How Rubrics Can Inspire Your Students’ Best Work
A well-done rubric is a thing of beauty for both students and instructors. They provide students with a set of guidelines to help them meet your expectations for the assignment and they provide you with a method to streamline your feedback and grading. But when they’re not set up well, a rubric is no use to anyone! Let’s look at what makes an effective rubric effective.
If you'd like a few more specifics, here's a short article on How to Write Great Rubrics.
Happy New Year!!
Yes, that is what I meant to write. I know it’s July, but we operate on a July-June fiscal year, so this is the time the @ONE (Online Network of Educators) team reflects on last year’s work and gets ready to tackle a new set of goals. And we couldn’t be happier that we are entering the new year with two new instructional designers - Liz du Plessis and Shawn Valcárcel!
Liz du Plessis was the instructional designer at Santa Rosa Junior College for three years before more recently working for the fully online college (“CalBright”). Liz has been active with @ONE as a facilitator and presenter and is also an adjunct history instructor. Shawn Valcárcel comes to us from Mt. San Jacinto College, where he worked as an instructional designer. He is also a part-time online music instructor and has worked with @ONE in the past. Shawn and Liz join our current Instructional Designers, Helen Graves and Cheryl Chapman. You can see profiles and contact info for all of our team on our website.
Highlights from Last Year
Thanks to the hard work of our entire PD team and the CCC educators who facilitate our courses, contribute to Pocket PD articles, and serve as course reviewers, we were able to bring you the following in 2018-2019:
- An additional 21 online PD courses compared to 2017-2018, including additional courses on Equity & Culturally Responsive Teaching and Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning.
- A 20% increase in people taking and completing @ONE courses over the previous year.
- 2 free, online conferences, Can•Innovate and Digital Learning Day, lead by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, that reached more people than the past 3 years of monthly desktop webinars combined.
- 5 new self-paced courses on accessibility available through @ONE as a result of our partnership with the CCC Accessibility Center.
- An additional 103 courses aligned to the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric through Course Design Academy, bringing the total so far to 232 courses!
A Look Ahead
And those are just some of the things our team has been working on! Here are two more:
Adoptable @ONE Courses are now in the Canvas Commons
Many of you have asked for copies of our courses so that you can use them as part of your local professional development programs. Helen Graves has been hard at work to respond to this need. Thanks to Helen, you can now find nearly a dozen CVC-OEI/@ONE adoptable courses in the Canvas Commons, including some of our most requested four-week courses, courses to support peer online course review and use of the rubric, and the self-paced accessibility courses brought to us by the CCC Accessibility Center. To find these adopable courses:
- Log into your college’s instance of Canvas
- In the global navigation menu, select Commons*
- In the search box at the top, enter “CVC-OEI Adoptable”
Please note: Our adoptable courses are licensed with CC-BY license, which means you're free to adapt them provided you attribute CVC-OEI.
*If you do not see a link to the “Commons” in your Canvas menu, contact your campus Canvas Admin to request that this feature be enabled.
New Names for Our Certificates
@ONE has gone through changes over the last three years, and so have our certificate programs. Several years ago, we replaced the original Online Teaching Certification with the Course Design Fundamentals Certificate. In 2017, we also introduced a second certificate in Online Teaching Principles. Since then, we have heard from many folks that it’s no longer clear which certificate is the right one to use for “certifying” faculty to teach online, or which one DE Coordinators should recommend to new faculty.
We hope these small changes we’ve made to the names will help clear up any confusion:
Certificate in Online Teaching & Design
Formerly: Certificate in Course Design Fundamentals
We recommend this program for preparing/certifying faculty to teach online and to prepare staff and instructional designers who support online teaching. The certificate prepares participants to develop and teach effective, interactive, and accessible courses that promote student retention and success.
Cheryl Chapman is leading a project this summer to redesign the 12-week Online Teaching and Design (OTD) course. It will continue to be one option for participants to earn the certificate, although Online Teaching and Design course may have a new name after the redesign! Look for a launch of the updated “OTD” in the fall.
Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles
We’ve added “Advanced” to the title of this certificate to reflect that we recommend this certificate for experienced online teachers, DE support staff, and instructional designers who are ready to explore how their humanized presence in the course along with culturally responsive and dynamic teaching practices can positively impact students.
Join Us!
While you are learning more about our certificate program, we invite you to put in your proposal for Can•Innovate 2019 and mark your calendars for October 25! Also, see what your CCC colleagues are talking about on Twitter using the hashtag #CCCLearn.
There are so many great things happening in our system right now and we want you to be a part of the conversation!
Was your college education largely spent sitting in lecture halls and classrooms listening to professors talk (…and talk…and talk)? Even if that works in face-to-face situations—and research is showing otherwise—it’s not going to fly in the asynchronous world of online learning. So, what’s an online instructor to do? Watch this and find out!
Want More Ideas?
Here are my top 3 resources for you.
You’ll find consistent themes running through all these (like keep it short!) but each resource has its own flavor and offers new tidbits for you.
- 10 Tips for Creating Effective Instructional Videos
- How to Create Engaging Instructional Videos
- 4 Tips for Creating a Sal Khan-Style Instructional Video (from Sal Khan)
Learning is a social process. That's why active learning has long been touted as an exemplary instructional approach for college classes -- whether they're taught in a traditional classroom or online. It's also why student-student interactions are part of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric and are now part of the Title 5 Education Code for California Community College Distance Education courses (Instructor Contact, Section 55204). Peer-to-peer interaction is foundational to developing a sense of community in your online courses. But meaningful interactions don't just happen; they are fostered through effective course design and teaching.
Neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio have shown that thinking and feeling are not distinct processes. Rather, feelings directly impact human reasoning and behavior. Thinking and feeling are inseparable from one another. And if you apply that to the way you teach, you'll notice big shifts in your students' engagement. Research shows that online classes can make some students feel more isolated, which can further exacerbate the feelings of stress and marginalization that many community college students experience. Throughout their lives, many of our students have been informed through the media and other messages that they're not cut out for college. It's your job to let them know, "I believe in you. You've got this." Just like in your face-to-face classes, validating your online students and establishing that your class is a safe place are the first steps to establishing a sense of belonging for your students (Rendón, 1994).
Providing low-stake opportunities that enable students to draw upon the wealth of experiences they bring to your class is also key. Doing so demonstrates that you value your students' diverse experiences and perspectives, as noted in the Peralta Equity Rubric. As students share what's meaningful to themselves, they will feel more included in your class and will also recognize things they have in common with their peers. When names on a screen begin to transform into human beings with rich stories, your class is on its way to becoming a community.
To support you in your efforts to foster student-student interactions and build community in your online courses, CVC-OEI/@ONE has developed a Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide, which you'll find embedded at the top of this page. We've shared the guide with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license and provided it in Google Slides format to make it easy for you to copy, adapt, and re-use as you'd like. In the guide, you'll find:
- References to research that will help guide meaningful conversations with your faculty peers about the recent Title 5 change,
- Recommended CVC-OEI/@ONE courses and PocketPD,
- Video tours of online courses showcasing assignments in Canvas,
- A collection of assignment ideas, shared by California Community College faculty
Leave a comment below to let us know what you think and how you plan to use the guide or share your favorite strategy for fostering meaningful interaction in your online course.
When broaching the argument that online courses aren’t as effective as in-person, people often bring up the absence of face to face contact. But video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Hangouts have made that hurdle disappear. And the Canvas Scheduler tool makes scheduling "live" online appointments ultra-simple. Yet another way to easily increase your instructor presence and build community in your online course!
Canvas Guide Links
- How Do I Add a Scheduler Appointment Group?
- How Do I Edit a Scheduler Appointment Group?
- For Students: How Do I Sign Up for a Scheduler Appointment in the Calendar?
Can•Innovate 2019 is scheduled for October 25, 2019, and we're ready to make this year's event bigger and better than last year but we need your help! Can•Innovate, a free, one-day conference supporting faculty and staff at the 114 California Community Colleges that use Canvas (registration is also open to the general public). Last year, more than 1,100 people joined in for a collaborative day of sharing and learning. Participants have the option to attend online from anywhere or on-campus from a group viewing room so mark your calendar today and start preparing your proposal.
