How Much Do You Really Know About Student Self Assessment?
Self-assessment is an undersung hero in the online instructor’s toolbox. It can not only help students develop skills in critical analysis, research by Sharma, et al. (2016) found it can increase their interest and motivation level, leading to enhanced learning and better academic performance. How ‘bout them apples?! Watch on to learn more.
The Secret to Embedding a YouTube Link You Probably Don’t Know
When it comes to embedding a video on your Canvas page, you’ve got choices. However, you may not realize that when the video embed displays as a thumbnail image, it means you’ve got an added accessibility concern. In this Byte-sized episode, you’ll learn the trick to handle that.
What's All This Humanizing Stuff Everyone's Talking About?
While online classes provide students with more flexibility and new ways to collaborate, success in the online environment is directly related to how present and engaged the instructor is in the virtual classroom. In other words, making content available to learners is not the same as teaching. Human connections and human relationships are the fertilizer, if you will, that allows our students to learn, blossom and grow. Supporting our diverse students in this way helps create a more equitable learning environment.
Check out the Humanizing tab on Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s website for some great resources!
Why We Love the Pope Tech Tool
Accessibility checker tools for our CA Community College system:
PopeTech available free to all CA community colleges
UDOIT - open source (free) OR cloud-based (premium)
The free open-source version of UDOIT requires hosting on a server. That could be somewhere on your college server, or, if that’s not possible, Heroku is a free cloud server option. Installation directions for UDOIT Installing Heroku There is also a cloud-based version of UDOIT which is hosted but requires purchase as part of Cidi Labs (some colleges have already done so - consider requesting that CidiLabs be added to the STAC list).
Ally (Blackboard) - fully funded for CCCs through June 30, 2021 If your CA community college would like to set up an Ally account, please contact support@cvc.edu.
3 Foolproof Tips for Using Images in Canvas
Images are a delightful way to increase engagement and reinforce written content in an online course. But if not used correctly, images can be problematic. From the way you embed to the size you choose, I’ll show you how to be an image master!
The Most Effective Way to Elimate Barriers to Students' Learning
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for thinking about teaching and learning that offers flexibility in the ways students access course material, engage with it, and show what they know. UDL principles benefit all learners by building in responsiveness that can be adjusted for every learner’s strengths and needs.
3 Things to Love About the New Rich Content Editor
Canvas’ new Rich Content Editor is here! Well, actually it’s been here for several months already and it will soon be the default editing tool. The new editor has an updated layout and increased functionality. Learn how to make the most of the new design. It may take a little getting used to (“Now, where did they put the accessibility checker?”) but once you do, you’ll love what you can do with it.
At the end of the semester, each student receives a single letter grade that summarizes how well they learned the content of our course. But, how much of that grade is really a measure of what they learned? How much of a student’s final grade is based on:
How complicated is their life?
Students with many responsibilities (such as unpredictable work schedules or family members who face emergencies) may lose points on late work because they need to choose between helping their child and helping themselves.
One of the concerns faculty have with removing late penalties is that students will abuse this allowance. This was not my experience when I went from very harsh late penalties to none at all. Most students still completed the assignments on time. The main difference I saw was that students who would likely have dropped due to missing early assignments stayed in the class and learned the content.
How much extra time do they have?
When we give students extra points for activities that are time intensive (such as watching a movie and connecting it to course content), we may be grading students on how much free time they have. Faculty often use extra credit as a “slush fund” to make up for points deducted due to things like late work. If we remove those penalties, students can focus on the learning rather than “making up points”.
When we make assumptions about what a “good” essay looks like or the test-taking skills students bring, we may be measuring which high school students attended rather than their knowledge of our content.
When we have harsh late policies but bend them for students who request an extension, we are actually measuring a student’s willingness to tell us about their challenges, their feelings of being worthy of special treatment, and their cultural background. It’s much more fair to let all students know up front that late work is acceptable. That is a move towards a more equitable learning environment.
