Discovering The Spark Of Teaching & Learning Through Equitable Grading

Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

In the 2020 Pixar film, Soul, Joe is a mentor in a purgatory-like realm mentoring a fellow soul named 22. Joe’s quest is to help 22 find her “spark” and decide to return of life on earth.  Joe believes that everyone must have a “spark” - a passion, a destination, a purpose.  It isn't until 22 lives in Joe’s body, however, that she finds her spark and desire to live on earth; and it isn't until Joe lives as a mentee (student) that he finds a legitimate appreciation for living life with purpose.  Through mentoring 22, Joe eventually discovers that a “spark” is not about finding one’s passion or single purpose in life.  Rather, the “spark” is being fully aware of moments that uplift and spark the soul. 

 Joe was supposed to be the mentor, yet he ended up seeing the gaps in the meaning of passion, sharing in a collaborative experience, shifting his perspective on the purpose of life, and reshaping his life.  Like Joe, faculty are mentors who can engage with intentional, equitable practices to discover the “spark” in learning. Both 22’s and Joe’s life experiences still mattered.  They were foundational to finding their spark.  This is a great metaphor for how teachers and students must collaborate in order to reach their full potential - our spark.

We are two community college faculty dedicated to achieving equity. In this article, we share our perspectives, inspirations, and research about equitable grading strategies. Our intention is to spark your curiosity to learn more and to encourage you to critically question your own practices to remove systemic barriers and ensure all students have what they need to achieve their goals – that is how we achieve equity

The process of schooling is at odds with the way humans learn. Dr. Christopher Emdin writes in his book Ratchetdemic: Reimaginig Academic Success, schooling “…places young folks in metaphorical cages and inhabits them from being free, [and] is a contemporary form of historical phenomena like slavery… They feel contemporary forms of the same stress, fear and anger their ancestors felt, and schools serve as spaces that condition them to accept those feelings and normalize them” (136).  As faculty, we have the opportunity to (re) kindle the spark of learning by intentionally and critically investigating our grading practices.  

bell hooks states in Teaching To Transgress: The Education As The Practice Of Freedom, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy, … [and calls] for a renewal and rejuvenation in our teaching practice. Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can go beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions…” (12). As equity-minded educators, we believe  it is time to re-examine our practice and  recognize our ability to heal by shedding oppressive practices and inspiring the spark in learning.

Seeing Inequities

Historically, grades were a means to efficiently demarcate students to different groups based on their perceived intelligence. By and large, as a system, we have been using the same A, B, C, D, F grading system that was instituted in the US in the Ivy League system in 1898. However, with the influx of immigrants, the move to compulsory education (Rickenbacker & Rothbard, 1974), the passing of the GI Bill in 1944 (Witt, 1993), and the ever-changing student demographic, the Eurocentric foundations of our education system are now (and have been for decades) misaligned with the students we serve. As such, grades are a foundational system that must be reexamined, as they serve as extrinsic rewards for performance, work as a means to favor outcomes over learning, foster competition among students, promote cheating or gaming the system, rely on subjective mathematical calculations, favor privileged students, and perpetuate systemic inequities. This then begs the question, what do grades really measure? In part, grades measure the instructor’s perception of student performance, the benchmarks of which are also defined by that same instructor. More problematically, however, grades really measure a student’s ability to succeed within the confines of our Eurocentric educational system that favors adherence to arbitrarily defined rules and guidelines. Grades measure parents’ educational background, socioeconomic status, memorization skills, and expedited content acquisition, rather than what we really hope to measure as educators: competencies, skills, outcomes, critical thinking, learning, and growth. 

Not only do grades inaccurately measure student growth, faculty have largely used the traditional grading system without questioning its foundations because they were successful in navigating grades as students. As a result, in their classrooms, they replicate the systems that afforded them the successes they had as students. Now, however, there have been many prominent scholars who have challenged conventional grading and have asked us to critically examine grades on a fundamental level. Those who have shed traditional grades in their classes have reported a sense of liberation, and students have disclosed a sense of agency and validation. Without grades, faculty are forced to reexamine their own priorities in the classroom and more creatively measure student growth. 

Sharing and Shifting Power: Alternatives to Traditional Grading

So, how do we move away from a system which has been indoctrinated in us since the move to compulsory education and which we have all experienced both as students and as instructors? There are multiple systematic approaches to modifying our grading practices. Faculty have moved to various alternative systems, including contract grading (Brown [formerly Kuhn], 2020), specifications grading (Nilson, 2014), labor-based grading (Inoue, 2019), and ungrading (Blum, 2020; Stommel, 2018; Gibbs, 2019). Although these systems have their own nuances, they all prioritize the learning process and growth. When adopting an equitized system, the instructor must also adopt the mindset that learning takes time, and to punish a student with a low or failing grade early in the semester is contradictory to the premise of education (Blum, 2020). Instead of focusing on high-stakes exams that require rote memorization, for example, faculty have shifted to open-ended discussions, project-based learning, peer review, self-assessment, revision, conferencing, and portfolios, among other activities. Instead of calculating grades based on weights and percentages, students have control over the grade they hope to achieve, and depending on the system, will complete and pass a certain number of assignments (with contract and specifications grading) or will self-assess the extent to which they grew in the course and make a case for the grade they believe they have earned (with ungrading). 

