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

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

Engaging students in giving one another feedback on their work or work-in-progress is another effective method of strengthening student-to-student interaction. Community is built as students support each other’s success and learning concepts are reinforced while engaging in a collaborative peer review process. Evaluating others’ work is a low-stakes, collaborative practice opportunity to reinforce the learning of your course concepts. I find it helpful to give students questions to respond to that evaluate specific criteria as they conduct their reviews. Canvas has a built-in peer review assignments tool, and it can be achieved in peer review pairs or small groups. For instance, students can give and receive art critiques or feedback on their problem-solving, presentations, and writing.

Social Annotation of Readings

Culturally responsive teaching draws from and then builds upon all that our students bring to the classroom, and Hypothesis provides a space for students to share it in the margins of texts while they read. For example, for low-stakes collaborative practice of strategic reading skills and metacognition, I ask my students to annotate parts of an article where they are making connections, asking questions, inferring, synthesizing, visualizing, and determining importance. This validates their cultures and language and capitalizes on it by using their background knowledge as a window to learning new content.

If you assign readings in your courses, Hypothesis allows for social annotation and replies for class conversations to unfold in the margins of PDFs and websites. In the recording of “Liquid Margins 18: Social Annotation in Community College: A California Case Study,” Kat King, Brandon Harrison, and I highlight how weaving in social annotation as a teaching practice has significantly increased student engagement, critical thinking, and learning outcomes.

Student-Created Videos

Text-based assessments come to life through video and audio with Flipgrid and Canvas Studio. Both of these humanizing tools can be implemented for both low-stakes practice and higher-stakes student presentations, debates, or speeches. A conversation unfolds as students interact through recorded videos and video, audio, or text replies to one another. For more on Flipgrid, see my previous article titled “Humanizing Your Online Courses with Flipgrid”.

Higher-Stakes Collaborative Summative Assessments

If you assign a wonderful group project or presentation in your on-campus class, then retain it for your online version. You might consider having groups collaborate on creating real-world, authentic infographics, pamphlets, slideshows, webpages, or videos on shared Google Slides, PowerPoint Presentations, or Adobe Spark posts, videos, and pages. For instance, math squads could design webpages on statistics of racial disparities in their community, groups of biology students could create pamphlets that might be found in a doctor’s office on diseases affecting marginalized populations, or ESL teams could record videos presenting different grammar concepts. Groups could then share their final products with the entire class, perhaps on a Padlet, which is a straightforward digital bulletin board that allows students to share digital content and leave feedback or comments to one another.

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 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?

The Brain Science Behind Humanized Online Teaching

Humanizing is a teaching approach that prioritizes instructor-student relationships and applies culturally responsive pedagogy to online courses. Humanizing has been a popular topic in recent years — but since the pandemic has brought about levels of isolation never before experienced, the subject has risen to the forefront. While we learn the HOW of humanizing, it is also important to address the underlying question of WHY it works.

I believe that understanding this WHY will help educators to make more informed choices about course design, content delivery, assessments, class activities, and much more. This video explains the role of the limbic system in processing new information and experiences, as well as some steps educators can take to reduce fear and anxiety in their students in order to foster a welcoming, safe space for student learning and growth.

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:

“In this course, I like the discussions that we’ve been having on Flipgrid. Flipgrid is really easy to learn and a fun place to interact with other classmates.”
“One thing that at first I didn't like because it brought me out of my comfort zone was the Flipgrid assignments but now I see them as valuable and think it’s a great part of this class.”
“Initially, I thought that I wouldn't like Flipgrid because the idea of posting videos of myself online was not appealing at all. But, after doing our first assignment and receiving comments on my videos, I actually like Flipgrid because I feel that I am actually in this class interacting with my fellow English 1A classmates.

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:

Seamlessly embed video assignments into Canvas for easy student access
Use Canvas Speedgrader to assess video assignments
Automatically create and edit closed-captioning for accessibility (Be sure to enable this feature!)
Enable video moderation for private conversations or testing
Set time limits for students’ video recordings from 15 seconds to 10 minutes

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.

