Learning from Students Who Use #EdTech

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

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

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

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

Quick Links

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

List of Panelists

View student bios here.

Cross-College Student Interaction Using Flipgrid

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Denise and DayaWe are a pair of community college ESL teaching veterans, world travelers, lifelong learners and former City College of San Francisco colleagues, who continue to collaborate despite our current North-South (San Francisco-San Diego) divide. We stay connected by a daily stream of text messages and social media posts, encouraging one another in our interconnected personal and professional lives. We share everything from our latest workshop and presentation slide decks to shopping selfies, vacation photos and videos of our newest dance steps and gym moves. Last semester we decided to share the love with our students, and expanded our use of a tech tool we both regularly use, Flipgrid, a free tool that enables asynchronous interactions in video using a webcam or a smartphone.

Both of us were teaching a class that fosters listening and speaking skills, Denise with an Intermediate-level Credit class at San Diego Miramar College, and Daya with a Beginning-level Non-Credit class at City College of San Francisco. Both of us were also  using Flipgrid as a tool for our students to record authentic videos to extend course content, build community between students, and practice communication skills. One day after informally sharing what we each doing in our classes, it dawned us that our our classes could collaborate together on one shared Flipgrid!

Quickly, we put together a new grid called “Visit SF/SD”, and we created our first shared topic with the instructions, “Where should we go if we are visiting San Francisco or San Diego? Tell us where to have fun and why you like this place.”

excited students

Excited students!

When we announced this to our classes, they were immediately excited to share places in their city and learn about one another. Denise knew it would be a hit when she recorded a group hello from her class at San Diego Miramar College.

As the posts began rolling in, we realized how this provided an excellent opportunity for students to “show off” their city and their speaking skills with other students outside their own classroom walls. Students posted about favorite restaurants, special parks and famous landmarks. They recorded their videos on the top of a mountain, in their cars, at home, and in the back of the classroom. One of Denise’s experienced students took us on a live tour of the San Diego

Student providing a tour of the San Diego Zoo.

One of Denise's students provided a tour of the San Diego Zoo.

Zoo, and one of Daya’s students, on her first day attending class, stood in the hall and encouraged visitors to come to her favorite spot in San Francisco, City College! No matter where they recorded or what they shared, all students were engaged and enthusiastic, practicing their presentations many times, for increased language mastery and confidence.

Daya’s class watched Denise’s class on the big screen and students were inspired by their peers’ fluency. They felt connected and inspired. And they felt more curious about this other California community, motivated by global learners like themselves committing themselves to their education.

Overall, we found this to be such a wonderful collaboration, that we are planning to incorporate it in our fall semester classes as well.

6 Tips for Class-to-Class Collaborations with Flipgrid

We have identified a  few tips for for a successful collaborations:

  1. If you use Canvas, forego using the Flipgrid Integration for your collaboration, as it will only allow students enrolled in your course to participate in your Flipgrid Topic. Instead, create an Assignment, enter "No Submission" for Assignment Type, and include the link and password to your Flipgrid Topic in the rich content editor below the Assignment title. 
  2. Activate the closed captions feature in your Grid settings to ensure your student contributions are accessible to everyone. 
  3. Before your class-to-class collaboration, use Flipgrid with your own class. Before our collaboration, both of our classes were already familiar with Flipgrid, which made students more comfortable with collaborating. This approach lessens the students’ cognitive load and calms nerves that can come along with using a new tool.
  4. When you introduce Flipgrid to your students, use a prompt that invites all students from participating classes to join in. It’s fun to see the other class setting, and the smiling faces of the professor and students.
  5. For your class-to-class collaboration, choose a topic that allows students to “show off” their expertise in their college or city. Then move into other more content-based topics.
  6. Find ways to support students who are less comfortable with the platform. If you're teaching a blended or face-to-face course, allow students to work alone or in pairs. For those who aren't comfortable showing themselves on video, provide the option to show a video tour and simply narrate it with their voice.

Flipgrid is a wonderful way to build a learning community, within a class and between classes. In addition, our students love sharing their grids with their friends and families, here in California and back in their home countries. Once the semester finishes they leave the class with a record of their learning progress and memories of classmates near and far.

 

Digital Citizenship Reflections

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What does it mean to be a “good” citizen? While certainly not a new question, it is one that is experiencing a renaissance in many of our hearts and minds. Especially in the last few years, we have come to realize that our digital space and the way we inhabit it has the power to profoundly impact our analog world. We live so much of our lives on the digital plane that who and how we are in this space arguably begs as much reflection and intention as that of our physical lives.

