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

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

This article first appeared on the California Acceleration Project blog.

When I asked my students for anonymous feedback at the end of my online course, they responded, “I loved being able to still have interaction with my classmates. I didn’t think I would really get that interaction in an online class so that was definitely a bonus for me,” and “I liked how the professor was able to keep us all connected with each other and made it feel as if we were in an actual classroom even though we were in the comfort of our home.” 

Students taking online courses that are intentionally designed with opportunities for asynchronous student-to-student communication and collaboration reap the rewards of not only the cognitive benefits of sharing ideas with peers, but also the socio-emotional benefits of being a member of a learning community. By cultivating engaging interactions and interconnections among students, we create a quality humanized learning environment where students, especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students, thrive.

Humanizing & Equity

This is the third blog in a series within the theme of humanizing online teaching and learning with an equity-minded lens. Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s transformative work on humanizing delineates how this practice “leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today's diverse students.” View the latest Humanizing Visual Guide on “How and Why to Humanize Your Online Class.” 

Implementing equity-minded and culturally responsive teaching practices to establish trust, make connections, and foster community is critical to serving minoritized students. Geneva Gay offers suggestions for improving the education of marginalized BIPOC students in her book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice as she illuminates, “Cooperation, community, and connectedness are central features of culturally responsive teaching. Mutual aid, interdependence, and reciprocity as criteria for guiding behavior replace the individualism and competitiveness that are so much a part of conventional classrooms. The goal is for all students to be winners, rather than some winning and others losing” (43-44). Author of the book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks expresses, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.” This is true for producing equitable outcomes and completion in the online classroom, as well. Culturally responsive online courses provide BIPOC students with a sense of community and belonging because they are not working in isolation--but in close collaboration with their peers.

In the online classroom, instructors need to be intentional in their course design to not only have a caring instructor presence, but to also provide multiple learning opportunities for students to cultivate trust, build community, and develop relationships with each other. For more on cultivating trust, view the “Sending Cues of Trust Online” session archive from the spring 2021 @ONE Humanizing Challenge Encore with Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Jennifer Ortiz, and me as your guides.

Why Student-To-Student Interaction?

Not only is course design with student interaction an equity-minded and a humanizing practice, but it is also required for compliance with both the California Education Code Title V regulations on Regular Effective Contact (§ 55204. Instructor Contact) and the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act. 

Research reinforces how vital a sense of belonging, the establishment of relationships, and collaborative group work are to online student learning, retention, and success. The 2017 CCC Chancellor’s Office Distance Education Report highlights, “A sense of belonging to a learning community is an important factor for distance education students” (33) and “students who are comfortable establishing relationships in an online environment tend to persist at higher rates” (52).  A 2015 Public Policy Institute of California report delineates that “a student’s perceived learning is correlated with how much of a sense of social presence is created in an online course. When the course structure allows students to develop strong working groups, they perceive the course to be ‘congenial,’ see themselves as a community, and perform better” (11-12). One of the four factors most directly correlated with California community college student success in online courses is regular effective contact (2015 Public Policy Institute of California).

Furthermore, interaction among students is an important component of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric (Section B4 and B5 on Interaction: Student-to-Student Contact) and the Peralta Equity Rubric (Section E8: Connection and Belonging).

Not Just Discussion Forums

For years, online courses have depended on whole-class discussion forums to encourage interaction among students. Imagine being a full-time online student whose courses all require you to post and reply to discussion forums week after week. It becomes disengaging as students suffer from discussion forum fatigue. 

My experiences participating in and assigning formal, contrived discussion forums have not been effective at building a strong online classroom community. It’s easy for students to get lost in whole-class discussions because they can be lengthy, clunky, and overwhelming with multiple conversations going on at once. In fact, two students speaking on a panel at the Online Teaching Conference 2019 session on “Online Student Community: What Do Students Need from Us?” shared that they loathe weekly whole-class discussions where they are required to post, reply to two peers, and meet the minimum word count. One student honestly disclosed, “Personally, I hate discussions. Hate them.” She explains the reasons for her aversion are that they are forced, that they are not organic, and that connections don’t form out of them.

I encourage online faculty to consider designing student-to-student interaction activities such as those described below that utilize asynchronous, low-bandwidth methods, which offer online students with unstable internet connections and with work or family responsibilities the flexibility they need to succeed in college. For additional examples by California community college faculty, view the @ONE Student-Student Interactions Guide. 

Student-To-Student Interaction In Practice

Low-Stakes Collaborative Practice

Low-stakes, formative practice activities are an excellent vehicle for heightening student engagement and retention. These checkpoints of student learning can be conducted online in the spirit of collaboration.