A concern I often hear about removing late penalties is that this makes the class less fair to students who complete the work on time. Treating all students equally can seem like the fairest approach but, in actuality, we are creating a playing field that benefits students who come to our class from backgrounds most similar to our own. Clearly outlining the flexibility in our course policies helps us build a course that responds to individual student needs. This lets us and the students focus on the course content rather than navigating course logistics.
Let’s revisit the points marketplace
In the table above, a student may choose to lose points for a late assignment over losing hours at work. After all, they can make up these points with extra credit but can’t make up the lost wages. And, a student with limited time may skip the reading. This reading takes the most time and results in the fewest points/hour. Unfortunately, this is also the single most useful item on the list. I highly encourage you to read Grading for Equity (for zero points)! It brings a fascinating perspective that completely changed the way I look at grading.
Disinvestment from the points marketplace
Instead, what if we focus our grading directly on what we want students to learn and remove all the confounding variables that add inaccuracies to our measures.
For example: I want to measure a student’s understanding of the respiratory system. I could ask students to write an essay - but this measures writing skill AND their understanding of the respiratory system. The writing skills are a confounding variable because they mask the true measure of a student’s understanding of the respiratory system. Similarly, using a timed multiple choice test adds the confounding variables of how fast students recall information and their ability to parse multiple choice test questions.
An alternative approach to this assignment is to tell students exactly what you intend to measure and let them choose how best to demonstrate this knowledge. For example:
Trace the movement of a molecule of oxygen from outside the body until it reaches a red blood cell. This may be easiest to answer using a numbered list, but you are welcomed to approach this however works best for you.
Include the following structures: alveoli, bronchus, bronchioles, epiglottis, larynx, pharynx, trachea. Briefly describe each of these structures.
Also include the terms: diffusion, oxygen and carbon dioxide.
The assignments in my biology class give students options in how they demonstrate their knowledge. Students choose to describe this process using a wide variety of strategies: an essay, labeled diagram, flowchart, video, and many more. I’ve been amazed at all the creative and engaging strategies students find for explaining concepts. Grading becomes fun! (yes, really…) The key to giving students options in how they demonstrate their knowledge is to be clear about what I am assessing and grading. Good rubrics (like the one below) are essential.
Criterion
Exemplary
Accomplished
Developing
Structures are described correctly
3
2
1
Flow of oxygen molecule is accurate described using the listed structures
3
2
1
Diffusion, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are accurately identified
3
2
1
Compare this rubric with the table at the very beginning of this article. What are students asked to focus on? Which gives us more accurate information about what a student is learning? I invite you to share your thoughts and equitable grading approaches in a comment below!
When I asked my students for anonymous feedback at the end of my online course, they responded, “I loved being able to still have interaction with my classmates. I didn’t think I would really get that interaction in an online class so that was definitely a bonus for me,” and “I liked how the professor was able to keep us all connected with each other and made it feel as if we were in an actual classroom even though we were in the comfort of our home.”
Students taking online courses that are intentionally designed with opportunities for asynchronous student-to-student communication and collaboration reap the rewards of not only the cognitive benefits of sharing ideas with peers, but also the socio-emotional benefits of being a member of a learning community. By cultivating engaging interactions and interconnections among students, we create a quality humanized learning environment where students, especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students, thrive.
Humanizing & Equity
This is the third blog in a series within the theme of humanizing online teaching and learning with an equity-minded lens. Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s transformative work on humanizing delineates how this practice “leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today's diverse students.” View the latest Humanizing Visual Guide on “How and Why to Humanize Your Online Class.”