The Call for Proposals for Can•Innovate is now open -- here's your chance to reach inside your bag of tricks and share a course design or teaching practice in a brief Lightning Round or a more detailed Share Showcase. All sessions are delivered online so there's no need for travel funding -- or a suitcase! Take a peek at last year's program for a little inspiration.
Announcing our Keynote Speaker
Kona Jones, Director of Online Learning at Richland Community College will kick off our program with an inspirational presentation, Integrating Compassion into Your Teaching. Kona is responsible for the development of faculty and student technology training materials, provides instructional design support to faculty, oversees the assessment of online courses, and facilitates faculty professional development. Kona loves teaching and is an adjunct instructor of statistics and developmental psychology. Her passion is student success and in 2019 she was awarded Adjunct Faculty of the Year. Kona is also a Canvas Coach and Canvassador, contributing extensively in the online Canvas Community and elsewhere.
Registration will open in September when the full program is announced. If you have any questions about Can•Innovate, let us know!
In my previous post, I shared how I use ConferZoom in Canvas to conduct “Live” orientation meetings with my online students. I call these meetings "
There is only one you…and you have lots of students, right? How can you use ConferZoom throughout your online course to provide the varying levels of personal attention your students need to synthesize the new concepts they encounter in your course.
Learning is variable. This means students process information at different rhythms and
Tips for arranging your klatch workgroups
Here’s are some tips to help you get started:
- Sign up here for your ConferZoom account if you don’t have one yet, refer to the help guides for assistance in getting started.
- Decide the amount of credit you will assign for attendance.
- Identify when you should schedule your workgroup klatch meetings to best support your students throughout the assignments and projects. (I will have a regular day and an alt-klatch day). I schedule my workgroup klatch meetings at critical points to provide scaffolded support for assignments or projects. For example, in my Nutrition class, the first project my students complete is a diet analysis self-assessment project that is comprised of 4 components. A critical stage in the project is the point at which students are required to perform several anthropometric measurements. Students can become discouraged, as many students view any mathematical equation as a daunting task, no matter how useful the information will ultimately be to them. I head this off with a scheduled klatch work-group, I offer 2 meetings on different days and times. Students are required to attend one of the meetings with the calculation worksheet in hand. They are required to have a calculator and
scratch sheet of paper ready. Students are informed that we will work as a team in the workgroup klatch to use current and previous student examples and solve each equation together. By the end of the klatch, students have solved all of their anthropometric measurement calculations required for their project. - Send out invitations to your students using the Canvas inbox in the invitation message make sure students know what will be covered and what they need to bring to the
work group (worksheet, scratch sheet, rough draft, research topic), and specify any content they will need to review or flipped classroom task they will need to complete before the klatch. If you want students to volunteer to share their work in the klatch, include that request in the invitation. My meetings for the term are posted in unit zero as you can see in this video. I also have the meeting broken down by modules - Send a reminder. An hour before the meeting I send out a reminder message through the Canvas inbox with a recap of the items students need to review or bring to be prepared for our session.
- Have your workgroup Klatch! Use ConferZoom’s built-in Record function to ensure you have an archive of your work-group for students who are unable to attend.
- Promote the next workgroup klatch. Don’t miss this opportunity to be sure your next meeting is on your students’ calendars and be sure it’s on your Canvas course calendar too.
- Include all students. for students who are unavailable to attend, provide the option to view the recording and share 1-2 things they learned. This ensures students aren’t penalized if their schedule does not allow them to be present.
Tips for a successful klatch workgroup in ConferZoom
Once your klatch workgroup is arranged, consider these tips for a successful experience:
- Adapt to your students’ needs. Have an idea of the topics you plan to cover and how much time you want to spend on each of them but adjust your plan to support the needs of students who attend. For example, if you plan to cover a topic, but discover the students in attendance don’t need it to be covered or the students want more time with another topic, adjust your plans. Be sensitive to what the class needs and adjust your pace to accommodate the needs of your students. If the class is picking up the concepts quickly, speed up. If they aren’t, slow down.
- Encourage participation. Use pauses to encourage students to contribute. Often, when you ask a question and wait silently, a student will reply.
- Encourage students to help each other. By setting the tone you will not be the first to jump in with the answer. Instead, when students ask questions, open them to the class whenever possible. These prompts are helpful: “Can anyone help Joe?” or “Does anyone want to try and answer Maria’s question?” This facilitation tactic can foster students’ connections with their peers and also provide you with a clearer picture of who has mastered the objectives. Klatch workgroups help gauge what students understand at particular points in the term.
- Use the archive to support learning. Encourage students to set aside time during the week to review the archive as they go to complete any work left unfinished
How are you using ConferZoom to support your students? Let us know by sharing a comment below!
Many of you may be familiar with the Online Education Initiative’s Course Design Rubric. (If you’re not and you teach online, you should consider completing the Course Design Academy or the Certificate in Online Teaching & Design by @ONE which both support you to redesign your online course according to the OEI rubric.) In 2017 we, the Peralta Community College Distance Education team, aligned our faculty training with the OEI rubric, but we also wanted to address equity for online learners. When we couldn’t find a rubric to support online course equity, we created the Peralta Equity Rubric to foster an expanded understanding of, and appreciation for, student populations, particularly for disproportionately impacted students. The rubric is structured to foster online learning environments that are inviting, inclusive, and meaningful for all students; additionally, the rubric is designed to support our students’ entire online experience--in distance education courses and also when seeking technical support or student services.
The rubric was developed through exhaustive research about the aspects of online courses that most negatively affect online student persistence and/or success:
- Make Technology Easy: Smartphones and Internet access seem so prevalent these days that it’s easy to assume every student has the technology they need to complete an online course successfully. We need to provide viable technology alternatives and support for students who need them.
- Value Diversity and Inclusion: To make every student feel welcome and encouraged to contribute, we need to create online courses in which all students “see themselves” and are valued participants.
- Improve Images and Representations: Our courses and materials--textbooks, lecture presentations, Canvas content pages, etc.--need to represent our students accurately and avoid stereotypes that can hinder academic and professional success.
- Reduce Human Interaction Bias: Based on student names alone, many online teachers reply more often to white male students than to other students (Baker, Dee, Evans & John, 2018). Once we’re aware of this possibility, we can proactively address it.
- Make Content Meaningful: Cultural bias can hinder learning in different ways. We can check for this bias as we design and deliver our online courses--from content selection to language choices for exam questions.
- Foster Personal Connections With and Among Students: Almost everyone sets up some form of interactivity in an online course, but the next step is to make sure that regular interaction is required as a way to strengthen connections and deepen learning.
- Use Universal Design for Learning: Based on a mantra of “teach every student,” UDL principles support providing online learners with flexibility in how they approach learning and showing what they know.
- Offer Student Support: Students often need virtual access to help beyond our online courses, including a) general student assistance, b) online academic supports; c) assistance with using technology; d) health and well-being resources; and/or e) resources for students with disabilities.
- Social Belonging (coming soon): Online teachers and learners alike should value that all students feel a sense of belonging, and research shows that belonging enhances the online learning experience through increased participation and motivation.
While we’re pleased that we just earned an Online Learning Consortium’s Effective Practices Award, we’re still refining the rubric, so email us with your suggestions! The rubric has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA) so you are free to adapt or adopt it at your own institution as long as you share your version too. Other next steps involve 1) collecting and sharing examples of what it looks like to address these rubric criteria in an actual online course and 2) creating a library of rubric-related resources to help online teachers, technology help desk staff and student services staff as they support online learners from a distance.
The newly-released updates to Title 5 regulations for online learning include a specific requirement of regular effective contact among students.
It’s time to move beyond discussions and embrace the wealth of benefits collaborative learning experiences provide to students (and instructors). C’mon, I dare ya!
