Learning outcomes help us identify and clarify the end point or destination of a learning experience. If we don’t know where we are going, we can get lost or wander all over the place. A course then becomes a bloated unorganized mess.
We use Fink’s Taxonomy for Significant Learning to create observable and measurable course learning outcomes.
This resource from the teaching center at the University of Buffalo provides a discussion of the taxonomy and how to use it to write your course outcomes.
We are excited to announce that the Coulter Faculty Commons is seeking applications and nominations for three Faculty Fellow positions for the 2022-23 Academic Year. We invite all full-time Tenure, Tenure-Track, and full-time Non-Tenure Track faculty members to join us in making an impact on teaching & learning at WCU.
For the upcoming year, the CFC is particularly interested in fellows who can develop and expand programming in the following areas:
DEI Inclusive Pedagogy
In support of the university’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, this fellow will work to develop a course design and teaching seminar in Canvas focusing on inclusive pedagogy and facilitate the seminar in the spring 2023 semester. The seminar will be in collaboration with the WCU DEI Community of Practice Training and Professional Development group.
New Faculty Mentoring and Support
This faculty member will work with members of the Faculty Partners team in the CFC in mentoring/supporting new faculty during New Faculty Orientation and Faculty Forward, our yearlong symposium. The Fellow will also be trained to facilitate the mid-semester Teaching Assessment Protocols as part of supporting new faculty. The fellow will also have input on content, resources, and opportunities for engaging new faculty, either new to teaching or new to WCU, and facilitate at least one of the monthly conversations.
Online Course Design and Pedagogy
Depending on the faculty member’s interest, this fellow will work on developing a mentoring program at WCU or take a lead in refining and co-facilitating the Online Course Design Institute and the Teaching Online with Impact Institute. The mentoring program will start from the ground up and the Online Course Design and Pedagogy program will expand on the existing offerings the CFC has in place.
Details
The fellows will be working collaboratively with the Director, current members of the Coulter Faculty Commons, and various other constituents across campus. The fellow will have a dedicated working space in the CFC but can also work remotely, and will attend the Faculty Partners meetings each week. The estimated time commitment is 2-4 hours per week. The faculty selected for these positions will be provided with a $1000 stipend in each academic semester (Fall 2022 and Spring 2023) and a $500 stipend for one summer session.
Apply
Applicationsfor the 2022-2023 year will be accepted from all full-time Tenure, Tenure-Track, and full-time Non-Tenure Track faculty members. The application deadline is April 15, 2022.
Completed applications should include a current vita, a brief letter of interest that clearly addresses the candidate’s qualifications and interest for the position, and a letter of support from the applicant’s chair or director. Applications should also clearly communicate the candidate’s intended area(s) of focus in at least one of the areas described above.
CFC Faculty Fellowships Applications are Open!
Completed applications should include a current vita, a brief letter of interest that clearly addresses the candidate’s qualifications and interest for the position, and a letter of support from the applicant’s chair or director. Applications should also clearly communicate the candidate’s intended area(s) of focus in at least one of the areas described above.
Small Teaching by J.M. Lang presents methods for making small changes in your teaching practices (hence the name) that can significantly improve your students’ learning. Each chapter provides the research-based evidence behind the practices Lang proposes so you can have confidence that Lang’s ideas work. The Coulter Faculty Commons will be boiling the Small Teaching chapters down into blog posts to provide instructors with concepts they can apply to a lesson, a class, or a course.
Let’s get started.
Chapter 1: Retrieving Every subject requires students to know some foundational knowledge to successfully engage in higher levels of learning. For example, they need to know what a line is before they can understand more complex geometric shapes or the history of the earliest immigrants to the North American continent before they can discuss the nuances of current immigration policy. For your students to be successful, they need to be able to retrieve knowledge so that they can apply what they know.
Students need to retrieve knowledge from memory, but as Lang points out, “if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory” (Lang, 2016, p. 20). How do you get students to practice retrieving knowledge? To illustrate a simple practice Lang cites studies where students were divided into three groups: one was given additional study time before a test, one given a practice quiz before the test, and one group where no intervention was taken. In one of the studies students that were quizzed prior to the test scored two letter grades higher than those that weren’t. Perhaps equally significant, students that were given additional study time scored no better than those that received no intervention. Re-reading did not improve knowledge retrieval.
Rather than just think of quizzes as assessment activities, consider them a means for your students to practice knowledge retrieval. But quizzing can take many forms. Here are the Quick Tips Lang suggests in Chapter 1:
Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes (at least weekly) to help your students seal up foundational course content; favor short answers or problem-solving whenever possible so that students must process or use what they are retrieving.