In other words, there’s a (relatively) new existential angst in town.

My own anxious concern around what exactly it means to be an educator in this brave new world led me to @ONE’s Digital Citizenship course, facilitated by Aloha Sargent & James Glapa Grossklag (read James' and Aloha's thoughts about digital citizenship) Within week one, I realized I was not alone in my concerns & questions; James and Aloha encouraged us to “embrace the chaos” of the unknown and dive head first into an exploration of how we want to participate as citizens in the creation of our digital world  --- while simultaneously operating within it.

You Tell Me That it’s Evolution…

""Prior to taking this class, I saw digital citizenship as relatively static. I knew the definition involved ethics and how we operate online -- and that there were grave concerns about how all this was playing out in education. Frankly, I was also worried about how people were treating one another digitally and how that was translating offline.

This course challenged me to think about Digital Citizenship specifically in the context of how online education is emerging as a culture and industry. Topics considered in Digital Citizenship come with the realization that as educators, we are assuming a really critical role in learning, teaching, and modeling not only digital literacy but digital citizenry well outside our disciplines.

So for four weeks, we discussed, read, and thought about questions concerning digital presence, participatory learning, and ethics. We also explored Open Education and Open Educational Resources. As a result, my definition of digital citizenship has evolved considerably.

You Say You Got a Real Solution…

""One of the most practical gifts of this course was the modeling of Participatory Learning - a way of teaching online that puts the learner at the center of their own learning as creator & curator; it allows for the learner to become part of the online community’s conversation in an immediate and contributory way. I’ve always been uneasy with the call and response that education - and online education in particular- could easily become, but #CCCDigCiz quickly dispelled that as we focused on ways to facilitate students developing content and creating our shared digital landscape. Harnessing the power of social media and learning to teach outside the LMS were introduced, and I quickly began to see just how far “beyond the classroom” we could take our students on this digital plane. Helping students learn to navigate the curation, evaluation, and creation rather than simply digest and respond to a prompt is an essential 21st skill set that is addressed by this course.

We were asked to think about and develop participatory and/or non-disposable assignments that addressed these skills and that we could use within our respective disciplines.

Another valuable and unexpected take away from Digital Citizenship was exposure to material sourced from Open Educational Resources, or OER. While involved in critical & ethical discussions around Open Education, we were guided to explore resources & materials that were freely available to all. What I love about OER is that many things can be adapted to suit one's needs and individual course goals; how often over the years have we wished this or that textbook could just be altered a bit and then would be a perfect fit for our needs? Depending on the licensing, OER sometimes allows for just that, which I did not know prior to taking this course.

Adopting Open Educational Resources also addresses issues of equity, and alleviates frustrations of both students and instructors in making sure everyone has the materials -- in other words, using OER levels the playing field. While these resources are somewhat still emergent, the value they offer in access and equity is inarguable.

We all Want to Change the World…

As I finished week four of Digital Citizenship, I realized my definition of Digital Citizenship was becoming more dynamic. Good teaching leads to further inquiry, and weeks later I am still thinking about the concepts we explored and their impact on our digital as well as physical world. I also have pedagogy and materials I can use right now in my course development. In short, I feel my own digital citizenship evolving.  Perhaps the best thing about Digital Citizenship is that it forces an ongoing reflection and practice -- and one that is anything but static.

As with most evolutionary mediums, learning to teach with - and within - technology is a bit like building a plane while flying it, and the topics covered in Digital Citizenship are  an important chapter in this emerging flight manual.

 

Attributions:

“An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Why remix an Open Educational Resource? by Liam Green-Hughes, licensed under CC BY 2.0 UK: England & Wales License

“Revolution - The Beatles.” VEVO, 20 Oct. 2015

 

What is Digital Citizenship?

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Search Google News for “Facebook scandal” and you’ll get 53,600,000 hits. Well, you will, if you have the same location and browsing history as we do.

Once you learn that an algorithm determines these hits, does that impact what you ask students to research? When you require students to use TurnItIn, do you tell them what happens to their intellectual property?  If you require students to use publisher courseware, do you know how publishers use the data they’re gathering? If so, then you’re asking questions that are at the core of the new @ONE course, Digital Citizenship. Admittedly, questions are more plentiful than answers.

Digital Presence

Being part of the digital world is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve now learned … there is this beautiful space of creativity, collaboration, and empowerment – and I’d like to be part of that space!

-Ramela Abbamontian, Los Angeles Pierce College

Acknowledging the unique abilities and dispositions of our 21st century learners, we begin the course by exploring strategies for modeling digital presence and providing opportunities for students to create content and connect with a global audience. Examples of this “participatory learning” include:

Digital Ethics

Pariser's talk about Internet filter bubbles and Tufekci’s talk about digital dystopias were alarming wake-up calls to the salient forces that shape our digital life and influence our behavior.

-Gisela Garcia, University of Memphis

Significant ethical issues impact how we engage with digital platforms, and thus how we teach and learn online

In the face of such daunting issues, what can we actually do? In addition to learning about digital platforms and student privacy, we can also emphasize digital information literacy in our curriculum. A great resource is Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy text, and corresponding short videos on media literacy.

Open Education

The Module discussing the prohibitive costs of textbooks really resonated with me…. The use of OER will give me the opportunity to start closing that equity gap.

-Kristie Camacho, College of the Desert

The most recent Wisconsin Hope Lab report on student hunger and homelessness finds 42% of community colleges students to be food insecure, and 46% housing insecure. In light of this, it’s no surprise that adoptions of Open Educational Resources continue.

The OER section of the course serves as a primer on finding, reviewing, and adopting OERs. Further, we see OERs as a decisive assertion of academic freedom, breaking away from conventional textbook packaging, which inextricably leads to undisclosed data harvesting by publishers.  

I'm excited for my students! They'll get to "take the wheel" of learning more and more. -Colleen Harmon, Cuesta College

Expecting our students to "take the wheel" empowers them as learners and recognizes their agency as digital citizens. Combining active learning that many of us practice with the permissions of open licensing points us to the idea of Open Pedagogy. Yes, we can use openly licensed resources with while teaching, but also we can ask students to contribute and share their own knowledge and work within the world.

Examples of Open Pedagogy include:

In other words, we can engage our students transparently and humanely as co-learners--we don’t know everything about the topic, let alone about our students.

Further Learning

If you’d like to learn more about how digital citizenship can affect your teaching and learning, register for the next session of the @ONE class, Digital Citizenship, or join the conversation on Twitter at #CCCDigCiz.

Sharing Student Work

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Sharing student work is a wonderful way to showcase the efforts and talents of your students as well as your pedagogical approach as an educator. Student work should be appreciated and should serve as a reminder of why we all come to work in the first place. Material evidence of student learning is also an excellent resource for faculty professional development. Sharing among faculty should be encouraged, not discouraged due to legal implications such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and copyright. While legal implications are important to consider and steps should be taken to address them, don’t let the fear of legal repercussions prevent you from celebrating and learning from the hard work of your students.

When it comes to sharing student work, whether with your colleagues, at a conference, or on the internet on a public website, there are two legal issues to consider: FERPA and copyright. Read on for an introduction to each, but please keep in mind that I am not a legal professional. Always check with your institution for information on how legal policy is interpreted and implemented on your campus.

What is FERPA?

FERPA is a federal privacy law that is designed to ensure students are in control of who has access to their student records. Personally identifiable information such as Social Security Numbers, cannot be disclosed without a student’s consent. Directory information – which may include name, address, enrollment status, and photograph – may be released without permission, provided the institution allows students to opt out of these disclosures. According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell, FERPA also protects the release of “education records,” which are defined as “those records, files, documents, and other materials which (i) contain information directly related to a student; and (ii) are maintained by an educational agency or institution or by a person acting for such agency or institution.”

Depending on how your institution interprets the meaning of “education records,” student work may or may not be considered an education record under FERPA.

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a federal law that is not specific to educational institutions. Copyright law protects the rights of authors to control the use of their work, while also seeking to balance the right of the public to use works protected by copyright. It is important to recognize that students own copyright of the work they produce in their courses.

Get Permission

Regardless of whether your students’ works are protect by FERPA or copyright or both, it is essential to get permission from students before sharing their work. One way to do this is to have students fill out a form before you share their work and retain the responses to this form.

To see a sample form, click the image below:

If you would like to save a copy of this form and modify it to meet the needs of your classes, simply click here and save to your Google drive.

sample google form

This form is shared in the public domain, which means you are free to make a copy of it and adapt it for your own use without permission.

Fostering Innovations in Teaching and Learning

As we strive to cultivate innovations in teaching and learning, we must recognize the value that sharing student work brings to our efforts while balancing our commitment to ensuring students maintain their privacy and the rights they are entitled to as creators. Additionally, as more and more educators are teaching at a distance, using technology in the classroom, and exploring the use of social media for educational purposes, it’s more important than ever that we stay abreast of laws and guidelines governing how student work may be shared. Make sure that, when asking for permission to share work, the student knows exactly what the permission is for, and you know the parameters of the permission that the student has provided. Create multiple forms and modify them as needed, just make sure to track student responses and keep organized records.