Implementing equity-minded and culturally responsive teaching practices to establish trust, make connections, and foster community is critical to serving minoritized students. Geneva Gay offers suggestions for improving the education of marginalized BIPOC students in her book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice as she illuminates, “Cooperation, community, and connectedness are central features of culturally responsive teaching. Mutual aid, interdependence, and reciprocity as criteria for guiding behavior replace the individualism and competitiveness that are so much a part of conventional classrooms. The goal is for all students to be winners, rather than some winning and others losing” (43-44). Author of the book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks expresses, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.” This is true for producing equitable outcomes and completion in the online classroom, as well. Culturally responsive online courses provide BIPOC students with a sense of community and belonging because they are not working in isolation--but in close collaboration with their peers.
In the online classroom, instructors need to be intentional in their course design to not only have a caring instructor presence, but to also provide multiple learning opportunities for students to cultivate trust, build community, and develop relationships with each other. For more on cultivating trust, view the “Sending Cues of Trust Online” session archive from the spring 2021 @ONE Humanizing Challenge Encore with Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Jennifer Ortiz, and me as your guides.
Why Student-To-Student Interaction?
Not only is course design with student interaction an equity-minded and a humanizing practice, but it is also required for compliance with both the California Education Code Title V regulations on Regular Effective Contact (§ 55204. Instructor Contact) and the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act.
Research reinforces how vital a sense of belonging, the establishment of relationships, and collaborative group work are to online student learning, retention, and success. The 2017 CCC Chancellor’s Office Distance Education Report highlights, “A sense of belonging to a learning community is an important factor for distance education students” (33) and “students who are comfortable establishing relationships in an online environment tend to persist at higher rates” (52). A 2015 Public Policy Institute of California report delineates that “a student’s perceived learning is correlated with how much of a sense of social presence is created in an online course. When the course structure allows students to develop strong working groups, they perceive the course to be ‘congenial,’ see themselves as a community, and perform better” (11-12). One of the four factors most directly correlated with California community college student success in online courses is regular effective contact (2015 Public Policy Institute of California).
Furthermore, interaction among students is an important component of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric (Section B4 and B5 on Interaction: Student-to-Student Contact) and the Peralta Equity Rubric (Section E8: Connection and Belonging).
Not Just Discussion Forums
For years, online courses have depended on whole-class discussion forums to encourage interaction among students. Imagine being a full-time online student whose courses all require you to post and reply to discussion forums week after week. It becomes disengaging as students suffer from discussion forum fatigue.
My experiences participating in and assigning formal, contrived discussion forums have not been effective at building a strong online classroom community. It’s easy for students to get lost in whole-class discussions because they can be lengthy, clunky, and overwhelming with multiple conversations going on at once. In fact, two students speaking on a panel at the Online Teaching Conference 2019 session on “Online Student Community: What Do Students Need from Us?” shared that they loathe weekly whole-class discussions where they are required to post, reply to two peers, and meet the minimum word count. One student honestly disclosed, “Personally, I hate discussions. Hate them.” She explains the reasons for her aversion are that they are forced, that they are not organic, and that connections don’t form out of them.
I encourage online faculty to consider designing student-to-student interaction activities such as those described below that utilize asynchronous, low-bandwidth methods, which offer online students with unstable internet connections and with work or family responsibilities the flexibility they need to succeed in college. For additional examples by California community college faculty, view the @ONE Student-Student Interactions Guide.
Student-To-Student Interaction In Practice
Low-Stakes Collaborative Practice
Low-stakes, formative practice activities are an excellent vehicle for heightening student engagement and retention. These checkpoints of student learning can be conducted online in the spirit of collaboration.
Group Discussions
To better foster community, consider placing your students into small groups to discuss your content instead of assigning whole-class discussions. When you break your class into diverse smaller groups to have more intimate discourse about your course content, there is a boost in meaningful student-to-student interaction. Students experience both a deeper engagement in the content and a greater chance of forming connections by focusing on the replies of 3 to 5 students instead of 30 or 40, especially when the groups are sustained over several weeks. Students in my online classes have expressed their appreciation of the small group discussions over a month as they discuss the book we are reading together in “book clubs.” View the first twenty minutes of this video of my CVC-OEI Can•Innovate presentation on “Group Discussions for Increasing Interaction, Engagement, and Equity” for why I choose group discussions over whole-class discussions and how to set them up on Canvas.