Group Discussions

To better foster community, consider placing your students into small groups to discuss your content instead of assigning whole-class discussions. When you break your class into diverse smaller groups to have more intimate discourse about your course content, there is a boost in meaningful student-to-student interaction. Students experience both a deeper engagement in the content and a greater chance of forming connections by focusing on the replies of 3 to 5 students instead of 30 or 40, especially when the groups are sustained over several weeks. Students in my online classes have expressed their appreciation of the small group discussions over a month as they discuss the book we are reading together in “book clubs.” View the first twenty minutes of this video of my CVC-OEI Can•Innovate presentation on “Group Discussions for Increasing Interaction, Engagement, and Equity” for why I choose group discussions over whole-class discussions and how to set them up on Canvas.

Peer Review  

Canvas inteface of the Peer Review option.

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

Social Annotation of Readings

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

Hypothesis logo

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

Student-Created Videos

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

Higher-Stakes Collaborative Summative Assessments

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

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

Canvas interface showing group assignment checkbox.

Some may cringe at the idea of group work. I’ve found that the more clearly structured and scaffolded the projects are, the better the experience for every group. Monitoring the groups helps ensure their success and gives me better insight into their group dynamics, so I build in regular check-ins, ask them to self-reflect, and evaluate their peers at the end. Providing models of exemplary work is a helpful resource for students to clearly understand what they are being asked to produce. I find it important to allow ample time for online students with busy schedules to successfully collaborate than I do when teaching on-campus courses. In Vanderbilt University’s guide entitled “Group Work: Using Cooperative Learning Groups Effectively,” Cynthia J. Brame and Rachel Biel offer helpful recommendations for structuring group work and making it effective that are transferable to the online classroom.

Informal Student-Initiated Contact

In addition to course-related collaborations and interactions, high-quality online courses provide spaces for unstructured student-initiated social contact with their peers. I’ve attempted implementing Canvas Discussions and Flipgrid for this purpose, but I have experienced the most success with Pronto.

Pronto logo

Pronto is the social space for students to connect more organically as they communicate through modalities they are already familiar with: text chats, GIFs, emojis, and live video. In my whole-class thread, students are asking questions, making clarifications, troubleshooting technology, and supporting one another on assignments. With Pronto, students have the ability to form their own groups, such as study groups or project teams, and it makes private or direct text exchanges possible between study buddies or friends.

Conclusion

Connections and relationships do not form as organically online as they do on campus. However, the formation of strong relationships between students and a robust classroom community is possible to achieve from a distance. Incorporating both formal and informal student-to-student interaction opportunities to establish trust and foster a social presence online is a humanizing, equity-minded, and culturally responsive pedagogical practice that addresses educational inequities and increases minoritized students’ success.

How will you design engaging asynchronous student-to-student interaction in your online courses?

Dialing Up the Quality & Inclusivity of Live Online Classes

I already knew long lecture videos are a bad way to fill an hour of synchronous instruction, but this course showed very specifically how to break things up into manageable segments of interaction, instruction, and active *participatory* learning regardless of camera-on status!
– Cynthia Hamlett, Distance Education Faculty Lead, Crafton Hills College

For decades, asynchronous online courses have been the gold standard for increasing access to higher education for students who have traditionally been left out. Prior to COVID, 28% of California Community College's 2.2 million students took at least one online course (CCC Chancellor's Office, 2017). But we know that access does not equal quality. In fact, known equity gaps in face-to-face courses have been exacerbated by online courses. To improve this problem, a system and institutional commitment to providing high-quality professional development in online course design and teaching is paramount.

Every teaching modality presents both opportunities and challenges for faculty and students. When COVID surfaced one year ago, faculty across the nation scanned their digital toolkits and recognized that videoconferencing could provide an option for a digital classroom environment. As classrooms were shutdown, Zooming became part of teaching vernacular and the inequities that synchronous online instruction created for students quickly began to be recognized. Karen Costa's powerful piece, Cameras Be Damned, opened our eyes to how enabling a webcam can be a trauma trigger for students, as well as faculty. Megan Corieri, a California community college student, shared this advice with faculty in Spring 2020 article, "There have been many times that I have had to shut my camera off in class, have a good cry, and come back. We are living through unprecedented times, and now more than ever it is important to have empathy, kindness, and patience." While video conference serves as a helpful scaffold for many, it comes with a high price for others. Zoom can place an extra tax on one's already strained mental health, not to mention the inequities associated with device ownership and network access. Today, community college educators recognize the need to support the whole student more than ever.

New Course: Introduction to Live Online Teaching & Learning

an tablet showing the homepage of Intro to Live Online Teaching & Learning

This is precisely why professional development is critical to guide faculty through the twists and turns of our dynamic instructional landscape. This month, in response to this emerging need, CVC/@ONE introduced its newest professional development course, Introduction to Live Online Teaching & Learning, a 2-week, facilitated course available to California Community College faculty and staff at the low cost of $45 with the option to receive one continuing education unit for an additional fee.