Resources
A nice series from Carnegie Mellon University
Other helpful ideas and guidelines
10 Research-Based Steps for Effective Group Work
Online Students Don’t Have to Work Solo
How to Design Effective Online Group Work Activities
I've developed a "plug 'n' play" module on using groups that you can include as a resource for your students. It also has a list of all the Canvas Guides for instructors on using groups. Do a search in the Canvas Commons for Group Project resources (the course card is a pile of Labrador puppies).
One year ago, CVC-OEI/@ONE held our first free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day. On February 28, 2019, this event was held for a second time. Our move away from individual webinars to full day, online conferences has yielded many benefits, summarized here.
CCC Digital Learning Day (CCCDLDay) 2019 was the California Community College's celebration of Digital Learning Day, an international educational event comprised of pop-up programs around the world. Our program, guided by a systemwide advisory committee, was designed around the theme of exploring digital literacies across the curriculum. CCCDLDay is distinct from our annual fall online conference, Can•Innovate, which focuses on supporting the use of Canvas across the California Community College system. For CCCDLDay, we aim to bring educators into a mindful consideration of the many opportunities and challenges that digital learning brings to our mission to prepare students for a successful life. This year, the
The Highlights
The 2019 program included 15 speakers including a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting Our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. A full day of sessions followed, featuring the teaching and learning innovations of CCC faculty and students, including an inspirational student panel moderated by professor Fabiola Torres from Glendale Community College. Matt Mooney, History Professor at Santa Barbara Community College, presented with his former online student, Amber Greene. In Making Creativity SPARKle, the two reflected on the impact of Matt's choice to transform a summative assessment in the course into a student-generated video about a historical topic. Donna Caldwell, from Adobe, shared a demo of Adobe Spark, providing attendees with the how-to knowledge for Matt's innovative practice. Librarians, Cynthia Orozco of East Los Angeles College and Aloha Sargent of Cabrillo College, examined the need for information literacy to be embedded in Canvas courses and shared examples of open educational resources available for use in Canvas. The day wrapped up with two sessions that took us back outside of Canvas and invited participants to join in on "Create" challenges. Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep from Folsom Lake College demonstrated creative uses of Twitter that engage students in networked, global learning. Last, but not least, Liz du Plessis from Barstow Community College and the California Online Community College presented alongside Mayra Avila, one of Liz's online students, and shared how she uses Google Maps to foster collaborative, contextual learning of historical content -- and everyone in the audience had a chance to drop their own pin on a map too. Search the Canvas Commons with "CCCDLDay" and discover a few golden nuggets shared during the day!
The Growth
We saw significant growth from last year in many areas.
- 4,445 online session registrations, 138% growth from 2018
- 3,010 attendances, 83% more than last year
- 791 attendees (unduplicated headcount), a 49% growth from last year
- 100 CCCs were represented at the event, up from 85 in 2018
- 78% people attended online
- CCC attendees were comprised of 40.8 percent full-time faculty, 37.6 percent adjunct, 11.3 percent classified, 4.6 percent administrators, and .8 percent students.
- Attendees rated their overall experience 4.7 out of 5 stars (based on the completion of an attendee survey, n=103).
Download the full CCCDLDay 2019 report.
Thank you for making CCC Digital Learning Day a success. Mark your calendars for Can•Innovate, our next free online conference, on Friday, October 25, 2019. The Call for Proposals opens next week!
Coming from a culture of storytellers, I’d like to share a story that inspired this post.
I was at my local supermarket
Like many working class immigrant households, we were raised to be proud, which meant not breaking the rules. Since many of our parents lived in fear of breaking rules in the US, the goal of behaving was instilled in us. Good behavior builds character. Character becomes more important than achievement. Nacho was the epitome of character. He was a good son of a single-family household, an Army Reserve Serviceman (another environment requiring good behavior) and a college student. Yet my policy became a barrier. I did not set up an environment to encourage communication and support him to succeed.
The next semester, Nacho registered for my course again. I learned he was a hard worker who also learned how to advocate for himself when he needed to. He never took advantage of my kindness and appreciated my personalized feedback. After all, I had met his Mama. Nacho earned an A, completed his bachelors at a Cal State, and is now a college recruiter. After Nacho, my journey as an online instructor was forever changed.