In my (Bri Brown) recent doctoral dissertation, I examined the impact of contract grading on equity gaps among underrepresented student populations in light of AB-705 and the Student-Centered Funding Formula. Equity gaps were measured by course retention, success, and grade; concurrent and subsequent term GPA’s; term-to-term persistence, and academic probation. The first research question examined whether contract grading correlated with, and predicted, equity markers for underrepresented student populations (e.g., racial minorities, females, foster youth, veterans, first generation students, Pell recipients, and returning students). The second research question examined how students experienced contract grading. The quantitative analysis included institutional disaggregated data for 1687 students enrolled in the participating merit- and contract-graded courses. I also conducted five student focus groups to explore their experiences in contract-graded classes. Quantitatively, contract-graded Latinx, Black, and Middle Eastern students were retained and successful in their English class at comparable rates to White students. Contract-graded Black and Middle Eastern students were also predicted to earn comparable course grades, concurrent GPA’s, and subsequent term one and two  GPA’s as White students. Qualitatively, students expressed appreciation for clear expectations and feedback; felt validated because they didn’t fear failure; felt more confident and safe in the classroom environment; experienced a heightened sense of motivation, engagement, and classroom community; and expressed a shift in motivation from external (i.e. grades) to internal (i.e. writing improvement). These findings confirm the results of several other studies, and as a result, it is logical to conclude that no-points grading is an effort worth pursuing. Not only does it validate students, but it also promotes equity and contributes to the decolonization of the classroom, outcomes which support the California Community College Chancellor’s OfficeVision for Success, as well as local institutional missions and values.  

When faculty let go of the impulse to situate themselves as sole-power keepers and leverage students’ narratives, the teaching and learning dynamic shifts from transactional to transitional with intentionality at the center. Therefore, through equitable grading, students find their spark in learning and we find our spark in teaching. And we are transformed.

Reshaping our power - sparks of inspiration: 

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Conveying Care Online

This article was originally published on the California Acceleration Project (CAP) blog.

One of the most significant factors correlated with student persistence, success, and learning in online courses is the relationship between the instructor and students (CCCCO Distance Education Report). An instructor’s empathy, care, and compassion distinguish the quality of those relationships.

This four-part blog series focuses on humanizing online teaching and learning. Michelle Pacansky-Brock defines humanizing as “a student-centered mindset that involves recognizing and supporting the non-cognitive components of learning. In a humanized course, faculty intentionally cultivate an inclusive learning environment that fosters psychological safety and trust and forms connections that grow into relationships and a community.” My first article was about humanizing your online course with Flipgrid. The second article was titled “Beyond Discussion Forums: Asynchronous Student-Student Interaction Online”, and the third was ”Beyond Lectures: Synchronous Student-to-Student Interaction”. The other side of the humanizing coin is a warm instructor presence that imparts empathy and awareness. In a recent article, “Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education,” Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Michael Smedshammer, and Kim Vincent-Layton highlight, “Instructor-student relationships lie at the heart of humanizing, serving as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor.”

Humanizing And Equity

For minoritized students, having an authentically caring instructor-student relationship is foundational to their learning and success. Dr. Luke Wood, in his 2018 Online Teaching Conference keynote entitled “Reaching Underserved Students through Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in the Online Environment,” emphasizes the equity-minded practices of being “relational” by forming relationships with your students and being “intrusive” by reaching out when they need our support. Zaretta Hammond, author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, encourages us to be a “warm demander” by explicitly focusing on building rapport and trust while still holding high expectations of our students. In Fabiola Torres’s “Practicing Radical Love: Breaking Down Instructor-Student Hierarchies” presentation for the @ONE Humanizing Challenge, she illuminates students’ needs for “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust.” Meeting these needs is even more essential for underserved, marginalized students.

A Warm Welcome Package

Your opportunities to greet students at the “door” and make a positive first impression are in your welcome email before the course begins, in your welcome video, and in your syllabus. Your warm, caring, and inviting language and tone are vital here, along with your facial expressions and emotion conveyed in your welcome video. Flower Darby, author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, illustrates at her 2019 Online Teaching Conference keynote “Answering the Call: New Motivation for Online Teaching Excellence” that students feel from the start, “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.” Establishing trust from the beginning is paramount.

Welcome Video

Short videos are a powerful way to make personal connections with your students. Imperfect is perfect, and there’s no need to go beyond the first take. Students just need to see and hear from you. In a two to five-minute humanized welcome video, you should introduce yourself personally, share your enthusiasm for teaching the course, and explain how to be successful in it. It’s a salient technique for initiating a personal connection with your students and making them feel welcome in the course. Below are two examples of my welcome videos where I instill a culture of care and personal warmth.

The @ONE Humanizing Challenge offers four options for creating videos depending on your comfort level and preference, including the Clips app, Zoom, Adobe Spark Video, and Screencast-O-Matic. After recording and captioning your welcome video, I invite you to share it with the CAP community and comment with feedback on each other’s videos.

For more wonderful video production ideas, I recommend Karen Costa’s recently-published book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes. If you’re feeling anxious about creating videos, view this two-minute “Maritez’s Video Production Journey” video. 