In the course, participants are immersed in the role of a student as they experience instruction that models the effective use of Canvas and Zoom to support learning at a distance. Participants work independently and in small group Zoom "huddles" to learn how to design and teach effective, inclusive live sessions with an ice breaker to check the emotional pulse of students or help them make connections with peers, direct instruction using screensharing, and active learning techniques using chat, polling, breakout rooms, and external tools like Google Docs, Slides, and Jamboard. Participants also engage in live class sessions in the role of "students" that model inclusive instructional practices. In one session, they participate in a lesson in empathy that requires them to complete a collaborative activity in a Zoom breakout room while attending from a smartphone. In the United States, Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to be smartphone dependent. When teaching at an open-access institution, teaching practices must be mobile-friendly to avoid perpetuating equity gaps.

Upon completion of the course, participants receive a digital badge that verifies their new skills. The two sections we scheduled for the spring are full ... but don't worry. We'll be offering more sections of the course this summer!

Adopt the Course!

Like all of CVC/@ONE's other professional development courses, we have shared our new Intro to Live Online Teaching & Learning course in the Canvas Commons with a CC-BY license, making it simple for your college to adopt, adapt, and offer the course locally for your faculty. To ensure the quality of your own local PD, we strongly advise that the local facilitator of an adopted course complete the course with us first. In your re-use of the course materials, please attribute California Community Colleges | California Virtual College. Sharing really is caring!

To adopt the new Live Online Teaching & Learning Course, go to the Canvas Commons and search for "CVC Adoptable." That will lead you to all of our adoptable courses.

If there's one thing we've learned from COVID, it is that effective, inclusive design and teaching are central to serving the needs of all students ... regardless of the modality of instruction.

We'd like to extend a special thank you to Francine Van Meter of Cabrillo College who contributed her expertise to the development of this new course. Francine will be retiring from our system in May and has left a tremendous legacy in distance education. You will be missed, Francine!

Conducting an Online Course Cultural Curriculum Audit: Steps Toward Student Equity and Success

What is a Cultural Curriculum Audit?

Long Beach City College (LBCC) facilitates numerous student equity initiatives for basic needs, student services, and access, just to name a few. Academically, however, we were not student-ready based on multiple measures. Namely, in Spring 2018, LBCC was ranked 113th out of 114 California Community Colleges for course-level student success. Our students of color experienced the greatest obligation gaps in terms of course-level success, retention, and transfer; these gaps were exacerbated in our online classes. 

Clearly a change was in order.

In response, LBCC began a collective effort between Student Equity, Curriculum, Faculty Professional Development, Academic Senate, Administration, Institutional Effectiveness, and Guided Pathways. Our Vice President of Academic Affairs has also been involved since the beginning, and continues to support the faculty-led project. We developed a training program that would invite full-time and part-time faculty to redesign their courses for student equity and success. This includes an examination of course-level student success data, revisions of syllabi, reviewing the Course Outline of Record through an equity lens, and creating culturally relevant curricula.

By Summer 2019, 30 faculty gathered on campus for the inaugural Cultural Curriculum Audit (CCA). This was a three-day intensive workshop that included guest speakers, presentations, discussions, and a 100+ page workbook. The program was so successful, it was repeated in Winter 2020 with a larger cohort.

LBCC faculty seated at round desks, participating in a check-in session.

With the pandemic-induced campus closure in March 2020, we modified our CCA so as to not lose momentum. We devoted Spring 2020 to building a robust online program for equitable online teaching. In Summer 2020, we offered a three-week audit using a blended model of synchronous Zoom meetings and asynchronous Canvas learning. Feedback was so positive that we facilitated the fourth iteration of the CCA in Winter 2021, which welcomed faculty leaders from other California Community Colleges and Long Beach Unified School District, our K-12 partner. 

What Do We Do in the Audit?

The three-week Online Course CCA is a pragmatic experience. We merge elements of the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric with our dynamic set of equity precepts (e.g. Welcome our students, build Partnerships in our classes, Demystify college processes, etc.). Content draws from the growing body of research, literature, and presentations specific to student equity and online teaching. 

Each week has two 90-minute Zoom meetings featuring peer presentations, discussions, and breakout activities. Our asynchronous content includes Pages with multimedia presentations, Discussions, Assignments, and feedback surveys. The CCA is divided into three broad modules of teaching:

Module 1: Student Equity in the Online Context

This first week includes an overview of student equity, confidential distribution of course-level success data to participants, and the application of welcoming practices to our online classrooms. The three main content areas include:

  1. Student Equity Online: An overview of equity, distinction of equity from equality, student success data, and recent survey results that inform the student experience at LBCC.
  2. Equity Precepts and Protocols: The introduction of equity-minded course redesign practices, and how they can be applied to our syllabi, Canvas Home Pages, and other parts of our classes.
  3. The Welcoming Online Classroom: A walkthrough of practices that humanize our web classrooms, and concrete steps we can take to make students feel more welcome in the online learning space.

