An Equitable Ice Breaker Using Google Maps

Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!

In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and add a photo of that location. As you will see, the map transforms into a contextual representation of the students’ backgrounds, inviting them to share meaningful experiences.

If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.

Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!

Register Now for CCC Digital Learning Day: Free, Online Conference

In October, more than 1,100 educators across California's community colleges and beyond joined us for Can•Innovate. We are happy to announce that our next free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day is now open for registration!

#CCCDLDay, brought to you by CVC-OEI/@ONE, is the California Community College's contribution to the national Digital Learning Day effort. Our theme for 2019 is Exploring Digital Literacies Across the Curriculum. The program has been crafted to engage you and your peers in a day of experimentation and creation, as we rethink and refocus our traditional notions of literacy and imagine how we might teach new digital literacies in all disciplines. You'll see teaching innovations that use Adobe Spark Video, Twitter, and Google Maps and Tour Builder to assess student learning, make relevant connections with content, and engage students in meaningful dialogue. Our day also includes a session led by librarians about information literacy and 3 sessions that include student speakers (hooray!).

Register for one or two sessions or join us for the entire day -- from anywhere. All sessions are delivered online in Zoom so you don't have to worry about traveling!

Program Overview

Our event kicks off on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 9am PT with a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the popular podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University.

The remainder of our morning program includes two sessions that will take you on a deep dive of Adobe Spark Video, a free, easy-to-use video creation tool. At 10:00 Matt Mooney, faculty at Santa Barbara Community College, will join us with one of his students, Amber Greene, to share how he is using Spark Video to transform his tests from drab to dazzle! After Matt and Amber's session, you'll have the opportunity to see a demo of Adobe Spark Video by Donna Caldwell, from Adobe Education. Donna will entice you to participate in our CCCDLDay Create Challenge too. Join in for a chance to win a cool prize from Adobe! We've intentionally left the lunch hour open to encourage you to dabble with Adobe Spark Video and get started on your video creation.

Our afternoon program kicks off with a student panel at 1pm, hosted by Fabiola Torres from Glendale College. Student panels are always the highlight of any event so we're considering this a must attend session for everyone! At 2pm, we're joined by Cynthia Mari Orozco, from East Los Angeles College, and Aloha Sargent, of Cabrillo College, two librarians who will present, Scaffolding Information Literacy in Canvas.

Our final two presentations feature more teaching and learning innovations and one more student too! At 3pm, Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep of Folsom Lake College will showcase how they are each using Twitter for Networked Global Learning. Their examples will redefine formative assessment as you know it and illuminate a whole new way to think about hashtags and brief messages. Finally, at 4pm, Liz du Plessis, from Barstow College and the California Online College, and her student, Mayra Avila, will be our guides for Mapping Content and Contexts with My Maps and Tour Builder by Google. That's right! Google Maps can do a lot more than help you get to your next destination. It can also foster real-world connections in your courses.

Excited? We are too. Share your excitement by sending a Tweet with the #CCCDLDay hashtag.

If your college is not yet hosting an on-campus viewing room for CCC Digital Learning Day, sign up now! Viewing sessions and creating content with your peers is an awesome way to learn and grow. But if you aren't on campus, no worries. #CCCDLDay is designed to support you no matter where you are.

Using NameCoach for Equitable Student Support Services

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According to Beckie Supiano in “How Colleges Can Cultivate Students’ Sense of Belonging”, a growing body of research has linked students’ sense of belonging on their campuses to a number of important outcomes, including their persistence in college and even their well-being. As a result, some colleges make an effort to help students- especially members of underrepresented groups- cultivate that sense.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Aligned with Chancellor Oakley’s Vision for Success to fully close CCC equity gaps, the CVC-OEI provides colleges with innovative tools, technology, and professional development in the areas of instruction and student services.  These ongoing efforts include applying an equity lens to address the disparate impact and surface institutional and systemic barriers in order to increase student success.