Introductions: During the first week, students in my English courses meet each other through video interactions on our first Flipgrid. They introduce themselves and then reply to each other with greetings, commonalities, and questions.
Microaggressions: After my students read articles from multiple perspectives on microaggressions, they share a situation when they experienced (or witnessed) a microaggression, the implied meanings, and their reactions. I record an example video for my students to use as a model, which Flipgrid allows you to pin at the top. You might also consider pinning stellar students’ videos as models to highlight. Students and I reply to each other and a fruitful discussion ensues.
Research and Writing Challenges: When my students are knee-deep in their research projects, they share their specific challenges with conducting research and with academic writing, such as finding effective evidence, searching the library databases, and MLA style. Students reply to each other by offering friendly solutions, suggestions, support, and encouragement.
Student Lounge: To support student-initiated contact with other students, I create a Student Lounge Flipgrid as an ongoing space for students to chat about non-course related topics. Flipgrid can be utilized for your course Q&A where students can reach out with questions. I’ve also applied it at the end of the course for us to say our goodbyes.

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

Introductions: Having students introduce themselves or do icebreakers at the beginning of a semester is a simple way for students to first learn Flipgrid.
Discussions: Asking students to respond to an open-ended prompt and then reply to their peers is a great opportunity for low-stakes, collaborative practice with course concepts.
Think alouds: A technique from Reading Apprenticeship, this activity asks students to read a passage and describe what is going through their mind, building metacognitive understanding of reading processes and strategies.
Presentations: Students share slides and deliver speeches on course concepts.
Storytelling: Students share experiences from their lives that connect to the class topic.
Debates: Students practice argumentation, with half the class assigned to one side and half to the other side.
Muddiest points: Students share the most challenging or confusing part of a lesson/unit and receive clarification from peers.

English

Reading groups:Students discuss assigned readings in small groups, supporting both reading comprehension and critical thinking. (Set up a separate Flipgrid for each group.)
Golden lines: Another Reading Apprenticeship technique asks students to share important quotes from a text, explain why they were important, and reply to peers’ golden lines.
Summaries of found content: Students find their own reading, film, poem, etc. related to the course topic and provide a summary to the class.
Socratic seminars: Students discuss spoken responses to an essay prompt before writing.
Peer review or critiques: Students share a draft (or part of a draft) of their work and receive feedback from their classmates.

ESL

Vocabulary charades: Students act out a vocabulary word and peers reply with their answers. (You can also have students teach the class new words and peers reply with their use of the word in a sentence.)
Interviews: Students work in pairs to practice question formation and responses.
Clap the word: Students practice pronunciation by clapping the syllables of a word with the stress on the correct syllable.
Grammar lessons: Students deliver a presentation on a grammar point to the class or tell a story from their lives using the targeted verb tenses.
Reading and writing activities: Students discuss their personal responses to a reading, enabling them to talk through ideas in preparation for a formal writing assignment.
More ESL ideas on the Flipgrid site and under “English” above.

Math

Number talks: Students deepen their learning by explaining their math reasoning and problem-solving processes and seeing how other students approached a problem.
Tutorials: Students create mini-lessons on different math skills using the screen record, whiteboard, or graph paper features.
Challenges: Students create their own math problems for classmates to complete, then reveal the correct answer in a later reply.
Real-world math: Students share math experiences from their lives, helping them understand that math is all around us.

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

Integrating Flipgrid into Canvas

VIDEO: Edit Captions on Flipgrid Videos by Flipgrid
WEBSITE: Flipgrid Help Center
WEBSITE: Flipgrid Blog

Student Resources

How and why to humanize your online course

by Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Humanizing Infographic

What is humanizing?

Humanizing applies learning science and culturally responsive teaching to asynchronous online courses to create an inclusive, equitable class climate for today's diverse students. When you teach online, it is easy to relate to your students simply as names on a screen. But your students are much more than that. They are capable, resilient humans who bring an array of perspectives and knowledge to your class. They also bring life experiences shaped by racism, poverty, and social marginalization. In humanized online courses, positive instructor-student relationships are prioritized and serve "as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor" (Pacansky-Brock et al., 2020, p. 2). In any learning modality, human connection is the antidote for the emotional disruption that prevents many students from performing to their full potential and in online courses, creating that connection is even more important.

heart plus "i" for equals brain, symbolizing the importance of placing relationships before content.

