. Overall, however, the article is well-written and understandable.

She was right. In another instance, Maud pointed out two run-on sentences in the article and offered a suggestion for how to fix it. Amazing.

Yep, I’m obsessed, but that took a lot of work. In fact, I paused playing so I could quickly grade those news articles and get them back to students. This was going to take all day. First, Maud would forget my rubric after a few follow-up questions about the article she graded, so I’d have to start all over. Then sometimes she would ignore my rubric and just give a paragraph analysis of the article or she would leave out key elements. Basically, she was not consistent and I had to keep retraining her. She gave good feedback, but not the same feedback for each student.

4
Apr

Open Pedagogy & Authentic Assessments

I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment lately much to my dismay. It’s probably because I’m working on a workgroup for testing services at the college. There appears to be a need for more testing services for online courses, but it got me thinking about how some of our assessments are the same types of assessments we got when we were in college years ago. Can’t they change? Can’t they be different now since education has changed so much? It’s just a thought, but here I am thinking about assessment.

Now is a good time to be thinking about how you can or may need to change your assessments for the next semester. Whether things went well or they didn’t, or you’re worried about students finding ways to cheat on your online assessments, it’s always good to evaluate how things are going and make adjustments. One thing to consider is open pedagogy and authentic assessments. Authentic assessments are usually designed by teachers to gauge students’ understanding of the material. They are tied directly to the learning objectives of a course, program, or discipline. Some examples of authentic assessments include open-ended questions, written compositions, oral presentations, projects, experiments, and portfolios of student work.

Open pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. It is based on the idea that knowledge should be freely available to everyone. Some examples of open pedagogy include students creating and sharing video-based learning objects for their classes, engineering students creating an open online textbook, forestry students creating open conservation case studies, and physics students creating course learning resources.

Here are some practical tips to help you get started with implementing authentic assessments in your classroom:

  • Align assessments with learning objectives. When designing authentic assessments, it is essential to ensure that they align with the learning objectives of your course or unit.
  • Design the curriculum backward from the assessment. This means that you should start by identifying what you want students to learn and then design assessments that will measure their understanding of those concepts.
  • Evaluate along the way using benchmarks. Use benchmarks to evaluate student progress throughout the course or unit.
  • Give students time to revise after self-assessment and peer assessment. This will help them improve their work and deepen their understanding of the material.
  • Continually adjust your assessment tools. Be willing to make changes to your assessments as you learn more about what works best for your students.
  • Be innovative to improve assessment. Use technology, games, simulations, and other innovative approaches to make assessments more engaging and effective.

I hope these tips help you implement authentic assessments in your class!

Resources:

22
Mar

Trashy Romance Novels & Chat GPT

Okay, this could be good. Or not. How exactly does a trashy romance novel help shape my current approach to your work here at GCC? OMG! I’m going to ask Chat GPT to answer that. That’s a good question for her, Maud. We’re on a first-name basis now.

Maud said, “It is unlikely that reading a trashy romance novel would have a direct impact on a teacher’s approach to teaching at a community college. However, there are some potential ways that reading for pleasure could indirectly impact a teacher’s teaching approach.” Well, that’s not very exciting. She’s good at changing the topic or guiding me away from salacious topics and back to more sensible ones. I think I’ll pass on that for now and write about my obsession with Maud (Chat GPT) instead.

I’m completely fascinated by how easy it is for students to cheat using AI tools now, and it’s amazing how freaked-out educators across the country have become. Frankly, I find it all amusing. It’s the perfect scenario for forcing people to change, adapt or get out of their comfort zone. I think we get too comfortable in our jobs at times. We like a certain textbook, and even though it’s 20 years old, it still works somehow. Or you might have a lesson or lecture that you started using when you began teaching 10 years ago. The course content hasn’t changed; the lecture is still good, right? Well, that’s the comfortable mindset. We’re in our comfort zone.

A comfort zone can be described as “a psychological state in which things feel familiar to a person and they are at ease and in control of their environment, experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress.” Well, Chat GPT and other AI innovations have blown most of us out of our comfort zones. We need to face reality. Just like when Covid hit and we all had to magically transform to online learning almost overnight, we are now once again being challenged to get out of our comfort zones and “reimagine” our assessments. I recently wrote about how to Robot-Proof Your Writing Assignments which includes a few tips for how to create assignments that are more difficult for AI to complete. I’ve also been doing a lot of reading on AI and came across a few resources that I found useful, including this page from the University of Utah which is an excellent resource for AI Generative Tools and tips for assignment design and how to discuss these tools with students. Good luck getting out of your comfort zone once again.

7
Mar

Yep, I Get It Now

I was so excited to start Write 6×6 last week. I was raring to go. Ready to put pen to paper. Super excited. And then I got the writing prompt. Whaaat! A song?

What song represents your career in education, your evolution as a teacher, or your approach to student success?

Lisa

My enthusiasm was immediately crushed. I couldn’t think of a song. I mean how does Coi Leray’s “Players” have to do with my career in education? The lyrics constantly playing in my head, “Yeah, ’cause girls is players too…” Am I player? What does that mean? I can’t even think of another song, and this one is so not appropriate. Sigh.