The week 1 assignment tasks participants to create an equity-minded class orientation module which employs the protocols in part 2 above. And finally, the discussion forum has participants peruse a mock Canvas course and apply a campus space review that we have adopted from the USC Center for Urban Education and modified for online courses. 

Module 2: Equitable Content and Communication

Week 2 features explorations of short and long-term steps toward student equity online. The three content areas are as follows:

  1. Active Online Learning: We present a curated list of 85 Online Active Learning Strategies, emphasizing that such activities engage our students more effectively than traditional summative assessments. 
  2. Effective and Intrusive Communication: Drawing from Dr. Frank Harris III and Dr. Luke Wood, we blend principles from the CVC-OEI Rubric Part B: Interaction, with the practice of intrusive communication--a proactive approach to reach our students.
  3. Culturally Relevant Curriculum: We encourage a critical examination of the Course Outline of Record in addition to rethinking class content, examples, images, language use, and others to be more culturally relevant. 

The week 2 assignment asks participants to respond to a mock email from a struggling student, while identifying their application of principles above. The discussion forum requires participants to locate an accessible and culturally relevant video clip, embed it in the forum, and describe how it fits in their class.

Module 3: Equitable Assessment and Accessibility

The final week explores our assignments, assessments, and accessibility, leaving participants with some next steps once the CCA has concluded.

  1. Equitable Assignments/Assessments: Participants take self-assessments that inform their teaching style, read literature that speaks to this style (e.g. Becoming the Warm Demander), and apply the Transparent Assignment Template to their online classes.
  2. Accessibility and Universal Design: Drawing heavily from the CVC-OEI Rubric, Part D, we affirm that Universal Design is good design. Participants learn about the Ally Accessibility Checker as well as LBCC-specific services for serving our students with disabilities.
  3. Moving forward: A summation of practices for additional implementation and reflection, as well as references to encourage continued learning.

The last assignment has participants read, “The Wise Feedback Model,” and write a self-reflective piece on how they employ feedback in online classes. Our final discussion forum is a space for participants to share some next steps for redesigning their online courses for student equity based on what they have learned.

Final Module: Deliverables

Once the Online CCA is complete, participants have additional time to put their skills and practices to work in their online courses. In order to receive a stipend for the audit, we ask them to submit the following deliverables as evidence of their applications:

  1. Equitized Syllabus: A revised course syllabus with substantive changes to some or all of the following aspects of the course: course content (readings, topics, etc), classroom activities, assignments, grading structure, language, class policies.
  2. Welcoming HomePage: A “front page” in your Canvas course that students see as soon as they log in, which will contain redesigned formatting, content, and images.
  3. Canvas Content Page: A new or updated “Page” in Canvas with changes to formatting, content, images, hyperlinks, etc. This page may be: Learning content, Course Success/Resource Page, or Weekly Introductions.
  4. Transparent Assignments: One or more new or revised assignments using the transparent assignment template.
  5. Active Learning Activities: An explanation of two or more newly designed active learning activities (synchronous or asynchronous)
  6. Highlights Powerpoint: A short powerpoint presentation highlighting the changes you made to your class.
    1. Sharing with the Campus: Participants should be willing to share their curriculum audit work at other venues such as the Curriculum Committee, Academic Senate, or Flex events.

Outcomes and Next Steps

Our CCA Leadership Team solicits participant feedback to continue improving the program. In addition, we monitor the initial cohort’s course-level student success data over time. Early findings show a 9% course-level success rate increase for LBCC Black, LatinX, and Pacific Islander students. However, equity gaps still persist, so we endeavor to revise, innovate, and train.​

We will continue offering the CCA. Many of our participants have expressed a desire for an “Audit 2.0” so they can continue this type of professional development. While there are many things that need to happen to make the CCA successful, there are two priorities that are paramount:

  1. Build a strong and cohesive leadership team. Every audit has featured at least two Lead Facilitators with an advisory group to support from start to finish. 
  2. Equity work is dynamic, and a readiness to adjust our methods, check ourselves, own our mistakes and work to ameliorate them is essential. 