Peer Review
Engaging students in giving one another feedback on their work or work-in-progress is another effective method of strengthening student-to-student interaction. Community is built as students support each other’s success and learning concepts are reinforced while engaging in a collaborative peer review process. Evaluating others’ work is a low-stakes, collaborative practice opportunity to reinforce the learning of your course concepts. I find it helpful to give students questions to respond to that evaluate specific criteria as they conduct their reviews. Canvas has a built-in peer review assignments tool, and it can be achieved in peer review pairs or small groups. For instance, students can give and receive art critiques or feedback on their problem-solving, presentations, and writing.
Social Annotation of Readings
Culturally responsive teaching draws from and then builds upon all that our students bring to the classroom, and Hypothesis provides a space for students to share it in the margins of texts while they read. For example, for low-stakes collaborative practice of strategic reading skills and metacognition, I ask my students to annotate parts of an article where they are making connections, asking questions, inferring, synthesizing, visualizing, and determining importance. This validates their cultures and language and capitalizes on it by using their background knowledge as a window to learning new content.
If you assign readings in your courses, Hypothesis allows for social annotation and replies for class conversations to unfold in the margins of PDFs and websites. In the recording of “Liquid Margins 18: Social Annotation in Community College: A California Case Study,” Kat King, Brandon Harrison, and I highlight how weaving in social annotation as a teaching practice has significantly increased student engagement, critical thinking, and learning outcomes.
Student-Created Videos
Text-based assessments come to life through video and audio with Flipgrid and Canvas Studio. Both of these humanizing tools can be implemented for both low-stakes practice and higher-stakes student presentations, debates, or speeches. A conversation unfolds as students interact through recorded videos and video, audio, or text replies to one another. For more on Flipgrid, see my previous article titled “Humanizing Your Online Courses with Flipgrid”.
Higher-Stakes Collaborative Summative Assessments
If you assign a wonderful group project or presentation in your on-campus class, then retain it for your online version. You might consider having groups collaborate on creating real-world, authentic infographics, pamphlets, slideshows, webpages, or videos on shared Google Slides, PowerPoint Presentations, or Adobe Spark posts, videos, and pages. For instance, math squads could design webpages on statistics of racial disparities in their community, groups of biology students could create pamphlets that might be found in a doctor’s office on diseases affecting marginalized populations, or ESL teams could record videos presenting different grammar concepts. Groups could then share their final products with the entire class, perhaps on a Padlet, which is a straightforward digital bulletin board that allows students to share digital content and leave feedback or comments to one another.
Some may cringe at the idea of group work. I’ve found that the more clearly structured and scaffolded the projects are, the better the experience for every group. Monitoring the groups helps ensure their success and gives me better insight into their group dynamics, so I build in regular check-ins, ask them to self-reflect, and evaluate their peers at the end. Providing models of exemplary work is a helpful resource for students to clearly understand what they are being asked to produce. I find it important to allow ample time for online students with busy schedules to successfully collaborate than I do when teaching on-campus courses. In Vanderbilt University’s guide entitled “Group Work: Using Cooperative Learning Groups Effectively,” Cynthia J. Brame and Rachel Biel offer helpful recommendations for structuring group work and making it effective that are transferable to the online classroom.
Informal Student-Initiated Contact
In addition to course-related collaborations and interactions, high-quality online courses provide spaces for unstructured student-initiated social contact with their peers. I’ve attempted implementing Canvas Discussions and Flipgrid for this purpose, but I have experienced the most success with Pronto.
Pronto is the social space for students to connect more organically as they communicate through modalities they are already familiar with: text chats, GIFs, emojis, and live video. In my whole-class thread, students are asking questions, making clarifications, troubleshooting technology, and supporting one another on assignments. With Pronto, students have the ability to form their own groups, such as study groups or project teams, and it makes private or direct text exchanges possible between study buddies or friends.