Syllabus and Course Policies

While your contact information and quick response times are fundamental to your syllabus, even more so is the language itself. In the Center for Urban Education’s webinar “How to Express Care with a Focus on Racial Equity,” Dr. Frank Harris III delineates that the language of the syllabus sets the tone and establishes the relationship between the instructor and students. I encourage you to reevaluate your syllabus and course policies through an equity lens. Do you communicate with a warm, welcoming tone? Does your late work policy give grace to students? Deliver student-centered messages of “I’m here to support you” and “I care about you and your success.” Instead of using rigid and punitive language, aim for caring and compassionate language. For instance:

Before After
No late work accepted! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!I understand that life happens sometimes, so I offer a 24-hour grace period on all assignments, no questions asked. If you are unable to meet a deadline, contact me, and let’s work together to create a plan for your success.
Failure to submit the first week’s assignments will result in a student being immediately dropped from the course and replaced by a student on the waitlist.Tip for success: To count as your attendance during the first week and to avoid being dropped, be sure to log into the course and complete the assignments in the orientation module. I will check in on you if you forget to participate.

Student Surveys and Canvas “Notes”

We can easily identify early on which students may need more of our attention and support by administering a quick student survey during the first week. Surveys can be created using Canvas Quizzes, Google Forms, or other survey tools. I ask my students questions to gauge their feelings about the class and anticipate their needs, for example, “How are you feeling about this online course?” and “What is one thing that can get in the way of your success in this course, and how can I support you?” See Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s sample student information survey for more excellent questions.

When I review their first-week survey results, I implement the Canvas “Notes” column in the Gradebook to enter details about individual students. Before sending them a message, I check my Notes so I can communicate care into the conversation. For instance, if I note that a student is working a full-time job, has a toddler, and had surgery, I might ask how work is going, how their child is doing, or how their recovery is coming along in my message. I also note the pronunciation of student names and their nicknames for when I have a synchronous meeting with them and when sending them messages.

In addition to administering a student information survey at the start, solicit your students’ anonymous feedback on surveys during and at the end of the semester to improve their experience of the class. You might consider asking them what they enjoy about your class, what suggested changes they would like to see in your course, and then immediately apply their feedback as your course continues.

Maintaining Your Presence

Weekly Video Announcements

Instructor presence can be applied weekly through quick video announcements that express your personal warmth. You might consider including: 

A student wrote on my anonymous post-course survey, “I will miss her awesome greetings through her Monday morning video announcements!” 

Here are two examples of my weekly video announcements:

Feedback/Feedforward 

An online instructor’s human presence is also maintained throughout the semester by giving students rich, timely feedback on their work. Engaging in dialogue with students about their progress is critical to the learning process. In the Center for Urban Education’s webinar “Being Aware of Learning Constraints and Opportunities Posed by Online Teaching,” Sim Barhoum demonstrates the “feedforward” approach that focuses on a future they can change, not a past they can’t, for example: “I like that you did x. In the future, can you try y?” and “Can you explain this in a different way?” To save time and to better express your emotion, you might even consider giving students audio or video feedback while in the Canvas SpeedGrader. 

Individualized Support

Canvas “Message Students Who”

Another effective humanizing and equity-minded strategy of online instructors is having a keen awareness of their students, paying special attention to when students need support. The Public Policy Institute of California study reveals that the most successful online instructors monitor student engagement and seek out students who seem to be disengaged or struggling. The Canvas Gradebook makes it easier for us to send messages to students who we want to check in with using the “Message Students Who” feature. Once a deadline for a major assignment has passed in my course, I use this feature to nudge students who did not submit it. It can also be used to praise students who are excelling or to provide just-in-time remediation, one of the CAP principles. 

Canvas interface showing how to "message students who"

Instead of writing to a student, “You’re missing assignments,” I use the language of care and empathy such as, “I’m checking in. Is everything okay?” Most of the time, I discover that things are not okay and work with the student to get them back on the path to success. At the close of a semester, a Latinx student who was working full-time sent me a letter of appreciation expressing, “I was going through a hard situation a couple weeks before the semester ended and I was thinking of dropping the class and giving up on everything, but thanks to you I decided to keep it. If it hadn't been for the text message you sent me that day and the support you kept giving me, I would have dropped the class and I would have lost my financial aid and other benefits. In other words, you were my hero.”

Personalized Synchronous Meetings

Strong instructor-student relationships are better fostered over synchronous sessions when they are in a more personal one-on-one or small-group format. I encourage you to consider holding scheduled conferences or study sessions with students during your office hours where you could review how a student performed on an assessment, give individualized feedback on a draft, or hold a small group review session before an exam. My schedule always fills up with students signing up for an appointment slot. I even award my students extra credit for attending to reverse the psychology and stigma associated with needing help from the teacher. For ease of schedule management, you could use Calendly, a shared Google Doc, or the Canvas Calendar. Below is an example of how I begin a typical writing conference with a student where I prioritize our relationship by first checking on how the student is doing.

Recap

Without a warm, caring instructor's presence, the online classroom can be a lonely place, and many students who feel isolated may end up dropping out. An online instructor’s care has a significant impact on student success and retention, especially for minoritized students. I hope that my ideas have inspired you to think about how you will create a culture of care and implement your warm human presence. To leverage the potential of humanizing and equity-minded pedagogy in the online environment, we must be intentional in our course design and facilitation to be fully present, convey care and personal warmth, establish trust, and build relationships with students. A Black working mother who I interviewed for my Online Student Voices Inquiry Project disclosed, “We can tell which teachers want us to succeed.” Be that teacher.

Equity, Cameras, & Online Learning: A MiraCosta College Commitment

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

Moving completely to distance education in the fall of 2020 challenged faculty and students in many ways. At our local Academic Senate meetings, our Associated Student Government representative would share concerns about student experiences and frustration with inconsistencies in online course delivery. These concerns enriched our conversations and mobilized us to address emergent issues. After hearing from students at Academic Senate and across the state with regard to how they were experiencing online education during the COVID pandemic, it became clear to us that we needed to do a better job of communicating expectations upfront and clarify recommended practices for faculty. We also learned about the technology challenges and/or psychological trauma that many students experience when required to turn on their cameras in their Zoom classes.