Lastly, we hope to invite faculty leaders from other colleges to join us in this effort, so they can create comparable programs for their institutions. You are welcome to complete our interest form here to learn more: Long Beach City College Cultural Curriculum Audit Interest Form

A Principled Online Teaching Journey: Part 1

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

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

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

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

First, as a student in online learning

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

@ONE course facilitators walk the talk

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

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

Principles before practice

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

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

Let’s break them down 

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

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

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

Backwards was better

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

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

Automaticity is not enough

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

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

Principles as lifelong goals

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

Learning is personal and social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide

Make your own copy.

Learning is a social process. That's why active learning has long been touted as an exemplary instructional approach for college classes -- whether they're taught in a traditional classroom or online. It's also why student-student interactions are part of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric and are now part of the Title 5 Education Code for California Community College Distance Education courses (Instructor Contact, Section 55204). Peer-to-peer interaction is foundational to developing a sense of community in your online courses. But meaningful interactions don't just happen; they are fostered through effective course design and teaching.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio have shown that thinking and feeling are not distinct processes. Rather, feelings directly impact human reasoning and behavior. Thinking and feeling are inseparable from one another. And if you apply that to the way you teach, you'll notice big shifts in your students' engagement. Research shows that online classes can make some students feel more isolated, which can further exacerbate the feelings of stress and marginalization that many community college students experience. Throughout their lives, many of our students have been informed through the media and other messages that they're not cut out for college. It's your job to let them know, "I believe in you. You've got this." Just like in your face-to-face classes, validating your online students and establishing that your class is a safe place are the first steps to establishing a sense of belonging for your students (Rendón, 1994).

Providing low-stake opportunities that enable students to draw upon the wealth of experiences they bring to your class is also key. Doing so demonstrates that you value your students' diverse experiences and perspectives, as noted in the Peralta Equity Rubric. As students share what's meaningful to themselves, they will feel more included in your class and will also recognize things they have in common with their peers. When names on a screen begin to transform into human beings with rich stories, your class is on its way to becoming a community.

To support you in your efforts to foster student-student interactions and build community in your online courses, CVC-OEI/@ONE has developed a Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide, which you'll find embedded at the top of this page. We've shared the guide with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license and provided it in Google Slides format to make it easy for you to copy, adapt, and re-use as you'd like. In the guide, you'll find:

Leave a comment below to let us know what you think and how you plan to use the guide or share your favorite strategy for fostering meaningful interaction in your online course.

Present at Can•Innovate 2019 - no travel required!

Can-Innovate brought to you by the CVC-OEI. Free Online Conference. Submit Your Proposal by August 20th.
Fabiola Torrres' 2018 presentation projected on a screen in a campus viewing room.
Fabiola Torres presenting online at Can•Innovate 2018.

Can•Innovate 2019 is scheduled for October 25, 2019, and we're ready to make this year's event bigger and better than last year but we need your help! Can•Innovate, a free, one-day conference supporting faculty and staff at the 114 California Community Colleges that use Canvas (registration is also open to the general public). Last year, more than 1,100 people joined in for a collaborative day of sharing and learning. Participants have the option to attend online from anywhere or on-campus from a group viewing room so mark your calendar today and start preparing your proposal.

The Call for Proposals for Can•Innovate is now open -- here's your chance to reach inside your bag of tricks and share a course design or teaching practice in a brief Lightning Round or a more detailed Share Showcase. All sessions are delivered online so there's no need for travel funding -- or a suitcase! Take a peek at last year's program for a little inspiration.

Get tips for writing a great proposal.

Announcing our Keynote Speaker

Kona Jones Bio Pic

Kona Jones, Director of Online Learning at Richland Community College will kick off our program with an inspirational presentation, Integrating Compassion into Your Teaching. Kona is responsible for the development of faculty and student technology training materials, provides instructional design support to faculty, oversees the assessment of online courses, and facilitates faculty professional development. Kona loves teaching and is an adjunct instructor of statistics and developmental psychology. Her passion is student success and in 2019 she was awarded Adjunct Faculty of the Year. Kona is also a Canvas Coach and Canvassador, contributing extensively in the online Canvas Community and elsewhere.

Registration will open in September when the full program is announced. If you have any questions about Can•Innovate, let us know!

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Recap of CCC Digital Learning Day 2019

CCC Digital Learning Day 2-28-19

One year ago, CVC-OEI/@ONE held our first free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day. On February 28, 2019, this event was held for a second time. Our move away from individual webinars to full day, online conferences has yielded many benefits, summarized here.

CCC Digital Learning Day (CCCDLDay) 2019 was the California Community College's celebration of Digital Learning Day, an international educational event comprised of pop-up programs around the world. Our program, guided by a systemwide advisory committee, was designed around the theme of exploring digital literacies across the curriculum. CCCDLDay is distinct from our annual fall online conference, Can•Innovate, which focuses on supporting the use of Canvas across the California Community College system. For CCCDLDay, we aim to bring educators into a mindful consideration of the many opportunities and challenges that digital learning brings to our mission to prepare students for a successful life. This year, the program was designed to be provocative and raise questions that don't always have answers. And, like all of our conferences, we strived to ensure student voices remained at the center of our inquiry.