Darnell G. Cole, an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Education, Identity, and Social Justice at the USC, agrees that colleges should not take students’ sense of belonging for granted. Cole encourages colleges to have “a structure in place that’s designed to communicate that students matter. Just because students got into a college doesn’t mean they feel at home there.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education. Creating a sense of belonging and inclusion resulted in improved academic performance when the University of Texas improved outreach efforts by sending welcome and belonging messages to students from marginalized communities. In The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging, john a. powell, offers belongingness as a way to move beyond tolerance and respect to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in society. Prudence L. Carter, reflecting on Brown v. Board of Education, in Equity and Empathy: Toward Racial and Educational Achievement in the Obama Era, suggests our policies and practices must be student centered and reflect an institution’s intention, commitment to, and consistent efforts toward actively incorporating students from marginalized communities into every facet of the educational process...in classrooms, counseling sessions, categorical programs, and in the delivery of student services.

NameCoach

The CVC-OEI is supporting efforts in the California Community Colleges (CCC) to increase students’ sense of belonging in online instruction by providing innovative tools such as NameCoach, a new tool that nurtures inclusion in the classroom, available to all OEI consortiums colleges at no cost and available to all non-consortium CCCs at a discounted price. Founder and CEO of NameCoach, Praveen Shanbhag, developed the software to enable true inclusion in school communities through technology. NameCoach is a tool for students to record a pronunciation of their name and convey their gender, and easily share this with instructors, administration, staff, and student peers. The CVC-OEI will incorporate this software to foster belonging in other campus settings, such as the delivery of online student support services.

Why NameCoach?  Educators often struggle with correctly pronouncing the names of students from diverse populations. This software addresses the problem of name mispronunciation and misgendering.  According to Dereca Blackmon, Associate Dean and Director of the Diversity and First Generation Student Office, Stanford University, NameCoach makes it easy for students’ identities and cultures to be respected. “Belonging Uncertainty” is heightened for students of color and this sense of belonging is not equally distributed for students from traditionally marginalized communities. Mispronouncing students’ names and using the wrong pronouns can increase ‘belonging uncertainty,’ which Stanford research shows can affect students’ performance, stress levels and overall sense of being a valued part of community.” It is also a constant reminder to students that they do not belong. This also applies to misgendering.

Student feedback stresses the positive impact of using NameCoach. “This is great! This is why we push and remain critical. Instituting seemingly small things like this can have the largest impact on campus culture. It is a recognition of the value of diversity on campus.”  

NameCoach can be incorporated in online counseling, online mental health services, financial aid online support and online tutoring. Online Counselors will finally have an opportunity to properly pronounce their students names during counseling sessions, leading to increased student engagement and trust.  Traditionally used in instruction, NameCoach will expand into online student support services. Using NameCoach is an important step on the road to making student services more inclusive, welcoming and belonging.

Would you like to learn more about using NameCoach to create a sense of belonging within Student Services? Join us on February 1, 2019 at 12pm for a free webinar!

Modality Doesn't Matter

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When I signed up for the @ONE suite of courses for the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles, I didn’t expect they would help me to improve my on-campus classes. The Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses are about teaching online, right? Right. Yet I discovered these courses would help me become a better face-to-face teacher, too.

Sometimes, modality doesn’t matter.

Take, for example, creating a more equitable classroom. I thought I had this nailed. I teach from the heart. I get to know my students’ names, interests, and majors. My motto is “Reach students where they are,” and this motto informs my teaching.

Looking back, I realize now that I wasn’t providing opportunities for my students to be wholly present in spite of my best efforts to engage them. I had not designed assignments that would allow students to draw upon their cultural strengths or heritage, and I kept my own heritage and personal experience out of the classroom. My syllabus was professional and complete but devoid of personality and probably a little off-putting.

As the instructor, I was also the concierge. I would provide every text up until the research essay. I had hundreds. I would provide the answers. I had hundreds of those, too.

After the first week of class and the icebreakers were in the past, it was full speed ahead. There was little time to pause and ask students to reflect. There was little group work.

There was room to improve my on-campus classes, too.

It’s clear to see that these practices had the potential to be counterproductive if they weren’t already undermining my good intentions to create a welcoming learning community—whether that community sat ten feet in front of me or across the internet.