Open class periods or online sessions by asking students to remind you of content covered in previous class sessions; allow students time to reflect for a few moments if you do so orally.
Close class by asking students to write down the most important concept from that day and one question or confusion that still remains in their minds (i.e., the minute paper).
Close class by having students take a short quiz or answer written questions about the day’s material or solve a problem connected to the day’s material.
Use your syllabus to redirect students to previous course content through quizzes or oral questions and discussion (Lang, 2016, p. 39).
Summer Beach Read
Small Teaching is one of SITL’s Beach Reads. Are you registered yet?
I started teaching online in 2003 for a for-profit institution. It was two years after receiving my M.Ed. in Research and Collaboration at TCU where my focus was on online asynchronous learning. I was anxious to apply my research to my own classroom!
The realities of teaching online soon became very apparent. At that time the institution did not have an LMS. I taught the course through discussion forums. My students were lines of text on the screen, as I was to them. We didn’t have Zoom or any other video meeting software so we were confined to interacting through the discussions and email.
I realized quickly that I needed to somehow become a real person to my students; a person who cared about their experience and success. So I set about recording video introductions, using video and recorded screencasts to help them learn HTML, web design and multimedia. Soon I was asking them to post an audio or video introduction instead of text, encouraging them to share photos of pets and places they loved to travel. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was humanizing my online course.
What is humanizing?
If you google this topic, you will see quite a few results. We’ve been working on this for a couple of decades, so that doesn’t surprise me. I particularly appreciate the work of Michelle Pacansky-Brock, a community college faculty member turned faculty developer who started teaching online in 2004. She created a wonderful infographic on this topic.
“Humanizing leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today’s diverse students.” Brock, 2020.
Humanizing your course is how you bring equity into your course design and teaching.
It also brings decades of research on instructor presence and student persistence to bear on course design and instruction. Being an excellent instructor in both the physical and online classroom in higher ed is a skill that anyone can learn. So these steps can apply to in-person courses as well.
Steps to Take to Humanize Your Course
Brock offers eight elements to use in humanizing your course:
The Liquid Syllabus: A public, mobile-friendly website that has your brief welcome video and includes “warm, non-verbal cues and hopeful language” to ease anxieties about your course and how to be successful in week one (Brock, 2020, pp107-108).
Humanized Homepage: the homepage provides a clear and friendly welcome to the course and tells the student how the course works and has a clear Start Here link to the syllabus and/or the course information module in Canvas (this is also a Quality Matters and Online Learning Consortium quality standard). Here is an example
Getting to Know You Survey: In week one, ask the students to complete a confidential survey that provides additional information about each student and helps you identify which students are going to be ‘high touch’ requiring more of your time that other students. In Canvas, you can create a survey for this purpose. If you are logged into Canvas, go to https://westerncarolina.instructure.com/accounts/1/external_tools/43?launch_type=global_navigation to see an example of questions to include.
Warm, Wise Feedback: I love this and always attempt to convey support and encouragement in my feedback to students. Brock states, “Your feedback is critical to your students’ continuous growth. But how you deliver your feedback really makes a difference, especially in an online course. To support your students’ continued development and mitigate the effects of social and psychological threats, follow the Wise feedback model (Cohen & Steele, 2002) that also supports growth mindset (Dweck, 2007). Support effort + ability + action. And deliver your message in voice or video to include verbal or nonverbal cues and minimize misinterpretation.
Self-affirming Ice Breaker: Week one of a course is full of anxiety for students and can impede their ability to start the course. Try an ice breaker that invites them to share a part of their identity. One example from the infographic is to ask them to reflect on a value that is important to them and then choose an object from their life that represents that value.
Wisdom Wall: sharing the ‘wisdom’ or advice from students who have previously taken your class. You can use a collaborative tool such as a Word file in OneDrive that students can access, or Flipgrid, which can be enabled in Canvas. You can also have studente email their success advice to you that you would add to the file, or empower students to create their own by having a link to a shared Word document by changing the edit settings to ‘Anyone with the link’. Post this link in your course to share it with your current students and then they can also add their own advice. Here is Michelle’s example of a Wisdom Wall.
Bumper Video: Short videos used throughout the course to introduce a new module or clarify a sticky concept.