The Highlights

The 2019 program included 15 speakers including a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting Our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. A full day of sessions followed, featuring the teaching and learning innovations of CCC faculty and students, including an inspirational student panel moderated by professor Fabiola Torres from Glendale Community College. Matt Mooney, History Professor at Santa Barbara Community College, presented with his former online student, Amber Greene. In Making Creativity SPARKle, the two reflected on the impact of Matt's choice to transform a summative assessment in the course into a student-generated video about a historical topic. Donna Caldwell, from Adobe, shared a demo of Adobe Spark, providing attendees with the how-to knowledge for Matt's innovative practice. Librarians, Cynthia Orozco of East Los Angeles College and Aloha Sargent of Cabrillo College, examined the need for information literacy to be embedded in Canvas courses and shared examples of open educational resources available for use in Canvas. The day wrapped up with two sessions that took us back outside of Canvas and invited participants to join in on "Create" challenges. Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep from Folsom Lake College demonstrated creative uses of Twitter that engage students in networked, global learning. Last, but not least, Liz du Plessis from Barstow Community College and the California Online Community College presented alongside Mayra Avila, one of Liz's online students, and shared how she uses Google Maps to foster collaborative, contextual learning of historical content -- and everyone in the audience had a chance to drop their own pin on a map too. Search the Canvas Commons with "CCCDLDay" and discover a few golden nuggets shared during the day!

The Growth

We saw significant growth from last year in many areas.

Download the full CCCDLDay 2019 report.

Thank you for making CCC Digital Learning Day a success. Mark your calendars for Can•Innovate, our next free online conference, on Friday, October 25, 2019. The Call for Proposals opens next week!

View the CCCDLDay archives!

Register Now for CCC Digital Learning Day: Free, Online Conference

In October, more than 1,100 educators across California's community colleges and beyond joined us for Can•Innovate. We are happy to announce that our next free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day is now open for registration!

#CCCDLDay, brought to you by CVC-OEI/@ONE, is the California Community College's contribution to the national Digital Learning Day effort. Our theme for 2019 is Exploring Digital Literacies Across the Curriculum. The program has been crafted to engage you and your peers in a day of experimentation and creation, as we rethink and refocus our traditional notions of literacy and imagine how we might teach new digital literacies in all disciplines. You'll see teaching innovations that use Adobe Spark Video, Twitter, and Google Maps and Tour Builder to assess student learning, make relevant connections with content, and engage students in meaningful dialogue. Our day also includes a session led by librarians about information literacy and 3 sessions that include student speakers (hooray!).

Register for one or two sessions or join us for the entire day -- from anywhere. All sessions are delivered online in Zoom so you don't have to worry about traveling!

Program Overview

Our event kicks off on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 9am PT with a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the popular podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University.

The remainder of our morning program includes two sessions that will take you on a deep dive of Adobe Spark Video, a free, easy-to-use video creation tool. At 10:00 Matt Mooney, faculty at Santa Barbara Community College, will join us with one of his students, Amber Greene, to share how he is using Spark Video to transform his tests from drab to dazzle! After Matt and Amber's session, you'll have the opportunity to see a demo of Adobe Spark Video by Donna Caldwell, from Adobe Education. Donna will entice you to participate in our CCCDLDay Create Challenge too. Join in for a chance to win a cool prize from Adobe! We've intentionally left the lunch hour open to encourage you to dabble with Adobe Spark Video and get started on your video creation.

Our afternoon program kicks off with a student panel at 1pm, hosted by Fabiola Torres from Glendale College. Student panels are always the highlight of any event so we're considering this a must attend session for everyone! At 2pm, we're joined by Cynthia Mari Orozco, from East Los Angeles College, and Aloha Sargent, of Cabrillo College, two librarians who will present, Scaffolding Information Literacy in Canvas.

Our final two presentations feature more teaching and learning innovations and one more student too! At 3pm, Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep of Folsom Lake College will showcase how they are each using Twitter for Networked Global Learning. Their examples will redefine formative assessment as you know it and illuminate a whole new way to think about hashtags and brief messages. Finally, at 4pm, Liz du Plessis, from Barstow College and the California Online College, and her student, Mayra Avila, will be our guides for Mapping Content and Contexts with My Maps and Tour Builder by Google. That's right! Google Maps can do a lot more than help you get to your next destination. It can also foster real-world connections in your courses.

Excited? We are too. Share your excitement by sending a Tweet with the #CCCDLDay hashtag.