Teaching with OER OpenStax Canvas Course Shells

In this 9-minute video, Dr. Jennifer Carlin-Goldberg from Santa Rosa Junior College shows how she uses Canvas Commons to import sample course shells with free OpenStax textbook content. Jennifer also gives us a tour of her hybrid Statistics class in Canvas and explains how she integrated OpenStax content with her own materials along with shared quizzes and YouTube videos designed to go with the OpenStax textbook.

OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University that creates peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks available in free, digital formats to students and for a low cost in print. Since it launched in 2012, OpenStax has produced 45 textbooks in Math, Science, Social Sciences and Humanities that are free for faculty to use “as is” or to download and modify. Starting in December 2017, Canvas users can use Commons to import OpenStax content that the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (OEI) has embedded in Canvas course shells.

Tweeting Your Way to Professional Growth

Tweeting Your Way to Professional Growth

This post is the third in a series about principles in teaching and learning with contributions by Jim Julius and Lene Whitley-Putz.

passion led us hereSocial media is a topic that stirs a mixed bag of reactions with college educators. Some shake their heads and speak of a generation of souls lost on screen-time, superficial Snapchat stories, and fake news. While each of those topics are worthy of a critical discussion, social media means something very different to other educators, like myself. To me, the topic sparks a reflection about lifelong professional growth and development.

I have had a very non-traditional career path for a college educator. And through the ups and downs of my journey, I have benefited tremendously from my participation in social media. As I look back on roughly ten years of blogging and tweeting, I identify countless virtual connections that have grown into meaningful professional relationships, I’ve become a more well-rounded, reflective practitioner from the resources shared by peers, and I even received an offer to write a book along the way.

And now, in my new role with @ONE, my team and I are shepherding educators into the networked era by designing professional development opportunities fueled by social media to improve their digital literacy and prepare students for professional and personal success after college. Through the use of our new hashtag, #CCCLearn, we are helping educators to demystify hashtags by lurking in our feed or by sending a Tweet with the hashtag #CCCLearn that describes what they’re learning/trying/reflecting on. We also just kicked off our first @ONE Reflective Writing Club, a 6-week community-based blogging experience designed to support educators in examining the unique opportunities and challenges of public, digital writing (peek into our journey by searching for the hashtag #CCCWrite on Twitter or viewing this RSS feed of our blog posts).

Along the way, I realized that educators embarking upon their first experiences with social media as a form of professional growth may need advice and some guidance. As I looked back on my own journey, I asked myself, “What do you know now that you wish you had known then?” To answer this question, I searched the web for existing resources, but did not find what I had in mind. I located many institutional policies about social media, most written through the lens of public relations or marketing. But I did not find a concise and focused resource supporting professional learning. So I wrote my own and, in the process, reached out to a few of my peers, Jim Julius, Katie Palacios, and Lene Whitley-Putz, for some feedback. The five finished principles are provided below. They draw upon my own practices and experiences with social media and I hope they will serve many of you as you embark on their own journeys.

5 Social Media Principles for Professional Growth

Beginning a journey to become a lifelong digital learner can be a daunting task, especially for educators who are used to having all the answers. The principles below are offered to help you get started, guide you, and motivate you through the twists and turns ahead. Enjoy your journey!

Experimentation

As you look down the path in front of you, you may feel uncertain about where you are headed and how you will get there. Keep wondering about what’s ahead; curiosity will keep you moving forward. You’ll need to make choices that you may feel uncertain about at times. That’s why becoming a digital learner is, in many ways, like a long-term experiment. As you try new things, remember to look back and recognize what you would like to do differently next time. Trial-and-error is a way of life in digital culture.

Kindness

As you start your journey, you may question the value that you have to contribute to the public web. Self-doubt is common when engaging in an open digital community. Remember that you are surrounded by individuals who feel the same way. When you participate, you are taking a leap of faith and you will recognize and appreciate those who are kind to you. When others take the time to comment on your work, make it a priority to listen and respond.

Community

Know that you are not alone in this endeavor. Being a digital learner means you are part of a community. Lean on others for support and, in return, encourage your peers. Give to your community by sharing your ideas, your resources, and engaging in dialogue. Over time, you will begin to see your generosity come back to you in unexpected and beautiful ways.