But that’s with the benefit of hindsight—hindsight gained after completing the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses: Equity & Culturally Responsive Teaching, Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning, Dynamic Online Teaching, and Digital Citizenship. These courses helped me to improve my online courses and, bonus, my on-campus classes, too.

The principles espoused in the @ONE courses cross the lines of modality.

As I reflect on what I’ve learned, here are some key improvements I made:

  1. My syllabus is more student-centered and, I think, more welcoming. It’s also readily available online using mobile or desktop browsers. I continue to improve it.
  2. I designed more activities that draw upon what my students already know and make reflection a key step of the learning process.
  3. I gave up my role as the concierge. Well, almost. I still rely on a key OER text or two, but now, my students are increasingly responsible for locating and creating texts as they strengthen their digital and information literacy.
  4. I ask more questions. My students start collaborating in groups from the beginning of the course until the end, and I’ve seen this work pay off in more ways than one.

I’m still learning and improving both my online and on-campus classes, and the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses continue to inform my practice. In hindsight, I shouldn’t be surprised that regardless of modality, the principles of effective teaching and learning are the same. Welcome students and empower them as learner-explorers. Give them guidance and plenty of opportunities for fearless practice. Connect them with each other. These principles help create a stronger learning community—online or on-campus. Completing the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses reinforced these principles and helped me to see new ways I can put them into effect regardless of teaching modality.

Learning from Students Who Use #EdTech

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In November, a group of five college students representing the California Community Colleges and California State University systems participated in a virtual panel at the annual Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) conference. Projected on a screen in front of hundreds of educators, students shared their candid reflections and experiences with technology in teaching and learning.

I had the honor of moderating the panel with support from J.P. Bayard, Director for System-Wide Learning Technologies and Program Services at the CSU Chancellor's Office. As always, listening to student experiences inspired me and reconnected me with the reasons I do what I do. As technology plays a more expansive role in teaching and learning, we must make efforts to center what we do around the real experiences of the humans at the other end of the screen. I also find myself reflecting on the courage it took these students to volunteer to participate and be candid about their experiences. And that is also something all of us can learn from.

I hope you listen to the 30-minute recording and let the students' messages inform your practices as you start the new term ahead. Leave us a comment below and share a takeaway -- we'd love to hear from you!

https://youtu.be/tjEf6SDtvqk
30-Minute Archive of a student panel from the 2018 DET/CHE Conference.

Quick Links

Don't have 30 minutes to listen? Here are the 5 questions the students were asked and a video quick link to their responses.

List of Panelists

View student bios here.

Link, Link. Who's Got the (properly formatted) Link?

Links are how your students navigate your course content. While it might seem like a picayune matter, knowing how to set links up properly will have a pretty big impact on how quickly and easily students can start interacting with all the great content in your course (and it’ll increase your Canvas Ninja factor considerably!).

NOTE: This episode was updated in January '22 to reflect the new rich content editor.

[Here's a resource with examples of good and bad descriptive link text.]

Authorship in the Age of OER

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I am a counselor at Grossmont College in San Diego. As part of my role, I teach a course in Study Skills and Time Management.  In an effort to support my students, I applied for sabbatical leave in the Fall 2018 semester to curate three OER (Open Educational Resources) for my course and to be shared amongst common College Success classes at Grossmont College. This post will provide an overview of how I produced my OERs and showcase some exciting data about the impact OERs have had on my students’ success and retention.

Writing With a Little Help From My Friends

To start with my OER development process, I researched existing high-quality College Success OERs shared with Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) open licensing and used Pressbooks to “reuse” and “remix” some of the existing content and integrate my own original content.  Then members of the Rebus Community conducted a blind peer review of my work – and I held my breath.

With some terrific constructive criticism and suggestions from the reviewers, I edited, edited, and edited some more.  The OER text also went through an accessibility review (thanks Will Pines!) and a student review.  Thanks to folks at Pressbooks and the Rebus Community, I am proud of the resulting three Blueprint for Success in College OER textbooks being used for College Success and Personal Growth courses, orientations, and first year experience programs (officially published by the Rebus Community, 2018):

The Student Experience

These openly licensed OER textbooks are FREE to students digitally.  Many studies have found that college students (especially community college students) do not purchase textbooks because of their cost. Therefore, having access to high quality, openly licensed, and free textbooks on day one of a course is helpful for many students.

Digital OER textbooks also provide students with many access options. OER designed with Pressbooks are accessible on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, Kindles, and Nooks.  Students may also download the texts so they can access them offline, which is especially useful for students in rural areas. These options allow students to have the learning material on (or before) the first day of classes and also ensures their access does not expire after the course ends.  This can be helpful for students who are taking courses in a sequence, repeating courses, or studying for post class or graduate exams. There is no need to purchase an access code again.

For students who prefer to have a print copy of the text, lulu.com provides high quality print versions at a low cost (only the cost of printing and paper) with no royalties and no tax that students have to pay for. The 456-page Blueprint for Success in College and Career OER textbook would cost a student just $8.45 via lulu.com (black and white) plus $3.99 for shipping.

Here are a few quotes from my students:

“I learned so much from the book that I now use it on a daily basis. I even help my little sister by telling her all these lessons. It just has so much goodness jam packed into it.”  - Jasmine Pineda

“I love the free, accessible textbook. Thank you so much for that.” - Margaret Yakou

“My favorite part of the class would have to be reading the book. There was an abundant amount of helpful information that taught me many new perspectives and ideas.” - Bladimir Enriquez

Measuring the Impact

Although the three Blueprint OER texts I produced were only released a few months ago and there has been no organized effort to market them, they are spreading around the California Community Colleges by word of mouth.  At least one instructor from each of the following nine colleges is using one of the Blueprint texts (or an adaptation of one of them): Grossmont, Hancock, San Diego City, Mesa, Miramar, Pasadena City, Reedley, Saddleback, West Hills Lemoore.  In addition, the texts are also being used in Oregon, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.

 

During my sabbatical, I was also eager to analyze how using OER in my teaching was impacting student success and retention. I started teaching with OER in the Spring of 2018 and I noticed almost immediately that students were more engaged.  With assistance from our local Institutional Research (thanks Stacy Teeters!) we were able to collect data from every course I taught at Grossmont over the last 10 years and compare the courses in which I used commercial textbooks that students had to purchase with the four sections I taught with OER in the Spring and Summer of 2018.  The data, as they say, doesn’t lie.

Retention rates for courses that used OER were 18% higher than courses that did not use OER.

 

Overall student success rates in courses that used OER  were higher than courses did not use OER.

Overall grade distribution comparison between courses with an OER and courses without an OER show that the courses with an OER had an increase of 26 percent As, 8 percent Bs, a decrease of 4 percent Cs, an increase of 1 percent Ds, a decrease of 2 percent Fs, and a decrease of 29 Ws.

Although not statistically significant, the data illustrated in the charts above is consistent with a larger study recently conducted at the University of Georgia.  I have been teaching online recently as my children are young and I appreciate the convenience it gives me.  As the success, retention, and grade distribution are exceeding some face-to-face numbers, I would call this a victory for both OER and online teaching.

What’s Ahead

Although the Blueprint College Success OER texts continue to be a work in progress, there are ancillaries in development that may make the content even more engaging to students and give faculty options and incentives to adopt OER.  Currently, we are working on an audio version of the texts that students will be able to listen to, a cultural competency/global awareness chapter, and we’re planning a Spanish version.

If you would like more information and/or are interested in collaborating on any of these projects:

 

What Did We Learn From Can•Innovate?

Through the leadership of California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI), all 114 California Community Colleges have adopted Canvas as their learning management system. Our systemwide move to Canvas enables our colleges to leverage the economy of scale and utilize resources more effectively. Moreover, part-time faculty who teach at more than one campus can now focus more of their time on teaching, as opposed to designing courses in multiple platforms. And, most importantly, our students who learn at more than one college will have a more consistent experience, which is particularly important as CVC-OEI expands access to online courses through cross-campus enrollment. Furthermore, our systemwide adoption of Canvas unites all of us — CCC faculty, staff, administrators, and students — to work towards the common goal of learning how to best utilize Canvas to support the needs of our diverse student population.

Last year, in pursuit of this goal, American River College in the Los Rios District in partnership with CVC-OEI and Instructure, hosted Can•Innovate 2017, a conference for faculty, staff, and administrators who use Canvas. Roughly 237 CCC educators attended that event.  This year, on October 26, 2018, @ONE (The Online Network of Educators), which serves as the professional development arm of CVC-OEI, hosted the 2nd annual Can•Innovate —this time in the form of a free online conference. 

Why a Free, Online Conference?

The decision to design Can•Innovate with a virtual program was made to support the needs of our CCC educators, comprised of 60,000+ faculty (70% of which are part-time) and approximately 30,000 classified staff and administrators. Leveraging what we learned from CCC Digital Learning Day, we designed the day to ensure everyone with a desire to learn and grow had the opportunity to do so.

In partnership with an advisory committee of faculty and staff, a robust online program was designed and delivered entirely through ConferZoom. The final program consisted of 19 sessions presented by 29 speakers including CCC faculty, staff, and administrators; national thought leaders; representatives from CVC-OEI ecosysystem, Instructure, and CCC supported tools; as well as a student keynote speaker, Natalie Miller. Attendees were provided 3 options to participate:  

  1. Online — from one’s own device
  2. On-Campus — from one of the 32 group viewing rooms across the system
  3. On-Campus -- from one of the 5 regional hubs

The Outcomes

Can•Innovate 2018 was well-attended by faculty, staff, and administrators from across the state. Some highlights of the attendee data are:

A 4.4 Star Event

A total of 270 attendees (40%) responded to the evaluation survey, providing us with rich user experience data from which we plan to learn and improve. Most of the evaluation responses (226 or 83%) came from those who attended online. The large majority (76%) online attendees indicated that convenience was the main reason they chose to attend from their own device, followed by “it is how I learn best” (6%), I live too far from a hub (6.6%) and my campus did not coordinate an on-campus viewing room (5%). Overall, attendees (all types) were very satisfied with their experience. Attendees gave their overall Can•Innovate experience an average 4.4 out of 5 stars. The distribution is shown below (all attendee types included):

★ ★ ★ ★ - 155

★ ★ ★ - 85

★★ ★ - 24

★ ★- 4

★- 3

Online attendees were slightly more satisfied (average 4.46 stars, n=226) than group viewing room attendees (4.28 stars, n=38) and hub attendees (3.85 stars, n=7). The data collected from the open-ended questions support high satisfaction levels. Those who attended online cited flexibility, the ability to learn without traveling, and efficiency as the top drivers of satisfaction. It is worth noting that these similar to the reasons students site for taking online classes.

Participants who attended from on-campus sited an appreciation for being able to converse with colleagues during and between the sessions, and on-site subject matter experts expand upon the presentations. Below are excerpts from the open-ended comments:

What did you like best about attending online?

What did you like best about attending in a group viewing room?

What did you like best about attending at a regional hub?

What did we learn?

For all the talk about student equity, it's also really nice to have opportunities for Teacher/Instructor equity as well. Online Conferences without exorbitant fees or limiting travel arrangements are the way to go - Thank you! — Elli England (@Toxicgrin)

Free, online conferences are a new form of professional development provided by CVC-OEI/@ONE. With each event, we seek to learn and improve. Can•Innovate has reconfirmed the value of untethering professional development from a time and place. By granting faculty, staff, and administrators the opportunity to learn and grow without needing to travel, more people are served and more students will benefit. Here are some of our key takeaways:

If you have any thoughts about our Can•Innovate findings, we’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below or reach out to me directly.

… and mark your calendar for our next untethered event, CCC Digital Learning Day, which will be held on Thursday, February 28, 2019! Let us know what topics you’d like to learn about by contributing in our social upvoting forum, which is open until November 30!

Humanizing My Online Teaching with Informal Videos

In the 6 1/2 minute video below, Wendy Bass discusses the value of using weekly, informal videos in her online teaching. The videos provide students with a brief preview of the new module and a sense of who their instructor really is, promoting her social presence.