The Process

In early October, the Office of Instruction convened a small taskforce consisting of one instructional dean, one student services dean, the registrar, the faculty director of online education, and another faculty member. This group was formed to proactively develop guidance materials for faculty to best address FERPA and student privacy issues in online classes using Zoom. 

While we recognized that a policy may require much more faculty buy-in and broader discussion, there was an immediate need to give some guidance to faculty. The small taskforce developed the document, “Guidance for Synchronous Instruction at MiraCosta College to Protect Student Privacy,” in consultation with Academic Senate leadership. The taskforce reviewed examples from other colleges including College of the Canyons. The initial guidance focused on effective practices for synchronous instructional activities, specifically on camera usage, recording, and safeguarding student privacy.

By the end of October, the Chancellor’s Office published their “Legal Opinion 2020-12 Online Class Cameras-On Requirement,” which directed community college districts to adopt policies to address the issue of camera usage in online courses with respect for concerns related to personal educational privacy, access, and equity, and to ensure faculty and students are fully informed.

It became clearer as more discussion happened at Academic Senate that there needed to be a broader policy statement regarding camera usage and when it may be necessary or not. In early spring, I worked closely with the Vice President of Instruction to assemble another taskforce, which included faculty members in disciplines that require camera usage for pedagogical reasons, our faculty director for online education, student services and instructional deans, the registrar, and other faculty leaders. Luckily, we had found a recently adopted example from the Academic Senate at neighboring Palomar College to help facilitate our work. 

The Outcome

We reviewed our current practices and discussed streamlining messages and arriving at consensus on when it is appropriate to require the use of a camera. Eventually the group agreed that our fundamental premise is that cameras should be presumptively optional for live synchronous online classes and that cameras may be required in specific course sections to support course curriculum content and objectives, and/or to enhance academic integrity of assessments. We felt that students should have choices and that being upfront and transparent in the class schedule and on the syllabus about what students should expect is critical. Once a draft of the document was developed in March, it was shared in various spaces for feedback. Student leaders present in these spaces and at Academic Senate voiced both positive feedback and suggestions for improvement. This feedback was incorporated into the finalization of the document, “MiraCosta College Commitment to Equitable use of Cameras in Online Instruction and Assessment.” This document represents and clarifies the current practices around camera usage in online courses. It was developed just in time for the summer and fall registration period.

Ultimately, the goals of this document were to make our online synchronous learning environment more equitable, and to codify for students the opportunity to know expectations in advance, in order to make an informed decision early in the enrollment process. The document did not create new practices; however, it made explicit and systematic the messaging and practice across the curriculum. 

The process took longer than what I had expected, but through a true collaborative process among various stakeholders, we were able to achieve clarity and consistency for the sake of our students and their success.

Are grades failing us?

Welcome to the Points Marketplace

TaskValueTimeConclusion
Complete the Assessment Worksheet+ 10 pts- 3 hours▲
Read Grading for Equity + 20 pts- 2 days▼
Late work- 10% /day+ X days▲
Find a sample rubric+ 5 pts EC- 5 min▲

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”.

Do they know the “hidden curriculum” of academia? 

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. 

red "Top Secret" stamp

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.

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.

CriterionExemplaryAccomplishedDeveloping
Structures are described correctly321
Flow of oxygen molecule is accurate described using the listed structures321
Diffusion, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are accurately identified321

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!

Beyond Discussion Forums: Asynchronous Student-To-Student Interaction Online

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

This article first appeared on the California Acceleration Project blog.

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  

Canvas inteface of the Peer Review option.

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. 

Hypothesis logo

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. 

Canvas makes it simple to turn an individual assignment into a group assignment. For more on online group work and helpful resources, view the “Byte-Sized Canvas” video by Helen Graves, an @ONE Instructional Designer, on “Why Group Assignments Are Worth Your Attention.”

Canvas interface showing group assignment checkbox.

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 logo

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?

Humanizing Your Online Courses With Flipgrid

This article was originally published on the California Acceleration Project (CAP) blog.

Humanizing And Equity

Students’ learning ignites when they trust their instructor and form relationships with their classmates. Michelle Pacansky-Brock is helping faculty nationwide to humanize their online teaching. She defines humanizing as “a student-centered mindset that involves recognizing and supporting the non-cognitive components of learning. In a humanized course, faculty intentionally cultivate an inclusive learning environment that fosters psychological safety and trust and forms connections that grow into relationships and a community.” She illustrates that the two key ingredients for humanizing are instructor presence and social presence. 

Strengthening the sense of community and humanizing online learning are inclusive, equity-minded practices. Dr. Luke Wood, known for his “Black Minds Matter” webinar series, delivered a keynote entitled “Reaching Underserved Students through Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in the Online Environment” at the 2018 Online Teaching Conference. Wood emphasizes the need to create a “community-centric” environment where students have opportunities to share their perspectives, stories, and reflections. 

This point is echoed by Zaretta Hammond, author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, who emphasizes creating “a community of learners” by building on students’ values of collaboration and connection to create intellectual safety and reduce stereotype threat.

Flipgrid supports a strong sense of community and social presence as students interact with each other and as instructors reply to students beyond text alone. Students are speaking and listening to each other, with audio and video enhancing their online exchanges. Tone, facial expressions, accents, and the sound of each other’s voices humanize each person and the whole online environment. 

I’ve witnessed quiet and reserved students absolutely shine on Flipgrid because it gives every student a voice. In an on-campus or synchronous setting, you are constrained to the time allotted for your class meeting, so not every student is allowed the opportunity to speak. That is not the case with Flipgrid; students are at the center and have equal opportunities to contribute.

Student Feedback

Students reported on my anonymous feedback survey how much they love Flipgrid:

Flipgrid Features

Instructors create prompts on Flipgrid (called “topics”), and students post their video responses to the forum for that topic (called a “grid”). Flipgrid enables faculty to:

See the faculty and student resources below for how-to videos. I encourage you to give Flipgrid a try from the students’ perspective. Go to our CAP Community Flipgrid, record a video response to the prompt, and reply to colleagues. (Note that this Flipgrid is not integrated into Canvas.)

Maritez’s Examples

I use Flipgrid to foster a high challenge, high support pedagogy in line with the CAP principles. It is easy to build fun Flipgrid assignments that prompt low-stakes collaborative practice on meaningful and challenging tasks. Just-in-time remediation takes care of itself using Flipgrid when students and the instructor reply to each other with friendly suggestions and support. The result is ultimately a community of learners with affective benefits that encourage effort and persistence. 

Consider replacing some of your Canvas Discussions with Flipgrids to prevent discussion fatigue. I have heard of colleagues who alternate between Canvas Discussions and Flipgrids each week. I enjoy sprinkling Flipgrids throughout the semester.

For The Camera-Shy

Students may be hesitant to record videos of themselves or show their faces on camera for various reasons related to their cultural background or comfort level. It’s important to practice inclusivity in our teaching and provide alternatives for students to still participate in our courses. 

Show your students the features in Flipgrid such as using the rear-facing camera (on any device that has one), pixelating their face with a filter, or inserting a large emoji over it. Similar to screen sharing, the Flipgrid camera is filled with new powerful features including a series of boards - whiteboard, blackboard, graph paper, lined paper, and more - which allow your students to share their voice either with or without their face being on camera. They can still successfully participate in Flipgrids by contributing their audio recording with alternative visuals.

Flipgrid “Topic” Ideas 

Flipgrid provides many opportunities to make learning authentic and communal by asking students to actively process course material, apply concepts to their lives, and collaborate with each other.

All Disciplines

English

ESL

Math

I hope that my ideas have inspired you to think about the kinds of discussions and interactions you would want your students to engage in Flipgrid. If you intend to create an online course with a strong social presence and community, Flipgrid is a powerful tool for applying student-centered, equity-minded pedagogy.

Faculty Resources

Student Resources

A Principled Online Teaching Journey: Part 1

Three monarch butterflies in three distinct stages of development.
Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

This article is part one of a two-part series. The next part will include a showcase of faculty capstone projects from the CVC/@ONE Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles. 

I sometimes do things backwards. Not intentionally. It happens when I’m captivated by an idea and run with it. That’s how I initiated my pursuit of CVC/@ONE’s Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles (Advanced OTP). @ONE (the Online Network of Educators) is the professional development arm of CVC, the Chancellor’s Office-funded initiative aimed at improving access to high quality and fully supported online courses for more students.

Although the Advanced OTP certificate is no longer offered, the five @ONE Principles for Quality Online Teaching that form its framework are compelling and vital to effective learning and teaching. What follows is my own journey as a student of Advanced OTP and then as a mentor for others.

First, as a student in online learning

In 2017, I had just completed local online learning certification on campus. I heard about CVC/@ONE, surveyed their online classes, and decided to enroll. My first course was Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Online Learning Environment with Arnita Porter and Fabiola Torres. In quick succession came Digital Citizenship with Aloha Sargent and James Glapa-Grossklag, Dynamic Online Teaching with Dayamudra Dennehy and Matt Calfin, and Humanizing Online Learning with Michelle Pacansky-Brock and Tracy Schaelen. These courses comprised the Advanced OTP certificate pathway which, combined with a capstone, lead to the certificate. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the Advanced OTP certificate was suggested to be completed after the Certificate in Online Teaching and Design (OTD) program, which consists of four other courses. So after completing the Advanced OTP, I backtracked and completed the OTD certificate, too. As it turns out, completing the two certificate pathways backwards was one of the best mistakes I’ve made.

@ONE course facilitators walk the talk

The four courses of the Advanced OTP certificate focus on online teaching principles, and the facilitators of those courses put the principles into practice, giving me a front row seat to see how learning spaces are created with the student in mind. Every facilitator, and @ONE facilitators are California Community College faculty, fostered connecting, growing, and sharing in the OTP courses, creating the space for each of us as students to be present, to give and take, and to learn.

The courses provided valuable opportunities to build relationships and participate in teaching communities that too often are not available to part-time faculty, and the facilitators encouraged such community building throughout the courses and beyond. This was an unexpected and welcome benefit which I continue to enjoy, and I heard this refrain repeated from my part-time colleagues around the state.

Principles before practice

The five @ONE Principles for Quality Online Teaching underscored in the Advanced OTP courses are human-centered. I describe them as:

  1. Equitize the learning space.
  2. Humanize the learning space.
  3. Adapt the learning space.
  4. Navigate and expand the learning space.
  5. Learn and grow as an educator.

Let’s break them down 

These principles are designed to meet the needs of the diverse students that we serve in the California community college system.