If your college is not yet hosting an on-campus viewing room for CCC Digital Learning Day, sign up now! Viewing sessions and creating content with your peers is an awesome way to learn and grow. But if you aren't on campus, no worries. #CCCDLDay is designed to support you no matter where you are.

View the Program and Register!

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?

""

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.

From Reluctant to Ready: The Power of Support for New Online Teachers

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I’ve been teaching in the classroom full-time for 17 years and I feel things are shifting.  One of the classes I love to teach has had an enrollment drop as more online classes have been added.   I’ve heard many colleagues over the years complain about their online students and how they aren’t prepared.  I’ve also had colleagues who started teaching online years ago and set up their courses to do the absolute minimal.  For me, part of the joy of teaching is being with people and watching my students’ eyes light up when they get “it.”  These are some of the reasons why I really didn’t think online teaching would ever be for me.

Adapting to Change

I feel certain the pendulum will at some point swing back to students wanting to be in the classroom more than online, but I’m not sure when that will happen.  I do know that online provides opportunities for many students who can’t be in a traditional classroom and I love the idea of making classes accessible to them.  The bottom line is I knew if I didn’t jump into online teaching now then I was closing the door to learning a different style of teaching.  With a desire to teach for another 17 years, I thought it was too soon to not change with the times.

It’s accurate to put me in the “reluctant online teacher” category.  I am tired of the grind of the commute which continues to get worse every year and I see how teaching online will reduce the hours in my car.  Therefore, I decided I was going to give online teaching a real chance.  If I was going to take the plunge to build an online course I was going to make THE BEST course I possibly could, and I was going to do it the right way the first time.

Finding Support with the Online Education Initiative

My college is a member of the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (OEI). As a faculty of an OEI college, I have the opportunity to teach online courses through the Course Exchange, which reserves a specified number of spots in my class to students at other CA community colleges. In order to be in the Course Exchange, however, I first needed to design my course and align it with the OEI Course Design Rubric. I thought if my course could get approval for the Course Exchange, then I would never have to worry about enrollment for my online course.

Therefore, I signed up for the OEI Course Design Academy online information meeting.  During the call, it was evident to me that many of the faculty in attendance had a long way to go before we would be ready for the Course Exchange.  More than a handful of us on the call had never taught an online class. To get started, we needed to learn how to develop a course before even thinking about the Course Exchange.  So I decided to enroll in an @ONE’s Online Teaching and Design (OTD), a 12-week, online course, to learn the ins and outs of online course design and teaching.

I took this course as if my life depended on it.  At about week 7 of the course, I submitted my online course for a peer review, which was the first step in getting my course in the Course Exchange.  I worked hard to develop a curriculum (I hadn’t taught this particular course in many years and I decided to build the content myself versus use a textbook that would cost the students a lot of money) and setup my Canvas pages. I used all the information I had learned so far in my OTD course and put it into my own course.  I was anxious to hear back from the OEI course review team.  A colleague of mine who already had a course in the Course Exchange told me not to worry. I was told that I would get a long list of things that still need to be done with my course, but the instructional designer would help me through it.

Invaluable Peer Feedback

The feedback from the review team, comprised of Aloha Sargent, a faculty member from Cabrillo College and @ONE course facilitator, and Helen Graves, an instructional designer with @ONE and the OEI, was so incredibly encouraging that it motivated me to make the changes.  Naively, I didn’t realize how much really needed to get done.  However, once I started the process, I knew I really was developing the best course I possibly could.  Helen Graves, my instructional designer, could not have been more supportive, encouraging, thoughtful or helpful.

Helen and I had a weekly one hour Zoom conference.  Without her, I cannot imagine how I would have developed a course I would be so proud of.  She took a tremendous amount of time going through my course with me and explaining how to make it accessible for all kinds of learners.  Along the way, she taught me how to use html code to do some very cool things in Canvas and help chunk the information into bite size bits.  As a result, my content was more clear and could be understood by more learners. Helen was incredibly patient and even made quick little videos during the week to show me how to do various things within my modules.  At times, she referred to her “A Team” colleagues who would magically and mysteriously help me improve my course’s 508 accessibility compliance.  I liked to imagine Mr. T behind the scenes helping with accessibility, but I think the real hero on the A Team for my course was Marisa McNees.

I’m Ready

Because of the OEI Course Exchange Process, I was able to make a course that I’m excited to teach. I am confident that I will have the chance to build a community and take care of my students in an online setting.  I imagine that it will be fulfilling for my students and for me.  I’m extremely appreciative of the instructional design and accessibility support available to me through the OEI , so I could continue to grow as a teacher.  This process not only made my online course better, it made me reevaluate how I share information in my face-to-face course and make it better, as well.  In the end, it felt like an indulgence to have someone take the time to give considered and thoughtful feedback and be as excited as me about the course I built.