The Principles

Humanized online teaching is supported by four interwoven principles:

Trust: As an instructor, it is your responsibility to intentionally cultivate student trust, and one way to do it is by practicing “selective vulnerability” (Hammond, 2014) in the online community you build with your learners. Choose to share aspects of your life that portray you as a real person – tell a story about a personal struggle you worked through or record a video while cooking dinner or walking your dog.
Presence involves intentional efforts to construct your authentic self through brief, imperfect videos to ensure your students know you are in this journey with them (Costa, 2020). Verbal and nonverbal cues add context to your communications, which is important to support culturally diverse students.
Awareness is achieved by learning about who your students are and how you can support them.
Empathy requires you to slow down, see things through your students' eyes without judgment, be flexible, and support them towards their goals.

An interwoven fabric of threads labeled trust, empathy, awareness, and presence. Trust runs up and down on each thread, while each of the other principles runs left to right only on one thread, symbolizing trust as the foundational element of humanizing.

The Pedagogy

"Students who often feel invisible and unimportant" – they need to be 'seen' and valued by educators. (Wood & Harris III, 2017, p. 41)

Research on men of color and first-generation students in community colleges has emphasized that "relationships before pedagogy" is a tenet of effective teaching (Palacios & Wood, 2015; Rendón, 1994; Wood & Harris III, 2015). Yet, when community college students learn online, they are less likely to experience rapport with their instructor and more likely to report needing to teach themselves (Jaggars & Xu, 2016). The lack of instructor-student relationships in many online courses exacerbates equity gaps. Humanizing intentionally cultivates a "welcomeness to engage" through trust, mutual respect, and authentic care (Wood & Harris III, 2015) before moving on to course content. Positive instructor-student relationships are leveraged to hold students to high standards, validate their effort and ability, and support them with achieving their goals. Students are more likely to lean in and apply themselves at a higher level when they know their instructor believes in them (Gay, 2000; Hammond, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 1994) and the same principles hold true in online courses (Glazier, 2016).

Mitigating the Impact of Stereotypes on Learning

Humanizing intentionally creates a learning environment in which everyone is welcomed, supported, and recognized as capable of achieving their full potential. This requires a commitment to becoming continuously aware of your unconscious bias and flattening the hierarchical structure of power embedded in White dominant culture. Instructors of humanized online courses recognize that students from non-majority groups are more likely to experience belongingness uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2007) and stereotype threat (Shapiro et al., 2016; Steele & Aronson, 1995). These phenomena disrupt the emotional conduits that steer cognition and, in turn, prevent students from performing at their best. Human connection allows students to feel safe by mitigating the psychological impact of stereotypes. With freed up cognitive resources (Vershelden, 2017), more students enter the Zone of Proximal Development where learning takes place (Vygotsky, 1978).

High Opportunity Zones

Weeks 0-1

Feelings of social isolation can worsen when students learn at a distance from their peers and instructor. To lower this barrier, humanized online courses incorporate kindness cues of social inclusion (Estrada et al, 2018.) into the “high opportunity zone” of an online course – the week prior to the start of instruction and the first week of a class.

STEM

The culture of STEM education offers a microcosm of inequity. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students leave STEM fields at greater rates than their White peers, and this problem is worse in STEM than other discipline clusters (Riegle-Crumb et al., 2019). Traditional, deficit-based instructional paradigms have created a "weed out" culture in undergraduate STEM courses. An overwhelming majority of students who switch out of STEM majors cite poor teaching (96%) and competitive course climate (81%) as problems that contributed to their decision (Seymour & Hunter, 2019). Humanizing online STEM courses is not a fix for every problem in STEM, but it is a start to creating more inclusive learning environments that will also expand opportunities for students who do not have the privilege to be on campus.

The 8 Elements

Teaching is a practice of continuous improvement. When we teach online, we may have a clear sense of the type of experience we want to cultivate for our students, but we may lack clear, practical steps to get there. The eight humanizing elements suggested below are offered as starting points for you. Try them. Adapt them. Make them your own and observe the results in your students' engagement and performance.

Liquid Syllabus

“I will be a partner in your learning.”