  1. Equitize: Equity ensures that each student has access to what they need to succeed. Turning “equity” into a verb, making the learning space more equitable includes not just providing opportunities for students to learn based on what they know, but also providing support for them to fill in gaps in their knowledge, stretch their wings, access services they need, and reach their full academic potential.
  2. Humanize: I like to think of humanizing courses as “showing up”—not just for me, but for my students, too. The Humanizing course took me out of my “professorial” persona and gave me back my personal attributes, those traits, qualities, and quirks that make me, me, and make my courses different from other English instructors. My students, too, show up more in my courses now, building relationships and creating community.
  3. Adapt: Even instructors who had no previous experience with online learning prior to spring 2020 had to pivot to an online modality because of the pandemic. That’s one way to adapt. But the principle conveyed by adapting refers to more than that. When I adapt my teaching to predict and respond to student performance and feedback, I increase students’ level of interaction and agency; they grow stronger as independent learners. They also adapt with exercises in meta-cognition and self-assessment.
  4. Navigate and expand: Navigating and expanding the learning space is about traversing the disciplinary field and its  manifestations in my students’ world. My courses address this principle by strengthening students’ ability to navigate the information landscape skilfully and by fostering their curiosity. By making sense of content in the open web as opposed to only in Canvas, students develop information and digital literacy, skills that are critical for success in today’s world. Practicing this principle, I’ve also adopted OER and ideas from Open Pedagogy to increase student access to quality course materials and to engage students in learning by exploring, creating, and sharing what they’ve learned.
  5. Learn and grow: The fifth principle, learn and grow, is about me. Although I teach, I’m also a student. I continue to learn, experiment, assess, and improve. My students and colleagues form my learning community. 

The values that underlie these five principles are those that lay the foundation for relationship: mutual respect and caring, appreciation for diversity, recognition of the whole person, and desire for growth. The @ONE online teaching principles are the articulation of these values.

Backwards was better

And that is why completing the two certificate tracks in reverse order worked to my advantage: I learned and practiced the principles before tackling the OTD certificate courses that focus on implementation. I learned “why” before learning “how”.

Learning why I should learn something creates a fertile field for then learning how to do something. We know that a context of meaning—meaning that speaks to the student—fosters learning.

Automaticity is not enough

Of course, we want our students to learn how to do something and to do it well. We want them to achieve mastery of practices, to achieve a level of automaticity so that they don’t have to struggle to remember how to do something or do it well. This level of mastery reflects a level of acquired knowledge and repeated practice translated into habit. When I believe I’ve mastered an individual skill in my teaching practices, I can say I’ve achieved a level of automaticity that facilitates my practice.

This automaticity is well and good, but it’s not enough. Not enough for our students or the world in which they live, and not enough for us. If I learn how to use Canvas to create a welcoming place, one which engages students in learning the course goals, which is accessible and incorporates various design elements to facilitate comprehension, and consider the course “done”, then I’m not putting the principles into practice. Instead, I’d be implementing what I learned without continuing to learn and adapt, and thereby place my courses and methods of teaching at risk of becoming irrelevant or worse. That’s the price of action devoid of principle.

Principles as lifelong goals

On the other hand, the @ONE Principles for Quality Online Teaching are best understood as goals, as signposts that point still further ahead. Yes, I can achieve a level where goals are realized to some degree, where I am closer to the goal, but I can get even closer if I continue the journey.

Learning is personal and social

Here’s one example of how practicing the principles covered in the OTP courses changed how I teach.

In course surveys I provide to students, I ask open-ended questions about their experiences with the online course, to reflect on their learning and the course environment. Requesting this kind of feedback speaks to the principles of increasing student presence in courses, adapting the learning environment to increase student success, and promoting student agency.

Many times, these surveys come back with comments that acknowledge the benefit of this or that element of the course or why students liked a particular assignment above others. But in one such survey, I got a response that stopped me in my tracks.

One student wrote in the nicest possible way, “I wish you would use ‘you’ and not ‘we’.”

At first, I didn’t know what to do with this feedback, though you may be nodding your head now thinking, “rookie mistake.” I had used the first-person plural intentionally throughout the course as a way to emphasize togetherness. I believed the word “we” could forge a subtle bridge between me and my students and between students, helping to create a community of learners.

And then it hit me. When I used the word “we”, I wasn’t talking directly to each student; instead, I was talking to an amorphous entity without an individual personality, goals, and background. The word “we” doesn’t create the space for a student to be present, for that student’s voice to be heard, for that student to interact with agency.

Learning online is an intimate experience. Students enter online courses from their personal spaces, even if that’s a coffee shop. More significantly, they enter as individuals; there’s no corner of the classroom in which they can sink into a desk and remain unseen. In an online class, each one of them shows up.

Thanks to this student’s feedback, I improved my courses by addressing the individual “you”, while continuing to provide opportunities for students to engage in social learning. In fact, social learning relies on individual agency; without “you”, there can be no “we”.

But this evolution in my teaching would not have happened if I was already satisfied that I had achieved successful course design and therefore didn’t solicit feedback or didn’t consider it necessary to iteratively adapt the learning space to meet student needs. This is where practicing the principles—viewing the signposts as pointing further ahead—makes the difference. My courses will never be complete. And that’s paramount.