 

 

You Had Me At Hello


Course HomepageRecently, I completed the @ONE course, Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning, that was facilitated by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, @ONE’s Faculty Mentor, Digital Innovation. From the moment I logged in to the course, I knew that something drastic was about to change for me. The course homepage had a .gif of Michelle waving and smiling, a banner with colorful and inviting colors, and a greeting that made it seem like someone was talking directly to me. How, I wondered, can I do that? How can I design a homepage so my students feel as welcome and engaged as I did?

It turns out, this was only the beginning. When I first enrolled in this class, I felt a lot of pride about the way I conduct my online classes. I've been complimented in the past for the videos I create to explain essay prompts and welcome students into the class. However, as soon as I logged into our Humanizing course and began exploring, I was amazed by how much I still had left to learn.

Structure

The course started with a helpful orientation module enhanced with 3 instructor-made videos, several images, a Flipgrid assignment, a Google Form, an infographic, Canvas tutorial videos, and consistent, beautiful banners throughout. Naturally, I compared this to the orientation materials that I use, and I discovered that I’m really only using a couple of content pages that introduce students to Canvas. Never had I considered putting an entire module together to get students oriented with the course, Canvas, and policies! Essentially, I learned how I can chunk my traditional syllabus into Canvas Pages and design it into an orientation module! This approach allows students to read through the module in small pieces rather than read, say, a 14-page syllabus!

Sparkly New Toys!

In the Humanizing course,  I was also introduced to a ton of new tools to use in Canvas that can help to humanize us as the instructors and our students as well.

Flipgrid, which is like a video discussion board, was a tool that I felt a little timid about using at first. However, after watching my colleagues post their video responses, I realized it was very similar to having an in-class discussion. As someone who is particularly shy in a student setting, I can empathize with my students who may feel the same way. However, once I got past simply recording my video and talking to the camera, it was smooth sailing!Brianna on Flipgrid

The tool asked me to take a quick photo of myself and add a sticker or two to create picture that would represent my comment. Being able to customize the picture allows for students to have creative license that a text-based discussion simply can’t provide in the same way. I then simply  submitted my recording and could see a grid of all the other participants who had posted their videos. All of the pictures of participants were arranged in a checkerboard grid, so I could become familiar with my peers’ names and faces. This is something that I had never known how to do in an online setting.

After working with Flipgrid for a couple weeks, I used it to create a "Checking In" assignment in my current online class, and my students loved it! I will definitely be integrating Flipgrid on a more regular basis in my classes, especially in the first week as an icebreaker.

Adobe Spark is another tool that has completely changed the way I conceptualize my online teaching. Adobe Spark is free and includes three separate, but equally useful and easy-to-use, tools for digital storytelling: Video, Page, and Post. Not only will I be using the Post and Video tools to introduce course concepts, but I will also be using Spark to integrate project-based learning in my classes. For example, this semester, students will be have the option to create multimedia reflections of an on-campus event as part of their final project using  Spark Video or Page

Last, I had heard of Canva before, but I had never thought to use it in the ways that Michelle did in her course. Canva is a free design tool that allows people to create flyers, resumes, invitations, and so much more. What I didn’t realize, however, is that, as online instructors, we can use the tool to create engaging banners, buttons, and YouTube video thumbnail images to enhance the design of the course. This, to me, is one of the best ways to truly humanize online learning: create a color palette for the course and design consistent banners that use the same color scheme. This creates cohesion in the course and allows students to intuitively follow the structure of the course while also being engaged by the beautiful and professional designs!

Equity

The tools have really made me realize how effectively they can reach, and more importantly, retain students of color and thus begin to reduce the equity gaps that are exacerbated by online classes. These  tools allow students to creatively and personally engage with the material in dynamic and intimate ways that contrast the sometimes cold experience of text-based discussion boards.Rather than simply reading text on a screen, the digital tools allow students to incorporate tone, facial expressions, and gestures, while simultaneously revealing the nuances of their identities as students and human beings. Additionally, by allowing students the creative space to use digital tools to express themselves, instructors and peers can more deeply empathize with each other. For example, in an Icebreaker, if a student discloses on Flipgrid that she is experiencing stress from her course load, work, and children at home, others can respond in a humanized way with an empathetic video.

I can't emphasize enough how much I am taking way from this @ONE course. I am thrilled to rework my online assignments and begin integrating these tools on a weekly basis. I'm even more enthusiastic to see how these changes will influence the dynamics in my courses and how many more of my students I will be able to retain!

If you are looking for a way to make your online class more warm, inviting, and community-oriented, I highly recommend Humanizing Online Learning. You’ll be engaged and learn ways to reach your students that are dynamic, creative, and authentic. You’ll have your students at “hello.”

Learn more about Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning.