When We Empower Students to Become Experts

Join Chelsea on a tour of this assignment in the 4-minute video above.

How might you blend research, group work, video creation, and friends and family into an empowering and equitable learning experience for your students? In the 4-minute video below, Chelsea Cohen from Laney College, will show you!

Chelsea’s students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, engage in a multi-stepped project, beautifully scaffolded into managing meaningful chunks. Each step of the way, students collaborate and increase their knowledge of a particular topic. Chelsea will demonstrate how extending discussions beyond the classroom or Canvas and into a students’ circle of family and friends can foster more diverse dialogue that situates a student as an expert. Can learning get more meaningful than this?

3 Steps to Becoming an Expert

In groups, create a video using Adobe Spark based on your research paper.
Share and discuss your video with friends and family (Extension: share the videos with your Twitter communities).
Reflect upon the experience with your classmates in our class discussion. Summarize the ideas that came up with your friends and families and how it felt for you to facilitate the conversation.

Accessibility tips! If you have a student in your class that uses a screen reader to navigate the web, you will need to provide an alternative to Adobe Spark Video. Also, if you have a student with a hearing impairment, have at least a few students caption their videos before sharing them with the class. To caption an Adobe Spark Video, download it from Spark, upload it into YouTube, and edit the auto-captions.

We suggest surveying your students in week one to let them know about your multimedia project plans and ask if they will need any accommodations. They'll appreciate your efforts to support them!

Authorship in the Age of OER

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

Writing With a Little Help From My Friends

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

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

The Student Experience

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

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

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

Here are a few quotes from my students:

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

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

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

Measuring the Impact

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

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

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

What’s Ahead

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

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

Leave a comment below or contact me via email or Twitter.
View the archive of my recent Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges (ASCCC) College Success OER webinar.

Equitable Online Course Design: Canvas Mastery Paths and EdPuzzle

In April of 2018, Merced College was accepted into OEI’s Consortium, in the Online Equity Cohort. We are very pleased and excited. We have set out to explore innovative approaches to promote equity in our online course designs.

If you have taught for a while, you know that your classes are populated by an array of diverse leaners. You may have a student or two who gets it all right—on the first try, every time. But you very likely have students who don’t pass on their first attempt. “Second chance” opportunities can support them to re-study, review and try again. Every student needs to build skills and competencies; and finish your class feeling enriched, accomplished and ready for the next challenge.

What Is Canvas Mastery Paths?

Use the links below to jump to different topics in the video above.

Canvas Mastery Paths is a feature in Canvas that allows instructors to set criteria for redirecting lower-performing students to supplementary or remedial activities (view the helpful Canvas Guide for Canvas Mastery Paths). Suppose, for example, after a summative assessment such as a unit exam, the instructor finds that some students passed; while others “barely passed” and some failed the exam. Mastery Paths allows instructors to redirect the students to varied levels of remediation. Those who achieve acceptable (“passing”) scores of, let’s say, 70% are not redirected for remediation. those who “barely passed”—e.g., scored between 60% and less than 70%--could be redirected to complete supplementary remediation at a moderate level. Finally, those who did not pass with scores of at least 60% could be redirected for more intensive remediation.

Practical Considerations for Online Remediation

Relevant Substance

The remedial task or activity should be one that re-teaches content and concepts similar and relevant to that in the primary assessment. For example, I teach Child Development for Merced College. If I give my students an exam about how preschoolers develop physically, cognitively and socially; then any remedial tasks should focus on those same developmental domains. It would be off-point to redirect study toward other topics; unless those are somehow foundational to the content that was not mastered on the exam.

Encouraging

Think about it. Your students just bombed on your exam. How enthused would they feel about being redirected to some labor-intensive, time-consuming, tedious and difficult requirement? We can guess they would feel much more encouraged and willing to do a task that refocuses their attention in ways that are relatively quick, engaging and fun.

Immediate Feedback

Canvas Mastery Paths is very versatile. Students could be redirected toward just about any assignment or task. An instructor could, for example, have students write an essay, or create a slide show, to demonstrate that they have reviewed the content and their comprehension is now significantly improved, since the exam. However, any such assignment requires instructor grading, which of course takes time. To facilitate quick feedback, I recommend remedial tasks that can be auto-graded in Canvas, such as quizzes.

Advantages of EdPuzzle

EdPuzzle allows users to upload educational or other videos from virtually any source, such as YouTube, Khan Academy or even teacher-created videos. The free version of EdPuzzle works just fine for this stategy, but there are premium account options too with additional features. Instructors select videos with content appropriate for their current teaching needs and augment these using EdPuzzle tools. With EdPuzzle, instructors can program a video to pause at strategic points, where questions or explanatory audio notes can be inserted. Therefore, when your student views an EdPuzzle video, the playback pauses at strategic points and the student is challenged to answer questions displayed to the screen (and/or listen to your prerecorded comments). Video is a very familiar and popular medium for most students today, which makes it an appropriate learning tool.

These features make EdPuzzle an effective approach for remediation, as well as other teaching methods. Let’s say, for example, that a student scores poorly on an exam. Presumably that student could benefit from a guided, focused re-study and re-assessment experience. An EdPuzzle—which in effect is a video quiz—could be ideal for this purpose.

Want to see how all this works? View my video overview of this teaching practice (also see the quick links embedded at the top of this post to help you navigate the video topics).

Hand in Glove

Therefore, when EdPuzzle is embedded into a Canvas quiz and used as the remedial method in Canvas Mastery Paths, low-scoring students can be automatically redirected to a fun and relatively easy, focused re-study and re-test opportunity, with a chance to recover a portion of the points missed on the recent exam or assessment.

EdPuzzle via Mastery Paths is an equitable strategy that gives your lower-scoring students a “second chance” at success in your course.

If you have any questions about this teaching strategy, please leave a comment below. I would be happy to answer them.

Innovative Tools to Equitize Online Counseling Services and Instruction

The California Community Colleges (CVC) - Online Education Initiative (OEI) provides support services to address equity and achievement gaps in the online learning environment experienced by students from marginalized communities. Aligned with Chancellor Oakley’s Vision for Success to fully close equity gaps within the CCC system, these ongoing efforts include applying an equity lens to surface institutional and systemic barriers, implementing an Equity Framework to address disparate impact and increase our students’ sense of belonging, and providing colleges with innovative tools, technology, and professional development in the areas of instruction and student services.

The CVC-OEI and the Online Counseling Network (OCN) have designed innovative tools to support high quality Online Counseling Services. Instruction and student services play a pivotal role in student success and providing students with the ability to access online services in real time, truly defines meeting our students where they are. In 2016, Cranium Café powered by ConexED was selected as the meeting and collaboration platform for the Online Counselor’s Network Project. The ConexED platform was designed with student services in mind and ConexED is 100% committed to accessibility, FERPA, HIPAA and Security. The platform allows for various forms of communication (email, chat, video conferencing) all in one tool. The CVC-OEI and the OCN not only introduced this innovative tool to the counseling field but they also made sure, training and resources were provided to those using the online counseling platform. Experienced counselors are invited to participate in professional development courses, where they will learn strategies and techniques for fostering successful online counseling sessions.

Student Equity in Online Counseling

Our students are tomorrow’s leaders and workforce. As educators, equity must be at the center of our daily practice as we assist students with meeting their educational, personal, and professional goals. Many of our students enroll in online courses and/or use online support services in the matriculation process. Counselors are key to this process. In classrooms and counseling sessions, they identify students’ strengths, skills, and knowledge, and provide guidance towards selecting appropriate educational and career paths. However, to address disparities, close achievement gaps, and meet the needs of each student, it is important for counselors to provide welcoming and supportive environments that are based upon equity principles and culturally responsive teaching and learning practices. Participating in flex-day breakout sessions, conferences, and campus-wide cultural events are great starts, but equity requires ongoing professional development, and a supportive community that provides networking opportunities and resources. There must also be a personal willingness and commitment to know our students and the communities they come from, to be more deeply engaged in the work to transform our classrooms, the delivery of student services, and our online colleges.

How Do You Do Equity?

In The Next Equity Challenge, Dr. Estala Bensimon refers to higher education faculty members as ‘first-generation equity practitioners’ who must recognize and concede that their practices are failing to create success for too many students. They need to see that their implicit biases about race and ethnicity often prevent them from viewing students who are not like themselves as college material (Bensimon, 2016). Having an awareness around institutional and systemic barriers to online learning is key to eliminating achievement gaps. This includes challenges such as implicit bias, microaggressions, and stereotype threat. USC Center for Urban Education (CUE) offers equity-minded indicators and other valuable resources. Equity-minded counselors help students to build on their strengths. They create welcoming environments that develop a sense of identity with and belonging to our institutions, and educational experiences to match their goals. Because equity is not about fairness, rather it it is about creating inclusive supportive learning environments that help our students find their voice and fulfill their potential.

Get Involved

The OEI will be offering professional development opportunities through on-campus workshops, online courses, webinars, and training modules, including a four-week course, Equity & CRTL for Online Counselors, this course will be offered through @ONE, late fall 2018. Along with opportunities for general counselors and mental health clinicians. A six-week Online College Counseling course, a two-week Online Mental Health for non-clinician course and a three-week Online Mental Health for licensed clinicians course.