Mindful Participation

Developing a professional learning network is a fulfilling experience, but it is a practice that involves care and attention. Because the lines between our digital and physical networks may blur, it is important to be clear about setting and maintaining boundaries.  As you engage, take care to set priorities, be present when in the company of your family, friends, and co-workers, and allow yourself to take a break. In digital culture, all of your actions matter. Develop a practice that involves pausing to consider your words before you publish/tweet/post. Sometimes choosing not to comment can be the wisest choice to make.

Curation

As you grow and change, your professional learning network should too. Developing your PLN is a continuous process of refinement that involves filtering out the noise. At the same time, making a conscious choice to seek out and include diverse perspectives in your network can open your eyes to new ways of seeing things.

If using Twitter and blogs for professional growth is new to you, are these principles helpful? If you are an experienced user of social media, do they resonate with your experiences?  Leave us a comment below and let us know!

Social Media Principles for Professional Growth by Michelle Pacansky-Brock is shared with a Creative Commons-Attribution CC-BY 4.0 International License.

 

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Online Teaching and Course Design

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Online Teaching and Course Design

This post is the second of a series about principles in teaching and learning with contributions by Jim Julius and Michelle Pacansky-Brock

coinsLike Fred and Ginger, peanut butter and jelly, the Patriots and the Super Bowl, some things are so closely linked that they simply don’t make sense without the other. For online education, how we design our course and how we teach our course are the inseparable pair--two sides of the same coin.

The professional development program developed by @ONE has long focused on both sides of this coin. In 2011, we used the iNacol Standards for Quality Online Teaching as the criteria for our online teaching certificate, and in 2014, we customized these standards to develop the @ONE Standards for Quality Online Teaching. The @ONE Standards were the foundation for the design and teaching practices that underpinned the @ONE Certificate in Online Teaching, representing both sides of the coin in one essential set of standards.

In 2014, though, the Online Education Initiative developed the OEI Online Course Design Rubric. This rubric focused solely on foundational criteria for course design, and pushed the shared standards for designing quality courses well beyond the @ONE Standards. Over the course of two years, as the rubric was used by faculty across the state, it went through some major revisions, and sets a gold standard for course design quality. In essence, the OEI Rubric advanced the initial design criteria offered in the @ONE Standards.

This caused a bit of a rub when using the @ONE Standards. Participants moving through the @ONE courses sometimes struggled with determining which set of standards or criteria they should be privileging. Participants in our courses were not always able to see which document was driving course design decisions--the Rubric, or the Standards. Moreover, as technology changed, and as more data about student success in online learning became available, we realized that the teaching practices outlined in the @ONE Standards needed some careful revision to better reflect the mission of the California Community Colleges (CCCs), including an emphasis on student success and equity.

So, this fall, we drew upon the collective wisdom of experienced online teachers from across our system in a collaborative effort to articulate a set of teaching principles that reflect the specific needs of our students, staff, and faculty. Our first step was to remove the course design elements--now the purview of the OEI Course Design Rubric--and focus our attention on the other side of the coin, the practices and behaviors that support quality online teaching.

Working from the original set of standards and resources that helped us better understand the national dialog around great online teaching (including those outlined by Jim in his post on Monday), carefully examining data about our online students, and drawing on the knowledge and expertise of our peers across the system, we developed a set of principles for quality Online teaching tailored to the CCCs. The principles state that effective online teachers:

  1. Are present within their course;
  2. Apply equitable methods to promote student access and success while acknowledging institutional obstacles;
  3. Respond to student needs and use data for continuous course improvement;
  4. Teach and model ethical online interaction, while helping students develop digital literacy that will poise them for success;
  5. Recognize ongoing professional development is a central component of their success.

We would like to invite you to read the full text of the Principles for Quality Online Teaching, and hope the principles give you some ideas to mull over and discuss with peers. Most importantly, we invite you to participate in developing our communal understanding of these principles by joining us in a webinar, writing a blog post, or participating in a course.

We think the pairing of the new Principles for Quality Online Teaching with the OEI Course Design Rubric lays the foundation for your success and the success of our students, but the reality is, Ginger and Fred engaged in a lot of practice before they became Hollywood legends. The Principles provide the initial steps for the intricate dance of teaching and learning, but our continued conversation and engagement with one another is the music that breathes life into the dance.

Teaching--face-to-face and online--is hard work, and our students may need to surmount many walls along their path to success. The Principles remind us that the unique mission of the CCCs is not to separate the wheat from the chaff, but rather recognize the human potential in all of us.