Conclusion
Connections and relationships do not form as organically online as they do on campus. However, the formation of strong relationships between students and a robust classroom community is possible to achieve from a distance. Incorporating both formal and informal student-to-student interaction opportunities to establish trust and foster a social presence online is a humanizing, equity-minded, and culturally responsive pedagogical practice that addresses educational inequities and increases minoritized students’ success.
How will you design engaging asynchronous student-to-student interaction in your online courses?
During the summer of 2020, as the pandemic made it obvious we weren’t going back to “normal life” any time soon, my curriculum needed to reflect the massive changes that were happening in our society. Using the traditional STEM assessment style of short answer or multiple choice exams would not function well within this online learning environment. I could continue to give traditional exams, but would they actually be a valid measure of student knowledge? And, more broadly, would these exams serve my students in helping them to develop skills necessary to be successful beyond my class?
Additionally, if I were to continue to use traditional assessments I would need to employ an online proctoring tool. This tool would help me maintain academic integrity, to an extent. However, these proctoring tools have significant implications for student equity. Knowing this, I could not, in good conscience, use one.
In 2019, I made the decision to leave my exams and not use an online proctoring tool. But this left me in a tough spot. How would I measure a student's knowledge without using exams?
Switching Assessment Styles
As an undergraduate STEM student and a STEM instructor, exams are the only type of assessment I have ever known. As I made this change, I began to realize that it would be important to switch to assessments that enabled my students to demonstrate their knowledge and develop new skills that could be used in other classes, as well as in life beyond higher education. With access to an abundance of human knowledge at our fingertips via the internet, the ability to research, synthesize, and communicate ideas is of more value to my students’ future than memorizing all the steps of photosynthesis for an exam. With this shift, I was able to move from assessing rote memorization to critical thinking skills – isn’t that what we all should be striving to do? I was also able to connect abstract concepts to current events or students’ daily lives, making them more meaningful and memorable.
Through this process, I developed a set of projects that draw on the principles of authentic assessments to assess student learning. I provide the basic structure of what needs to be included in the project so I can assess my students’ comprehension of the concepts, but the format of the project is generally open-ended, and multimedia projects are encouraged.
One example is a role-play scenario where students step into the role of interns for a state government committee on health and human safety. Their goal is to brief the state representative for whom they work about the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria. This project was inspired by the Performance Assessment Resource Bank. In the brief, students must include the following:
A discussion of what makes bacteria different from other forms of life
An explanation of how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, in evolutionary terms
A description of environmental conditions that select for antibiotic resistant mutations
A discussion of potential state-wide solutions that can be implemented to slow the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria
Within this one project, I was able to assess students’ comprehension of several learning goals: their ability to distinguish between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, as well as natural selection and evolution. This project also required students to demonstrate their ability to apply their knowledge of the evolutionary process to evaluate large-scale solutions to combat this issue. The form of the final product was entirely up to the students. One student, who was studying digital marketing, built a website. Another held a mock webinar. Some typed their project into a traditional research essay. Even though their final projects took many forms, grading and assessing their work was not as challenging as I expected because I provided a clearly defined rubric.
Here is a 3-minute video explanation I provide for my students about this project:
Reactions to a New Assessment Style in a STEM Course
During the week leading up to the start of the semester as students were exploring our syllabus and Canvas course, I had several inquiries about exams. Students asked, “When are the exams?” and “Will we need to use [proctoring service] to take exams in this class?” After fielding several variations of these questions, I explicitly explained to my students my philosophy for adopting this new assessment strategy and why we would not have any exams. The idea of being able to show their knowledge outside of an exam in a science class was, at first, mysterious to students. However, they quickly acclimated to this new style of assessment as I promptly answered their questions.