Humanize your pre-course student contact by creating a public, mobile-friendly website that contains a brief, imperfect welcome video; a learning pact detailing what your students can expect from you and what you'll expect of them; a teaching philosophy that conveys diversity as a value; tips for success; week one due dates and required materials; and a link to log into your course. Email the link to your Liquid Syllabus to your students the week prior to the start of instruction so they feel welcomed and prepared for a successful start. Save the policies, procedures, and other details for the course syllabus; with your liquid syllabus, convey a warm, welcoming first impression of you and your course.

Learn more about a Liquid Syllabus

Humanized Homepage

“You are welcome here.”

Ensure your students are greeted with a clear, friendly homepage when they arrive in your course. Include a visual banner; a brief video that welcomes and tells them how to proceed; and a clear "start here" button that links to the first module.

View an Example of a Humanized Homepage

Getting to Know You Survey

“I want to know how to support you.”

In week one, have your students complete a confidential survey that provides you with microdata about their individualized needs. Be sure students understand it is for your eyes only and that you will support them throughout the course with what they choose to share.

See an example of a Getting to Know You Survey

Warm, Wise Feedback

“I believe in you.”

Your feedback is critical to your students' continuous growth. But how you deliver your feedback really makes a difference, especially in an online course. To support your students' continued development and mitigate the effects of social threats, follow the Wise feedback model (Cohen & Steele, 2002) that also supports growth mindset (Dweck, 2007). Deliver your message in voice or video to include verbal and nonverbal cues and minimize misinterpretation. In your feedback, include:

A reminder of high standards ("this is a tough problem") so students are cued that mistakes are reflective of the course's rigor, as opposed to their abilities.
A personal assurance that informs the student they are capable and will improve with effort ("Look how much you've improved already, keep going. You've got this.").
Specific actionable steps to work on ("Next, I want you to work on ...").

Learn more about Warm, Wise Feedback

Self-affirming Ice Breaker

“Your values and experiences matter.”

Anxieties are highest in week one. To remedy this, invite students to participate in a low-stakes ice breaker that encourages sharing about something important to them. This real-world connection reduces stress, prepares them to engage in course content, and enables them to discover shared interests with their peers. Example prompts: Share a photograph of something important to you and discuss why you chose it; if you could only keep two items with you for the next month, what would they be and why; share your goals and aspirations with us. Use an asynchronous voice or video tool for an added humanizing kick!

Wisdom Wall

“Learning is a process of growth.”

Exposing students to role models with like identities increases self-confidence and minimizes stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) by changing the narratives students lean on to anticipate their challenges (Spitzer & Aronson, 2017). And engaging students in metacognition helps them to recognize their learning progress, increasing self-efficacy. Create a Wisdom Wall (Pacansky-Brock, 2017) at the end of a course by asking students to reflect back to the start of the course and identify something they know now that they wish they had known then. Then ask them to share that idea in the form of advice for your next group of incoming students. When your next course begins, share the Wisdom Wall with them in week one.

View an example of a Wisdom Wall

Bumper Video

“I am here to help you learn.”

A bumper video is a 2-3 minute, visually-oriented clip that includes background theme music and is designed to introduce a new module or clarify a sticky concept. Sprinkle bumper videos throughout your online course to differentiate your students' learning and empower them to quickly and independently revisit key concepts and ideas.

Watch a bumper video

Microlectures

“I am here to help you learn.”

Create a series of short (5-10 minute), laser-focused videos to guide your students through the comprehension of complex concepts. Before you record, identify one or two things you want your students to take away from the video. At the start of the video, tell your students what they will learn.

Learn how to make a microlecture

References

Asai, J. A. (2020). Race matters. Cell (181), 754-757.

Cohen, G. L., & Steele, C. M. (2002). A barrier of mistrust: How stereotypes affect cross-race mentoring. In J. Aronson (Ed.), Improving academic achievement: Impact of psychological factors on education (pp. 205-331). Academic Press.

Costa, K. (2020). 99 tips for creating simple and sustainable educational videos: A guide for online teachers and flipped classes. Stylus.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Estrada, M., Eroy-Reveles, A., & Matsui, J. (2018). The influence of affirming kindness and community on broadening participation in STEM career pathways. Social issues and policy review, 12(1), 258–297.

Eyler, J. (2018.) How humans learn. West Virginia Press.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.

Glazier, R. A. (2021). Connecting in the online classroom: Teachers, students, and building rapport in online learning. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hammond, Z. L. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Publishers.

Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2016). Emotions, learning, and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience. W.W. Norton & Company.

Jaggars, S. S. & Xu, D. (2016). How do online course design features influence student performance? Computers & Education, (95), 270-284.

Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students. School Review, 83, 301–344.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children. Jossey Bass.

National Research Council, (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: Expanded edition. The National Academies Press.

Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd ed. University of California Press.

Palacios, A. & Wood, J. L. (2015). Is online learning the silver bullet for men of color? An institutional-level analysis of the California Community College system. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 40(8), 1-13.

Pacansky-Brock, M. (2017). Best practices for teaching with emerging technologies (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Pacansky-Brock, M. (2014, August 13). The liquid syllabus: Are you ready? [blog post]. https://brocansky.com/2014/08/the-liquid-syllabus-are-you-ready.html

Rendón, L. (1994). Validating culturally diverse students: Toward a new model of learning and student development. Innovative Higher Education, 19, 33-51.

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.

Shapiro, J., Aronson, J., & McGlone, M. S. (2016). Stereotype threat. In T. D. Nelson (Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (p. 87–105). Psychology Press.

Spitzer, B. and Aronson, J. (2015). Minding and mending the gap: Social psychological interventions to reduce educational disparities. The British Psychological Society, 85, 1-18.

Seymour, E. and Hunter, A.-B., Editors. (2019) .Talking about leaving revisited: Persistence, relocation, and loss in undergraduate STEM education. Springer Nature.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797-811.

Vershelden, C. (2017). Bandwidth recovery: Helping students reclaim cognitive resources lost to poverty, racism, and social marginalization. Stylus & AACU.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Wood, J. L., Harris, F. III, & White, K. (2015). Teaching men of color in the community college: A guidebook. Lawndale Hill.

Wood, J. L., Harris, F. III. (2017). Supporting men of color in the community college: A guidebook. Lawndale Hill.

Wood, J. L. (2019). Black minds matter: Realizing the brilliance, dignity, and morality of black males in education. Montezuma Publishing.

Recommended citation:

Pacansky-Brock, M. (2020). How to humanize your online class, version 2.0 [Infographic]. https://brocansky.com/humanizing/infographic2

This resource was created with funds from the California Education Learning Lab and is shared with a CC-BY-NC license.

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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:

References to research that will help guide meaningful conversations with your faculty peers about the recent Title 5 change,
Recommended CVC-OEI/@ONE courses and PocketPD,
Video tours of online courses showcasing assignments in Canvas,
A collection of assignment ideas, shared by California Community College faculty

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.

Incentivize! Don’t Penalize: Revisiting Late Policies for Online Students

Coming from a culture of storytellers, I’d like to share a story that inspired this post.

I was at my local supermarket in the northeast side of Los Angeles when a former student, Ignacio (Nacho), recognized me and approached me. “Are you Ms. Fabi?” He then reminded me of who he was. I also met his Mama. His Mama started to tell me in Spanish what a good son Nacho is and how proud she is of him. I felt confused because, as I recall, he had dropped my class. As I listened to Nacho, there in the store, the reason he dropped hit me hard. He dropped the class because his mother had lost her job and he needed to work more hours to take care of his family. This caused him to struggle with time management. Nacho had a formative assessment due in my class and he couldn’t complete it by the due date. So, he dropped the class. Of course, I said, "Why didn't you tell me?" He said, "Well you were very clear about late papers. You set your rule and I broke it.” To him, talking to me meant asking for help, and he didn't want to ask for a favor. A “favor” was not an option for him. I could even see it in the eyes of his mother. She stood by his decision. “Se porta bien” – He behaves.

Like many working class immigrant households, we were raised to be proud, which meant not breaking the rules. Since many of our parents lived in fear of breaking rules in the US, the goal of behaving was instilled in us. Good behavior builds character. Character becomes more important than achievement. Nacho was the epitome of character. He was a good son of a single-family household, an Army Reserve Serviceman (another environment requiring good behavior) and a college student. Yet my policy became a barrier. I did not set up an environment to encourage communication and support him to succeed.