Teaching Matters

Professional development plays a critical role in improving the teaching and learning environments of the diverse students we serve in the California Community College system. To put it plainly: teaching matters -- face-to-face and online. Nearly all (96%) of college students who entered a STEM major and chose to leave (either drop out of college or enter a different major) cited poor teaching and learning experiences as a reason (Seymour & Hunter, 2020). Black and Latinx STEM major “switchers” were more likely (88% to 79%) to cite the competitive culture of STEM courses as an influence in their decision to change majors. While STEM courses serve as a microcosm of inequity in U.S. higher education, the problems cited by STEM students are not restricted to those disciplines alone. 

White and Asian students comprise less than 30% of the roughly 2.1 million students served by California community colleges. However, they are most likely to succeed in our courses, regardless of modality. Improving teaching and learning is an opportunity to advance equity in California. Our mindsets about race and ethnicity; knowledge about and appreciation for the rich, varied experiences our students bring to our classes; and our understanding of how to apply equitable teaching practices in our courses on-campus and online are integral to improving the lives of our students, the diversity of our state’s workforce, and the future of our country. 

Connecting PD with Equity at the College Level

For decades, online courses have increased access to college for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, and now they have also proven to be the resilient backbone of higher education. As we reflect on the past difficult six months of unexpected disruption brought on by COVID-19 and piqued racial injustice in our communities and across the country, I suspect that each educator reading these words can recognize why continuously improving our teaching and learning practices and being compensated for one’s time are so vital. 

From my experiences, many faculty, particularly those who are part-time, can be unaware for years, even decades, about how or if professional development can be used to increase their salary. Sierra College, driven by a systemic effort to improve equity, has made efforts to help faculty navigate this process. One of the changes Sierra made was to get the low-cost online professional development courses offered through @ONE and CVC-OEI and funded by the CCC Chancellor’s Office pre-approved by their Faculty Employees Reclassification Committee (FERC) and create a clear list of those courses, along with their locally-offered workshops and other off-campus opportunities. 

@ONE and You

Thank you, @ONE. Your course has opened my eyes to the power and potential of online instruction. The tools and knowledge are priceless and will not only bring our departments' program to another level, but accelerate its success, and . . . most importantly, that of our students! - Petra Maria, Laney College

@ONE’s nationally recognized online professional development courses serve the needs of thousands of CCC faculty and staff each year. They are facilitated by CCC educators; model and foster Culturally Responsive Teaching pedagogy, accessibility, and Universal Design for Learning principles; and are available to all CCC faculty and staff at a low cost. @ONE courses can be taken a la carte or stacked to earn a certificate in Online Teaching & Design. 

Many colleges in our system include @ONE courses in their locally-approved online teaching preparation process. Check with your college’s professional development coordinator or distance education coordinator to learn more. If you have a story to share about how @ONE helped improve your teaching, we’d love to hear from you in a comment below!

Register now for @ONE's fall courses!

References:

Riegle-Crumb, C., King, B., and Irizarry, Y. (2019). Does STEM stand out? Examining racial/ethnic gaps in persistence across postsecondary fields. Educ. Res. 48, 133-144.

Seymour, E. & Hunter, E. B. (Eds.). (2020). Talking about leaving revisited: Persistence, relocation, and loss in undergraduate STEM education. Springer.

Online Proctoring - Impact on Student Equity

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

A fundamental aspect of instruction is the assessment of student learning. The rapid response to move classes online in a pandemic has exposed concerns surrounding the practice of online proctoring. There are many online proctoring features offered by companies such as Proctorio, Examity, Honorlock, and Respondus. The methods that do not require a webcam include locking down the students’ browser so they cannot perform functions such as open another application or tab, use the toolbar, copy/paste, or print screen while taking an exam. The intrusive methods include requesting a photo ID, activating facial recognition, and a live proctor monitoring for sounds and motions. Sessions are typically recorded from the exam start to finish and a live proctor can monitor potential testing infractions as they occur. Proctoring services say exam videos and other data are securely stored. Some store videos in a certified data center server, and then archive them after a defined period of time in line with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act​ (FERPA) guidelines.

According to a 2017 study, it is suggested instructors familiarize themselves with how the services work so they can anticipate students’ concerns. Instructors should identify students’ technical difficulties and try to address them by spending time familiarizing students with how to get ready for and ultimately take their exams. In this pandemic, we know many students lack access to computers and wifi, and the newly issued Chromebooks challenge students to operate another new device and establish wifi access. 

Online testing may seem to make things easier but it’s possible the transition to new technology, or the lack of access using current technology that doesn’t include a webcam, may complicate matters and lead to a significant level of discomfort with online proctoring. A survey of 748 students about technology and achievement gaps found about one in five struggled to use the technology at their disposal because of issues such as broken hardware and connectivity problems. Students of color or lower socioeconomic status encountered these difficulties more often. 

My colleague, Aloha Sargent, Technology Services Librarian, shared with me an article from Hybrid Pedagogy that asserts "algorithmic test proctoring’s settings have discriminatory consequences across multiple identities and serious privacy implications." When Texas Tech rolled out online proctoring, they recognized students often take exams in their dorm or bedrooms, and students noted in a campus survey “They thought it was big brother invading their computers.” Some test takers were asked by live proctors to remove pictures from their surroundings and some students of color were told to shine more light on themselves. That’s a disturbing request in my opinion. Many of our community college students occupy multi-family or multi-person residences that include children. These proctoring settings will "disproportionately impact women who typically take on the majority of childcare, breast feeding, lactation, and care-taking roles for their family. Students who are parents may not be able to afford childcare, be able to leave the house, or set aside quiet, uninterrupted blocks of time to take a test."