Student feedback about this new assessment strategy was very positive. In an anonymous course evaluation, 97% of students rated the class as “always or almost always having assessments that are related to course material.” In another metric, 100% of students rated the class as “always or almost always having activities and projects which are useful for learning and understanding.” Students reported the projects as “fun and interesting” and said they “helped [to]… understand this subject better.” One student stated these projects helped them “gain a better understanding of the topic when applying it to real life,” which was my intent when making this shift.
In making this change to my assessments, I was met with some skepticism and backlash from colleagues, which resulted in me being reluctant to speak out about equity and assessments in online learning. When I did speak out, I received push back from colleagues saying “Students will have to get used to exams,” as well as, “There’s just no other way to assess learning in my class” except through exams. I even had a colleague claim I was calling anyone who used proctoring tools and exams “racist.” I see now that this reaction is tied to a larger, systemic issue about power and privilege in White dominant culture but I also know it made me hesitate to discuss the topic of assessments and proctoring tools again.
In Fall of 2020 I was due to be evaluated, and as a part-time faculty member I was incredibly nervous that this different assessment style would be seen as inferior, and thus my employment status and income would be impacted as a result. Luckily, despite the backlash I had received, I had many other colleagues, including my evaluators, who were curious and encouraged by these efforts to adopt different assessment styles. Out of this discussion about assessment and proctoring tools that was met with backlash, I was able to open a conversation about rethinking how we assess learning in STEM. Yes, this is currently an uncommon way to approach assessment for many STEM classes, and can be a challenging pivot to make. But, if we’re truly dedicated to closing opportunity gaps then we must make STEM courses more equitable for diverse learners.
Brookhart, S. M. (2018). Appropriate criteria: Key to effective rubrics. Frontiers in Education, (3)10. doi:https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/feduc.2018.00022 .
Learning Goals, Learning Objectives and Backward Design, Oh My!
One of the hurdles experienced by many instructors in higher education is the practice of hiring based on a graduate degree in one’s subject matter but which isn’t necessarily accompanied by any pedagogical training. This is an offshoot of the mistaken belief that if one knows a subject well, one is automatically going to be able to teach that subject. Au contraire, mon ami! As I’m sure many of you have come to realize, teaching is its own skillset.
Cultivating new knowledge and/or skills is the whole point of teaching and learning. A finely-crafted lecture—or in the case of asynchronous online courses, well-designed content—may be fascinating and even full of sparkling wisdom but if there’s no cognitive or behavioral change in students as a result, it’s all just entertainment (or drudgery, depending on the perspective). As one of my mentors said, “Telling ain’t teaching.”
Traditional methods of curriculum planning, where a list of content is the starting point and outcomes and assessments come last, often lead to missing content (where the content provided doesn’t match what’s being assessed) or the dreaded “bloat” (you know, when the course is full of “Oh, that would be good for them to know!” stuff but is lacking a solid progression leading to specific learning outcomes).
Typically, the missing ingredient is strategic planning based on a set of well-defined and clearly articulated learning objectives.
Getting Strategic About Course Design
As a first step in our strategic course design, let’s draw the distinction between learning goals and learning objectives. In the educational context, goals are the higher-level outcomes you plan to accomplish in the course. Objectives are the specific, measurable competencies students will demonstrate that lead to that goal. For example, my goal might be: “understand the concept of conditional probability” and a correlating objective might be: “calculate the conditional probability of a given event using a tree diagram.”
Once you’ve got a solid learning objective—clear, focused and measurable—your next step is to determine how you’ll assess whether students have mastered that objective (that’s why “measurable” is so important). Then it’s an easy jump to the final step of figuring out what content and activities—lecture, reading, videos, case studies, practice examples, etc.—will support students in achieving and demonstrating their competency.
Voilà! There’s your course design sequence: goals 🡪 objectives 🡪 assessments 🡪 content. This is often referred to as backward design and ensures that your outcomes and assessments map across to the content you’re providing students. It’s akin to taking a road trip and choosing your destination first, then planning the route and rest stops so you’re sure to arrive when and where you want.