Microlectures: laser-focused short videos (5 – 10 minute) that walk the students through the comprehension of complex concepts. Before you record, identify the one or two ideas you want your students to take from the video. Write a script to make sure that you are saying exactly what you want to say in the short video. Also, remember to produce closed captions for all videos. If you need help with closed captioning in Panopto, please contact the help desk ithelp@wcu.edu
All of these suggested steps are part of the best practices in online course design and teaching. They are also steps that you can take at any time during the semester.
These elements will be included in the CFC’s Online Course Design Institute offered totally online this summer. If you’d like more information about the OCDI, please contact us.
Resources:
Pacansky-Brock, M. 2017. Best practices for teaching with emerging technologies. Routledge, New York, NY.
Join us for our 2nd Annual Teaching & Learning Day. We will meet from 1 – 3:30 to discuss strategies faculty can use to prevent burnout in these demanding times. We will also discuss ways in which we can encourage and support our freshman and sophomores whose academic preparation was affected by the pandemic.
We have invited an expert on helping faculty prevent burnout through self-care to give the keynote address. Dr Julie Harrison-Swartz, DNP, MSN, RN, FNP-BC, is an assistant professor in the Department of Nursing at UNC Pembroke.
In the second hour of the event, we will discuss supporting students to be successful. We had an unprecedented increase in failure rates last semester at WCU. But we are not alone in this as other institutions across the country are also experiencing this situation. We will discuss what’s happening and brainstorm some ways in which we as instructors can help these students succeed this semester.
Whether you call it inverted instruction, classroom flipping, or some other term, the concept behind this kind of instruction is basic. Students get the foundational knowledge they need outside the classroom and class time is spent on higher-level learning. Properly executed, this instructional methodology changes the instructor’s role from one of a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” (Bergmann & Sams, 2007)
How do the students get that foundational knowledge?
Video
If you record your own videos:
Keep them short (7 minutes max)
Topic focused
Provide captions and transcript
If you don’t want to make your own, there are plenty of sources:
Khan Academy, YouTube, Ted Talks
Assign specific time ranges as appropriate
Texts
A history, account, narrative, or case study
From the course texts, assign specific pages if the students don’t need the whole chapter – they are more likely to do the reading
Consider developing a reading guide to target their attention on particular concepts or ideas
Websites
Again, assign specific pages or parts of the website as appropriate
Research
Give your students a list of questions and let them find answers
How can I know they have attained the foundational knowledge?
Barkley and Major, in their text Learning Assessment Techniques, offer concrete ways to assess students’ foundational knowledge, and they fit the “blending” teaching paradigm:
If asking them to recognize – consider an online quiz that focuses on verification, matching, or forced choice, to be taken prior to coming to class.
If asking them to recall – consider online quiz questions that focus on low cues or high cues.
If asking them to interpret or exemplify – consider an online quiz that focuses on constructed responses or selected responses.
If asking them to infer – consider questions that focus on verification, matching, or forced choice.
If asking them to explain – consider questions where students must reason, troubleshoot, redesign, or predict.
What are some effective classroom strategies to engage students in higher-level learning?
Muddiest point
Have your students bring a list of points they’d like to have clarified to class
Alternatively, have them post them to a discussion board
Address these points first before moving on to other learning activity
Group discussions
Students discuss/clarify muddiest points in groups
Group presentations
Have students teach what they learned
Knowledge Demonstration
Let the students demonstrate what they have learned
Is flipping right for me? The real question is whether or not flipping is right for your students. One of the big advantages of flipping is that it gives students more control over their learning as they guide the classroom activity with their questions. Another is the opportunity it provides instructors to review their teaching methods. After considering your options, you may decide that flipped instruction does not provide any advantages. However, keep in mind that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You may determine that some material in your course is suitable for flipping, while some still require more of a hands-on approach. In either case, you’ll have reflected on how you are teaching and that is always a good thing. (Trach, 2020)
Barkley, Elizabeth F., and Claire H. Major. Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hunter-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4205832.
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2007). Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. International Society for Tech in Ed. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hunter-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3317690
Hertz, M. B. (2012, July 10). The Flipped Classroom: Pro and Con. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-pro-and-con-mary-beth-hertz
Trach, E. (2020, January 1). A Beginner’s Guide to Flipped Classroom. https://www.schoology.com/blog/flipped-classroom
Whether you call it inverted instruction, classroom flipping, or some other term, the concept behind this kind of instruction is basic. Students get the foundational knowledge they need outside the classroom and class time is spent on higher-level learning. Properly executed, this instructional methodology changes the instructor’s role from one of a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” (Bergmann & Sams, 2007)
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