The next semester, Nacho registered for my course again. I learned he was a hard worker who also learned how to advocate for himself when he needed to. He never took advantage of my kindness and appreciated my personalized feedback. After all, I had met his Mama. Nacho earned an A, completed his bachelors at a Cal State, and is now a college recruiter. After Nacho, my journey as an online instructor was forever changed.

When I started teaching online, I struggled with late policies. I remember a colleague telling me I needed to be strict with deadlines to "show them how it will be in the real world." I learned my lesson after my Nacho encounter. After that, I began to imagine a learning environment where submitting late assignments could still be a method to encourage student effort and communicate that I believe in my students’ abilities. I have wondered how this change might remove barriers for students and foster a more equitable learning experience.

What Students Want

Our goal should not be to translate our face-to-face learning environments into our online courses. Both are unique and should be designed to leverage the characteristics of the modality. Also, our students have reasons for choosing to take an online vs. a face-to-face course. Kelly Ann Gleason, a student at Cuesta College, stated during the student panel for Digital Learning Day 2019, “We are taking online classes because we have life outside the classroom, so the very reason that we are taking this [an online class] communicates what we expect.” And what do they expect? Flexibility. Today, more than 24% of enrollments in the California Community College system are from online courses. Most of these students are blending their schedules with a mix of face-to-face and online courses to develop a flexible schedule that allows them to advance their academic goals while also fulfilling their work and life responsibilities. To put it another way, being on campus full-time is a privilege that many students do not have.

The student panelists who participated with Kelly Ann continued to advocate the need to respect faculty and their time, yet they want to see online faculty design an online environment where students are given a fair chance to submit quality work when time management becomes challenging. As Henry Fan, a student from Foothill College, stated, “Not all time is created equal.”

The full archive of the student panel is embedded below. To jump to the segment on late policies, click here.

https://youtu.be/7SKnCH02xMs?t=1845

How to Promote an Equitable Culture of Excellence

Equity means ensuring each student has what they need to succeed. Is it equitable to apply the same late policy to every student in every situation? It is our responsibility to measure the quality of student learning rather than how punctual an assignment is. And if it’s not punctual, how can we use that as an opportunity to understand our students’ realities and encourage them to keep going?

Here are some suggestions to incentivize responsibility by placing a culture of excellence and care on your end.

Spend time in preparing and designing Canvas Assignments. Make sure every student is clear about what to do and how to do it. Students might need models, templates or deeper explanations before they are ready. Include a rubric so your expectations are clearly communicated. Embed a video encouraging excellence within the Assignment page.
Use Canvas Announcements to nudge students on upcoming deadlines. We know some students struggle with deadlines and it would be irresponsible as a teacher to not act upon that knowledge before it’s too late.
Monitor submissions throughout the week. As the due date approaches, use the Grades area of Canvas to send a personal message to students who have not yet submitted. Ask if they are OK. Encourage them to talk to you if they need to.
For students who do not submit by the deadline, use the Canvas Inbox to message these students and ask if they are OK. Provide them an opportunity to negotiate. If a response is still missing, send your campus’ Distance Education policy language on Last Day of Attendance (LDA) for online courses. Be sure they know the last date they have to withdraw and receive a W, as it is better than an F.
Grade and provide comments in a timely manner so you reciprocate your culture of responsibility by providing meaningful feedback.
Plan your life around knowing you will always receive late submissions. So, when you don’t, you will feel happy and spend extra time with your loved ones.

We are content specialists. Not life specialists. Yet we can create an equitable culture of excellence, so all students can achieve academic excellence.

My Submission Policy:

Plan on submitting work on time.I immediately review work and provide meaningful feedback with in 48-72 hours.

Because time management is challenging, deadlines might not be met. But, you’re in luck. I’m on your side. Late submissions will be accepted with a penalty. Assignments submitted after the deadline may receive a 10% grade point deduction for each day following the due date and time.

Don’t want the penalty? Here’s an incentive.

If you recognize a due date might be a problem, advocate for your success by following these steps:

Identify the problem
Contact me to propose a solution
Let's negotiate

Do you have a submission policy you’d like to share? I warmly invite you to leave a reply below to keep the conversation going!

