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!

An Equitable Ice Breaker Using Google Maps

Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!

In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and add a photo of that location. As you will see, the map transforms into a contextual representation of the students’ backgrounds, inviting them to share meaningful experiences.

If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.

Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!

Link, Link. Who's Got the (properly formatted) Link?

Links are how your students navigate your course content. While it might seem like a picayune matter, knowing how to set links up properly will have a pretty big impact on how quickly and easily students can start interacting with all the great content in your course (and it’ll increase your Canvas Ninja factor considerably!).

NOTE: This episode was updated in January '22 to reflect the new rich content editor.

[Here's a resource with examples of good and bad descriptive link text.]

Finding Your Regional Distance Education Community

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What if you could meet regularly with peers from neighboring community colleges to share solutions and ideas about online education?  For faculty and staff at California community colleges located in southern border counties, this wish has come true.

The San Diego/ Imperial County Community College Association (SDICCCA) has an Instructional Services subcommittee on Distance Education that was founded in late 2012.  The subcommittee is made up of Distance Education representatives from nine community colleges in the San Diego and Imperial County area.  SDICCA members meet at the San Diego Community College District offices on the first Friday of each month. Together, we discuss and provide leadership on DE issues such as practices for supporting and preparing faculty and students, strategies for improving student retention and success, as well as effective practices for meeting accreditation requirements and state/national distance education regulations.

Finding My Community 

As the new DE Coordinator for Palomar College, I just started attending these SDICCA meetings this year and I have learned so much from the other long-time members of the group.  For example, since community colleges are making compliance with accessibility laws and regulations a big priority this year, we have explored ideas for handling vendor software that is out of compliance.  Here are a problem and proposed solution that I have taken away from my experiences. Many mathematics instructors use MyMathLab in their online classes and, currently, MyMathLab does not meet the minimum acceptable standards for accessibility.  SDICCCA members shared with the group other software that may be substituted such as Knewton or MyOpenMath, which has some accessibility issues but not as many as MyMathLab.

In our last meeting, each college DE representative shared something about the various software packages they were using to support DE classes.  Together, we discovered:

In addition to discussions around key themes, members share concerns about DE issues, report back to each other on what is happening at the state level, and they give an annual presentation to administrators to help them understand the benefits of online education, as well as the challenges we confront in expanding this teaching modality.

I highly recommend that other regional community colleges form DE groups of their own.  The sharing of ideas, concerns, and technology with each other are extremely beneficial! 

Opening Doors to Support all Online Students

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The Current State of Support for Our Fully Online Students

If you haven’t done so already, take the time to pretend you are a fully online student and try to navigate the many tasks that students need to do on a regular basis. What do you find? Are the services available to our online population equitable to those that are available on-ground at their college campus? What is the web presence like of your college's critical student services?  Which students are utilizing the services and which students are not and why? These are the many questions that we must ask when evaluating our distance education programs. On my campus, online course offerings are the first to fill but in turn, they have inferior success rates than our on-ground courses. Many times these students find themselves staring at a closed door looking for support that is limited.

What Online Support Should Look Like

Online support should be equitable to services offered in person.  As an example, on my campus, we have a financial aid lab for students to get help with their FAFSA or navigating their online financial aid portal.  Is this same support available to our online student population? If not, how can we provide this resource to our online student population? Maybe the solution involves leveraging the staff that currently work in the financial aid lab but have them utilize Cranium Café to offer the same services remotely. Additionally, we offer many workshops on all topics on campus but nothing online except for the orientation.  What if we recorded all of our workshops and made them available online? Or better yet provide a distance option for students to participate remotely with our students that are on-ground.

Online Support Supports All Students

Online Mental Health (MH) services provide anonymity, creating a safe environment to receive services. Once a student has participated in MH services online they may be more likely to reach out for additional support in person. In addition to MH services, other support services like tutoring, other health center services, special resource center or other services may have a stigma attached to them and preclude students from seeking help in person where they may feel comfort in reaching out online.

Inclusivity

This means providing the tools and support services for all of our students regardless of their background or how they are taking their courses. Online students must also be included in all of our equity conversations.

With all the buzz around Guided Pathways, how are we implementing the concepts of the 4 pillars for our online students?  Online students also need to be able to enter the path easily, have clarity in their path, have the support to stay on their path and to also ensure their learning on the path.

Equitable Online Course Design: Canvas Mastery Paths and EdPuzzle

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

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

What Is Canvas Mastery Paths?

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

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

Practical Considerations for Online Remediation

Relevant Substance

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

Encouraging

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

Immediate Feedback

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

Advantages of EdPuzzle

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

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

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

Hand in Glove

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

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

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

Meaningful Discussions That Build Community Too

Do you wish your students would engage more meaningfully in your online discussions? If so, you might want to reconsider how you are designing your discussion prompts.  In this 7-minute video, Stacey Smith from Coastline College, shows how she designs discussion prompts that elicit real life examples from her students. Stacey's end-of-semester surveys show high student satisfaction levels with the discussions and a strong sense of community. 

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.