It all starts with the humble learning objective.
Writing an Effective Learning Objective
How do you write a well-defined and clearly articulated objective? I’m so glad you asked!
I’ll give you the basics here but know that a Google search for “how to write learning objectives” returned 251,000,000 results so there are plenty of resources out there if you want more details. (I particularly liked this article on why objectives matter from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard.)
Identify the thing you want students to learn.
Example: five steps of the scientific method
Pinpoint the level of knowledge desired (using Bloom’s or another learning taxonomy).
The level of learning directly influences the type of assessment you’ll choose. In our example of the scientific method, asking students to apply the steps would be a higher level, and a different assessment task, than asking them to name the steps.
Example 1: to know the five steps of the scientific method (remember)
Example 2: to use the five steps of the scientific method (apply)
Identify a verb that describes the behavior students will demonstrate. (It’s gotta be observable/measurable. Understand or know are not observable.)
Example 1: recall the five steps of the scientific method
Example 2: perform an experiment following the five steps of the scientific method
If you’re getting fancy, you’ll also identify the conditions under which the skill or behavior is to be performed:
The student will recite Newton’s Laws without use of a memory aid.
The student will use a thesaurus to identify synonyms for a given list of words.
Using primary and secondary sources, the student will analyze causes of the American Revolution.
Given access to the College library, the student will identify the variety of research resources available.
And getting extra fancy, you’ll include the criteria used to measure performance. So, putting it all together using our example, you might end up with: The student will use the scientific method to perform an experiment in their daily life with a rubric rating of 85/100. (And then you’d craft the grading rubric.)
There you have it—the why and the how of writing meaningful learning objectives. Though often considered a pro forma aspect of course design, when used properly as part of a backward design approach, learning objectives are truly the backbone of student learning.
Dig Deeper with Professional Development from @ONE
Are you feeling inspired and ready to learn more about improving the design of your online course? @ONE has you covered. Consider the array of professional development opportunities below.
Accessibility is an important part of teaching online and, at times, it can benefit students, as well as faculty. Early on in my career at MiraCosta, I recall watching a colleague photocopy problems out of the book, cut the problems from printed pages with scissors, and tape them to a new piece of paper to create the problems. He would make a handwritten note or use whiteout to modify a problem. He had files of these tests in his office - decades worth. But he never used the same test twice and this process would continue every term. His process was time consuming and, at times, frustrating to students who struggled to read the problems. Imagine being able to save your own time and help students too!
Most faculty use typed exams but may not spend time thinking about how these materials create challenges for some students. While it is common for math instructors to spend time adjusting font size, making itemized lists for parts of a problem, and producing handouts to increase understanding, it is less common that we think about students who rely on screen readers, accessible technology devices used by people with vision impairments.
Many faculty also make videos for their students, even short videos like the one above. If posted to YouTube, the captions are created automatically – but be careful! Those captions are pretty good, but aren’t perfect. Imagine a video where you described a new algorithm for “sub track shin” or “Polly know meals”. If you’re a math teacher, the intent was ‘subtraction’ and ‘polynomials’ but those misconceptions will confuse students who are following the automatic captions. It is time well spent for all students to update the captions by adding punctuation, capitalization, and fixing these incorrect translations. Learn how to edit your YouTube captions for accuracy (a 7-minute video by Katie Palacios).
Making Accessibility Part of Your Course Content Workflow
In the video embedded above, which is just over 200 seconds, I share some quick tips to save you time while making documents, PDFs, or Canvas pages accessible to students who use screen readers. It takes a lot less time to format pages with lists automatically rather than typing them manually. I will also show how following accessibility guidelines helped when a student who was blind needed a Braille version of the course materials. We were able to provide this quickly and without much additional work (it even included Braille graphs) because the content was made with accessibility guidelines in mind.