At the University of California, Davis, they are discouraging faculty members from using online proctoring this semester unless they have previous experience with such services. “It suggests faculty consider alternatives that will lower students' anxiety levels during an already stressful time, such as requiring them to reflect on what they learned in the course.” The following article highlights a University of Washington story about adopting Proctorio because of the COVID-19 rapid transition to online. Read the experience of one University of Washington student, Paranoia about cheating is making online education terrible for everyone. The students’ experiences “are another sign that, amid the pandemic, the hurried move to re-create in-person classes online has been far from smooth, especially when it comes to testing.” Live online proctoring is a way to preemptively communicate to students, we don't trust you. It is a pedagogy of punishment and exclusion.

In higher education, traditional exams represent the most appropriate assessment tool. There are ways to cheat on exams no matter what method is used to deploy them. Even a major “NSA-style” proctoring software is not “cheat-proof.” Their sales representative was very candid in showing me how it’s done.  There are alternatives to typical exam questions—often referred to as authentic assessment. According to Oxford Research Encyclopedia, “authentic assessment is an effective measure of intellectual achievement or ability because it requires students to demonstrate their deep understanding, higher-order thinking, and complex problem solving through the performance of exemplary tasks.” 

Given the limited timeframe, there will be limits to what you can use now. That’s OK. Consider using Canvas question pools and randomizing questions, or even different versions of the final. For example, replacing six multiple-choice or true-and-false questions with two short-answer items may better indicate how well a question differentiates between students who know the subject matter and those who do not. Or ask students to record a brief spoken-word explanation for the question using the Canvas media tool. Just keep in mind, there are a dozen or more ways to assess learning without “biometric-lockdown-retinal scan-saliva-sample-genetic-mapping-fingerprint-analysis.”

References

  1. Dimeo, Jean. “Online Exam Proctoring Catches Cheaters, Raises Concerns.” Inside Higher Ed, 2017.
  2. Woldeab, Daniel, et al. “Under the Watchful Eye of Online Proctoring.” Innovative Learning and Teaching: Experiments Across the Disciplines, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Services’ open book and open textbook initiative, 2017.
  3. ​Schwartz, Natalie. “Colleges flock to online proctors, but equity concerns remain.” Education Dive, April 2020.
  4. Swager, Shea. "Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education." Hybrid Pedagogy, April 2020.

Yes! Use Your Phone in Class: Tips for More Equitable Temporary Remote Teaching & Learning

A phone held in the hands of a person in a car.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Encouraging students to use their phones in class is typically not a popular topic in higher education articles. However, when students need to unexpectedly transition from face-to-face to online learning due to an emergency like the coronavirus, a phone may be a student’s lifeline. 

The California Community College (CCC) system serves roughly 2.1 million students. A 2019 study by the Hope Center found that half of CCC students surveyed experienced food insecurity in the last 30 days and 60% were housing insecure in the previous year. Students who are unsure about where they’ll get their next meal or where they will sleep at night are not likely to have the financial resources to purchase a laptop and they certainly are not going to have a desktop computer in tow. But according to a national survey by EDUCAUSE, 96.3% of community college students have a smartphone. And data from Pew Research shows that Americans who are younger, people of color, and low income are more likely to rely on a smartphone than broadband for online access. Smartphones are not luxury items for low-income students. They are critical tools that are used to pay bills, apply for jobs, participate in job interviews, conduct business, socialize with family and friends, shop, listen to music, watch tv and movies, and learn. 

Recommendations for Faculty

Using Canvas to design a learning environment for your students is the place to start. And this archive of Shawn Valcarcel’s provides you with some great first steps. However, a Canvas course renders differently on a smartphone than it does on a computer. So, some special considerations must be made. This list is adapted from the Canvas Mobile App Design Consideration Checklist.

  1. Encourage students to download and use the Canvas Student App and provide a link to the Canvas Student Guide for iOS and Canvas Student Guide for Android.
  2. Organize content into modules and chunk content into smaller parts on Pages within a module. View the archive of Shawn Valcarcel’s Getting Started with Canvas webinar for support with this step.
  3. Use Text headers within modules to help guide student navigation. This is helpful because in the mobile app, students navigate your course content from the modules view.
  4. Use Canvas Pages to present content, instead of linking to external URLs or files. This prevents students from needing to download large files or view non-mobile friendly content.
  5. Write instructions and prompts that are platform-neutral. For example, avoid saying, “Click the blue Submit button at the top of the page,” as the mobile app does not have a blue submit button.
  6. Download the Canvas Teacher app and use it to navigate your course. Identify things that don’t work and provide alternative instructions for students on a mobile device or redesign these elements as needed.
  7. Design assessments with the tools on a smartphone in mind. They are handheld multimedia studios after all! Provide the option to record a video or audio file, take a photo, etc.
  8. Survey the external tools supported by your college. Many -- like VoiceThread and Pronto -- have a mobile app that students can download and use. These tools will also and open new mobile-friendly ideas for assessments.

Want to dig deeper? Make a copy of the Canvas Mobile App Checklist.

Recommendations for Colleges

In a state as economically diverse as California, it is critical for institutions to understand their student demographics and communicate resources to support mobile access during times of disruption. Here are a few recommendations for colleges to consider:

Visit the CVC-OEI Emergency Preparedness resources for more support through this transition.

Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide

Make your own copy.

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:

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.

A Closer Look at the Peralta Equity Rubric

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:

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.