Additional resources:

Canvas Speedgrader + Your Voice = A Win for Students

""

Please click the play button below to listen to Don Carlisle reflect on how and why he records audio feedback in Canvas to enrich his online students' learning. Or read the transcript below provided or access the interactive transcript.

All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Don Carlisle. I teach economics at Cabrillo College, Modesto Junior College, and also recently at Santa Rosa Junior College. I wanted to take a few minutes, at least for this blog post, to talk a little bit about audio, and hence why I'm doing this as an audio blog post.

One of the things that I find that, as I talk to other instructors, especially on ... that are using Canvas, is that they're not using a lot of audio, which surprises me because I find this such a fantastic methodology of providing feedback to students and interacting with students. How I use audio specifically within Canvas as an instructor are three main areas.

The first one is, I usually give it during Discussion feedback because I use discussions in my course as a way to expand knowledge. Some instructors use discussions as kind of a way for students to connect with each other, which I do that as a large part as well, but the main ideas is we're still discussing a particular topic, which is embedded within the, what I consider kind of the lesson plan, so I try to connect it directly to what we're reading, what we're going over, and I have students do some analysis and do some other things. The feedback to me is a very important grading tool, and also a way to help students kind of move forward and understand something a little bit more about say what they're reading or watching or doing something else within that assignment.

What's great about audio is that this can be done right within the SpeedGrader within Canvas. There is video feedback, which you can do, which I'll talk about in just a second, or you can also do audio feedback. Now, one of the best thins that I actually really, really love about audio feedback is that I can get up at ... pretty early actually, before my kids get up and my family kind of gets going, and I can do some grading. I don't have to be well-dressed, my hair can be disheveled, I can be drinking a cup of coffee, I don't have to get kind of ready to then be presentable within that audio feedback. By doing so, it's very easy, and I can do that very rapidly, kind of no matter what's happening. I don't have to kind of sit down during a video feedback to get presentable and make sure that the room is in order, and the backlight is okay. There are quite a few more steps that need to be in place for video feedback or to do a video than simply doing an audio.

What's great about that ... or I should take one step back and say what's the other aspect that I use audio messages in or audio media in is also during announcements. Now, the only caveat with announcements that you always have to be careful of is that there's an accessibility issue there. One thing with audio feedback on the SpeedGrader, if I know that I have a student that needs an accessibility or has a disability in the course, then obviously I won't use audio feedback with them, I'll just use regular text-based feedback. But if I am sending a message to the class, I have to be careful, particularly if I do have, say, a deaf student in the course or somebody that's hard of hearing or doesn't have the ability to listen to an audio message, then that can be a problem. It's just a caveat there, just pay attention to those types of things and make sure that you cover that base as needed.

The other thing ... So, going back to that, what I found is that audio messages in particular can provide a fantastic connection with students. One of the things that I don't get a lot of but that is fun when we get it and I can go back and forth with the students, when they reply with an audio message back. Now, again, that's typically a fairly savvy Canvas student, somebody that's played around with Canvas and understands it, knows how to interact with it and will reply. But when that happens, it's just fantastic. It's one of those interactions where you have a quiet conversation with a student very much one-on-one, and you can go over issues back and forth, and it just creates a fantastic experience for the student and for the instructor.

The other thing I want to say is that I know students appreciate the audio feedback because I get a lot of really positive responses when I survey them. Now, in my course, I actually do like a, what I would consider, a mini-survey every week with anonymous surveys in the middle and at the end of the course. In the mini-surveys, those ... the students know or they ... that those are not anonymous, those are done directly by the students, and they talk to me kind of directly. In that sense, I still get feedback from the students, saying, "Hey, I really appreciated that audio message. Thank you very much. That really helped me understand it better," or during the anonymous surveys I get a lot of really positive feedback on the audio responses as well.