Zooming to New Heights of Student Engagement

I was a college student during the Stone Age of online education…you remember it, right? The age of mile-long content pages where, if you were lucky your professor would include a link back to the top at the half-mile marker on the page! Well, online education has changed a lot since then and there are now more ways to improve our students’ experiences. For California Community College (CCC) faculty, one way is to “zoom” to new heights by using ConferZoom in Canvas.

ConferZoom is the CCC-branded version of Zoom, an easy-to-use video conferencing tool that is provided at no cost to CCC educators by CCCTechConnect. Using ConferZoom changed the dynamic of my online Nutrition & Health courses by providing a way for my students to interact more organically with me and each other. We know that retention rates increase when students feel connected to their professor and/or classmates. Zoom provides a way for this connection to occur. Since I started using ConferZoom, I have observed increased student-student and student-instructor interactions, which are key to supporting students to complete the course successfully.

What do I do?

klatch: a social gathering, especially for coffee and conversation

At the start of the course, I have an orientation or klatch meeting, a term I adopted from my favorite online CVC-OEI/@ONE instructor, Greg Beyrer.

In my welcome letter I invite students to my klatch online Zoom meeting and provide three meeting times from which they choose one to attend: one meeting time during the weekend prior to the first day of class and two meeting times on the first day of classes. What I have found is that some students will attend more than one of the meetings. The icing on the cake is that the klatch fulfills Section B: Interaction - Instructor Contact and Student-to-Student Contact of the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric.

Want to give it a try?

Follow these steps:

Send out your welcome letter before your class begins.
Include the dates and times of the orientation meetings. It is important to let students know attending one session is mandatory and they will get credit. (My orientation is worth 20 points, more than any other week one assignment.)
In your message, encourage students to join from a computer with a webcam or a mobile device so you can see and hear one another. If you are aware that a student requires live captioning as an accommodation, contact ConferZoom support in advance of your meeting.
When orientation day arrives, have your klatch meeting from a computer with a webcam.
Launch Zoom and share your desktop.
Meet and greet your students in real time!
Take your students step-by-step through the basics of your course’s navigation.

You have now demonstrated to your students how useful klatch meetings will be going forward. In a coming blog post I will share how I use the recording feature to Zoom it up a notch!

Laying out the welcome mat

UsingConferZoom for my course orientation not only sets the table for my students to get a taste of what’s to come, but it also allows me to more easily create learner-centered content throughout the term, as students can ask questions and let me know what they’d like to learn about. Their input helps me guide the klatch in the direction the students deem necessary, as opposed to being completely instructor led. I also fulfill regular and effective contact in a more substantive way.

Since personal bonds are developed through shared experiences, we can easily see the significance of bringing students together live as they are entering your virtual classroom. Ensuring the session is meaningful and provides opportunities for social connections is essential. I want my students to know that I am here and available to them, both now and going forward. I also want my students to know that we are on this virtual nutrition or health “journey” together.

ConferZoom empowers me to take the anxious feelings that online students have at the start of a course and turn them into a promise of a shared learning experience. Through this experience, students are more likely to relate to me as their guide, mentor, and comforter. They also relate on a personal level with their peers. Thanks to ConferZoom, we have faces and personalities for the names we see on the screen and our shared journey toward a healthier life.

Learning from Students Who Use #EdTech

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.

3:28 Reflect on your experiences as a college student and answer this question, "I wish my teachers would _____________. "
8:08 If your instructor gave you the choice for a test to: write a paper, create a video, or create a verbal presentation, how would you feel about having that choice? Which option would you choose and why?
18:03 How are you using mobile devices to access the resources and services provided by your instructors and college?
20:25 Why did you choose to take an online class? What makes an online class a good learning experience?"

List of Panelists

View student bios here.

Arturo Aguilar, CSU Fresno
Trinity Chi, San Francisco City College
Amber Greene, Santa Barbara City College
Dineo Maine, San Diego State University
Laura Marquez, Citrus College

Canvas Speedgrader + Your Voice = A Win for Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Caring is Beautiful: Memories of Pretty Classrooms and What They (Can) Mean in Higher Education

Physical classrooms are part of our elementary school memories. Remember the ABC’s in the classroom, that scenic inspirational poster, or that poster from a Highlights Magazine? How about other instructional posters, graphs, and seasonally decorated bulletin boards? Now, remember how some teachers were better than others? Why? What attracted you to the classroom? The teacher? The subject?