When I started teaching online, I struggled with late policies. I remember a colleague telling me I needed to be strict with deadlines to "show them how it will be in the real world." I learned my lesson after my Nacho encounter. After that, I began to imagine a learning environment where submitting late assignments could still be a method to encourage student effort and communicate that I believe in my students’ abilities. I have wondered how this change might remove barriers for students and foster a more equitable learning experience.
What Students Want
Our goal should not be to translate our face-to-face learning environments into our online courses. Both are unique and should be designed to leverage the characteristics of the modality. Also, our students have reasons for choosing to take an online vs. a face-to-face course. Kelly Ann Gleason, a student at Cuesta College, stated during the student panel for Digital Learning Day 2019, “We are taking online classes because we have life outside the classroom, so the very reason that we are taking this [an online class] communicates what we expect.” And what do they expect? Flexibility. Today, more than 24% of enrollments in the California Community College system are from online courses. Most of these students are blending their schedules with a mix of face-to-face and online courses to develop a flexible schedule that allows them to advance their academic goals while also fulfilling their work and life responsibilities. To put it another way, being on campus full-time is a privilege that many students do not have.
The student panelists who participated with Kelly Ann continued to advocate the need to respect faculty and their time, yet they want to see online faculty design an online environment where students are given a fair chance to submit quality work when time management becomes challenging. As Henry Fan, a student from Foothill College, stated, “Not all time is created equal.”
The full archive of the student panel is embedded below. To jump to the segment on late policies, click here.
How to Promote an Equitable Culture of Excellence
Equity means ensuring each student has what they need to succeed. Is it equitable to apply the same late policy to every student in every situation? It is our responsibility to measure the quality of student learning rather than how punctual an assignment is. And if it’s not punctual, how can we use that as an opportunity to understand our students’ realities and encourage them to keep going?
Here are some suggestions to incentivize responsibility by placing a culture of excellence and care on your end.
- Spend time in preparing and designing Canvas Assignments. Make sure every student is clear about what to do and how to do it. Students might need models, templates or deeper explanations before they are ready. Include a rubric so your expectations are clearly communicated. Embed a video encouraging excellence within the Assignment page.
- Use Canvas Announcements to nudge students on upcoming deadlines. We know some students struggle with deadlines and it would be irresponsible as a teacher to not act upon that knowledge before it’s too late.
- Monitor submissions throughout the week. As the due date approaches, use the Grades area of Canvas to send a personal message to students who have not yet submitted. Ask if they are OK. Encourage them to talk to you if they need to.
- For students who do not submit by the deadline, use the Canvas Inbox to message these students and ask if they are OK. Provide them an opportunity to negotiate. If a response is still missing, send your campus’ Distance Education policy language on Last Day of Attendance (LDA) for online courses. Be sure they know the last date they have to withdraw and receive a W, as it is better than an F.
- Grade and provide comments in a timely manner so you reciprocate your culture of responsibility by providing meaningful feedback.
- Plan your life around knowing you will always receive late submissions. So, when you don’t, you will feel happy and spend extra time with your loved ones.
We are
My Submission Policy:
Plan on submitting work on time.I immediately review work and provide meaningful feedback with in 48-72 hours.
Because time management is challenging, deadlines might not be met. But, you’re in luck. I’m on your side. Late submissions will be accepted with a penalty. Assignments submitted after the deadline may receive a 10% grade point deduction for each day following the due date and time.
Don’t want the penalty? Here’s an incentive.
If you recognize a due date might be a problem, advocate for your success by following these steps:
- Identify the problem
- Contact me to propose a solution
- Let's negotiate
Do you have a submission policy you’d like to share? I warmly invite you to leave a reply below to keep the conversation going!
Instructor presence is crucial to student success, perhaps especially in an online learning environment. Offering regular, meaningful feedback is an excellent way to contribute to student learning and to make your presence in the course known. Let’s look at some ways Canvas can help you create connection through feedback.