Obviously, it's never going to replace all the other types of feedback, but I just feel it's one of those venues that isn't used very well or not used enough. I really want to encourage instructors to really, really try to use that audio feedback, try to jump in there when you're doing feedback or when you're giving a reply, or you're doing grading and you want to provide some feedback to the student that may be hard to articulate in writing or may be lengthy in writing. Jump on the audio piece, kind of experiment with it. It will take you a few times to figure out the volume, what kind of microphone are you using, how does it work, how do I make sure that the level isn't too high, and that's kind of the one thing to be careful of is that, as a default, you probably want to say, "Well, I want a little less gain or volume in my recording, so that way people can turn it up as opposed to the other way around, which then can just distort everything and get kind of sideways."

 That's really it. I'm not going to talk for too long here, just 'cause it can go on and on. But I just want to stress that there's some really big positives to audio feedback. Number one, the cost as far as getting ready and being ready to go and just being able to do it, is very different than video, and it's much more impactful for students and much more personable if you can do it, especially on a one-on-one basis. I think the absolute best place for that is in the SpeedGrader. So, whether or not you're grading quizzes or essays or discussions, it just is a fantastic place to provide feedback.

One other quick anecdote. During my discussions in my class, actually, the first couple of weeks, I actually take a lot of time to give audio feedback. The first week, I give nothing but audio feedback. I actually go through every single student and provide audio feedback based on their discussion. A lot of it is repetitive, a lot of it is the exact same thing, and it gets to be kind of the same old stuff. But I feel it's such an important connection with the student in doing that audio connection and have them hearing my voice and seeing my picture at least upfront and seeing all of the other videos that I have posted in my Canvas course in the beginning, but to get something a little bit different, and that is me jumping on there and saying, "Hello, Sarah. Hello, Miguel. Whatever it is. I really liked what you did here, but here's some suggestions going forward that would be even better for you to get an even higher grade." That simple connection via audio, whether it be just one minute or even 30 seconds or two minutes, which is about where I like to keep it, students really, really get a positive experience.

My big suggestion to you this week as far as my blog post is just jump out there. Really try to get a good handle on audio. Find ways to use it. Make sure you find a good microphone that you like and you're comfortable using, and really start to use audio feedback, especially during the grading times, in the SpeedGrader because it's so easy to use and I feel it's a really powerful tool.

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Making Your Tables Accessible--In 15 Seconds (or Less)

Tables can be a useful way to organize certain types of content visually. But tables add an extra layer of complexity for students using a screen reader device which means it’s imperative your tables are formatted properly. Never fear! The Canvas Accessibility Checker is here to save the day.

Finding Your Regional Distance Education Community

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What if you could meet regularly with peers from neighboring community colleges to share solutions and ideas about online education?  For faculty and staff at California community colleges located in southern border counties, this wish has come true.

The San Diego/ Imperial County Community College Association (SDICCCA) has an Instructional Services subcommittee on Distance Education that was founded in late 2012.  The subcommittee is made up of Distance Education representatives from nine community colleges in the San Diego and Imperial County area.  SDICCA members meet at the San Diego Community College District offices on the first Friday of each month. Together, we discuss and provide leadership on DE issues such as practices for supporting and preparing faculty and students, strategies for improving student retention and success, as well as effective practices for meeting accreditation requirements and state/national distance education regulations.

Finding My Community 

As the new DE Coordinator for Palomar College, I just started attending these SDICCA meetings this year and I have learned so much from the other long-time members of the group.  For example, since community colleges are making compliance with accessibility laws and regulations a big priority this year, we have explored ideas for handling vendor software that is out of compliance.  Here are a problem and proposed solution that I have taken away from my experiences. Many mathematics instructors use MyMathLab in their online classes and, currently, MyMathLab does not meet the minimum acceptable standards for accessibility.  SDICCCA members shared with the group other software that may be substituted such as Knewton or MyOpenMath, which has some accessibility issues but not as many as MyMathLab.

In our last meeting, each college DE representative shared something about the various software packages they were using to support DE classes.  Together, we discovered:

In addition to discussions around key themes, members share concerns about DE issues, report back to each other on what is happening at the state level, and they give an annual presentation to administrators to help them understand the benefits of online education, as well as the challenges we confront in expanding this teaching modality.

I highly recommend that other regional community colleges form DE groups of their own.  The sharing of ideas, concerns, and technology with each other are extremely beneficial!