While some of us might articulate a memory, some of us might be able to remember the feeling of being in a beautiful classroom. What did beautiful classrooms represent? Most likely, it represented a teacher that cared. Is this relevant to an online course? Yes. Research suggests that the aesthetics of an online course impact how students judge the course’s usability and credibility within moments of accessing the course (David & Glore, 2010). https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter134/david_glore134.html

Caring is radical. And that type of radicalism is beautiful. Adding beauty to our learning environments sends the message to students that we care about their learning, our subject matter and their success.

Jump to higher education and our learning environments change. We do not have an individualized classroom. The walls do not belong to us or our discipline. So how can we make both our physical and virtual learning environments beautiful? How can we demonstrate we care about our learning environments, subject matter, and student success? Through the practice of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning.

4 Attributes of Caring

Geneva Gay's book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice propose that we focus on "...caring for instead of caring about the personal well-being and academic success of ethnically diverse students... caring for is active engagement in doing something to positively affect [success]“ (Gay, 58). According to Gay, caring is:

Attending to person and performance. Teachers model personal values such as patience, persistence, and responsibility while incorporating skills such as self-determination throughout their curriculum. "In other words, culturally responsive caring teachers cultivate efficacy and agency in ethnically diverse students".
Action-provoking. It is not dumbing down rigor. To the contrary, caring teachers demonstrate respect to students, provide choices and "...are tenacious in their efforts to make information taught more understandable to them.
Prompts Effort and Achievement. Supportive instructional styles incorporate reciprocal experiences, such as providing students feedback reflecting our stories, can improve cognitive understanding between the students and the instructor. (Let them know they are not alone in their learning process.)
Multidimensional responsiveness. Caring is a process. “Caring is anchored in respect, honor, integrity, resource-sharing, and a deep belief in the possibility of transcendence, that is, an unequivocal belief that marginalized students not only can but will improve their school achievement under the tutelage of competent and committed teachers who act to ensure that this happens” (69).

Applying care to our learning environment requires passion, empathy, and effort, and a collective commitment to provide all students with the individual support they need to succeed. Through the use of Canvas and course design, we can let our students know we care for them. We can ensure their learning experience will be safe, fun, informative and successful by intentionally making the design inviting and beautiful. Just like caring for elementary school teachers and their classrooms, we can take extra time to make our Canvas pages beautiful too.

Let’s Take a Tour!

Trying to reconnect with my childhood learning memories, I decided to attend an elementary school to interview a teacher and see her classroom - Mrs. Marisa Torres (Ok yes. She’s my cousin). She shared with me her way of showing she cares for students, their learning and their overall environment.

Mrs. Torres designed a classroom that feels safe, fun, informative and adventurous with no competition. Behavior expectations, academic goals, and resources were available for students to take risks while feeling safe. Yet she went above standards in her learning environment to send a message to her students that she cares and that they matter.

But she can’t do this alone. She needs inspiration. Because her school only covers about 10% of the materials in her class, she needs inspiration from her colleagues, other colleagues, online via Pinterest and then her family. Ultimately, Mrs. Torres wants her students to feel like they are walking into a second home.

Her process represents the effort and process we have to do to make our course shells beautiful. We need inspiration, colleagues, communities of practice and the CCC Family.

Let’s Get Started!

We may not be experts in HTML, photography or even course design, but we can make an effort. Where to begin? Right here on the @ONE blog!

Here are my favorite Posts about making courses beautiful:

Byte-sized Canvas episodes by Helen Graves:
You Had Me At Hello, by Brianna Kuhn
Creating beautiful FREE Graphics in Canva for your online course, a webinar archive by Angela Gomez-Holbrook

Tip! Register for the free Can•Innovate session with Tracy Schaelen this Friday, October 26 at 2pm to learn to use Canva to create beautiful graphics for your Canvas course.

Cross-College Student Interaction Using Flipgrid

We 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!

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:

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.
Activate the closed captions feature in your Grid settings to ensure your student contributions are accessible to everyone.
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.
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.
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.
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.