It got me thinking though. How often do we crush our students’ enthusiasm in our classes? Does it happen on day one as Lisa did mine? Ha! Just kidding, Lisa. But truly does it happen at all? The biggest culprit I see is grades. Often with grades on those first few big assignments, a poor performance on the first few without the others in the grade book to weigh them out can be crushing. I often have students ask, how did my grade go from 95% to 72% overnight? Well, I graded something, and you didn’t do well. Crushed!

Students don’t always get the math, so seeing their grade drop drastically is not encouraging. So years ago I changed my strategy. I still crushed my students if they didn’t do well, but I introduced a policy to not only help students learn from their mistakes but also to keep them motivated and in the game. Assignments submitted on time and complete are eligible for a rewrite. They can resubmit the assignment within a week and earn a better score. Rewrites are optional, but they get feedback on the work and an opportunity to improve and learn. Canvas now makes this convenient for me to suggest rewrites with the Reassign button in Speedgrader.

I encourage them to submit a rewrite by giving them clear feedback using a rubric and comments on the assignment. Often times it’s a simple fix that students resubmit right away. Other times it’s a bit more involved. But the overall grade in the course bounced back up after a rewrite grade is entered, and hopefully, students are motivated to keep going unless, of course, they get stumped by a strange writing prompt and just give up without trying. Yep, I get it now.

23
Feb

Do Your Students Have More Skin in the Game Than You Do?

Have you really thought about that as an online instructor? Do your students have more skin in the game than you do? What in the world am I getting at with that question? Well, there’s been lots of discussion around direct instruction and regular and substantive interaction in online learning. If you don’t remember, I shared about: New federal US Department of Education (DoE) regulatory definitions of distance education require that institutions ensure regular and substantive interaction (RSI) between a student and an instructor(s). And I also wrote about direct instruction in online learning here. Read those to better understand where I’m going here.

The amount of time an online faculty professor should spend teaching an online class can vary depending on various factors, such as the course’s level, complexity, and the number of students enrolled. However, in general, faculty members should expect to spend a comparable amount of time teaching and preparing for an online course as they would expect a student to spend learning in the course. Now is that a bold statement, a personal opinion? Let’s see. The official credit hour definition states:

A credit hour is an amount of student work defined by an institution, as approved by the institution’s accrediting agency, that is consistent with commonly accepted practice in postsecondary education and that reasonably approximates no less than
-One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different period of time;

HEA Definitions – Distance Education (GCC Institutional Effectiveness Office of Compliance Regulatory Reference Series

So basically that means we’re required by HLC to deliver 3 hours of direct instruction and a minimum of six hours of out-of-class work (homework) each week. That’s nine hours for each course. If they are a full-time student taking 5 classes, their skin in the game is that this is a full-time job at 45 hours per week. That’s probably why they call it full-time.

Now for faculty, according to the Quality Matters Program, an organization that provides standards for online course design and delivery, a rule of thumb for the amount of time needed to design and teach an online course is 8-12 hours per week for a 3-credit course. This time includes developing course content, facilitating discussions, providing feedback on assignments, and grading. But let’s break that apart because we’re not always designing and teaching at the same time. And let’s use direct instruction (DI) and regular and substantive interaction (RSI) as our baseline. Much of our DI can be done during the course development phase. We create videos, caption them and sometimes create quizzes to go along with them. No doubt this is time consuming, but once it’s done, often there’s not much design work to do once the class begins. There’s also lots of other engaging content that we develop and provide in an online course that doesn’t require weekly work once the course begins. So we can’t always factor in time for that for time needed to teach an online course.

Now let’s consider the RSI factor. Faculty members should also consider the time they spend communicating with students and providing support outside of class time. This may include answering emails, hosting virtual office hours, posting announcements, and responding to questions on discussion boards or via email. And we have to add in the time spent grading student work. Grading student work is a fundamental component of the teaching and learning process in a college course, and it is critical to assessing student progress and achievement. Providing clear feedback on student work is essential as it provides students with feedback on their progress and helps to guide their future studies in the course and beyond. The best type of feedback for student assessments is one that is specific, timely, and constructive. Specific feedback is clear and detailed, highlighting particular aspects of a student’s work that are well done or require improvement. And it should also be timely. That all takes time.

One major way to ensure RSI is happening in your online course is to make sure you are providing feedback that is specific, timely, and constructive. Auto-graded assessments are not the best example of that if that is all you provide. So would you say you spend at least 2 hours per credit hour or 6 hours a week doing RSI for your online course? Just one course? Well, that is the expectation we have for our students. Nine hours each week. And that should be the expectation for faculty as well. That would mean that your minimum load of 5 courses each semester would require you to spend 45 hours each week. That’s something to consider, but let’s pretend you say, I’m not doing that much RSI in my online courses. Okay, but you are spending that time in other ways that support students and the college. We have required office hours, committee assignments, department meetings, and 4Dx. All of that supports students in some way either directly or indirectly.

So, do you have more skin in the game than your students? Or are you dialing it in? Setting it and forgetting it? Here are some characteristics of bad online teachers: lack of organization, poor communication, limited engagement, inadequate feedback, unavailability, and technical difficulties. Overall, a bad online teacher can negatively impact the learning experience for their students and hinder their academic progress. Don’t be that guy. Get engaged in your own online course.