A course map is a visual representation of the ways in which your course instruction and assignments align with the learning objectives. Mapping your course allows you to identify where students are learning key concepts and skills, and to make decisions about formative and summative assessments. This Online Course Mapping Guide https://www.coursemapguide.com/ developed at UC San Diego, provides faculty with resources and templates for online course development, beginning with a curriculum analysis and resulting in a course map that displays the alignment of all components of a course.
Incorporating metacognitive practices into your class
Dr. Sandra McGuire https://faculty.lsu.edu/smcgui1/ is an expert in supporting faculty in helping students learn how to learn in their class. She argues that most students come to college underprepared. Specifically, she advocates for metacognitive equity, or closing the gap between students who use metacognition (effective thinking and learning strategies) and those who do not. (https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0516466a-bf01-4aff-a0ba-9c326f59d464/content). She argues that this the gap in metacognitive strategies contributes most to the persistent achievement gap and that all students must be taught how to learn. A 2017 Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-enroll-students-arent-prepared-higher-education/, shares “data from 911 two- and four-year colleges revealed that 96 percent of schools enrolled students who required remediation in the 2014-15 academic year, the most comprehensive recent numbers. At least 209 schools placed more than half of incoming students in at least one remedial course”.
Dr. McGuire counseled several students to have a back-up plan for medical school after failing an organic chemistry test in her course. She went through faculty professional development which encouraged her to incorporate metacognitive learning strategies into her teaching practice. The improvement she saw in students helped her come to the belief that most students do not know how to learn. She argues that in many cases, metacognitive learning was not a prerequisite for good grades in their previous educational experiences. “Many received As and Bs without the need to learn the subject matter in a great deal of depth”. An example she shares to illustrate this point is supporting a student who stated he had “valedictorian syndrome””, which he explained by stating, “Well, I was valedictorian of my high school class but I’m flunking everything at [college].”
If you think of these same students as scientists, she argues, “They’ve collected, interpreted and made predictions regarding data they have collected for all of their lives! If they skipped classes or barely opened their textbooks in previous educational experiences, yet successfully graduated in a top percentage of their class and ended up in college, we can understand that based on their personal “lab” experience, the same behaviors should result in the same success in college.”
This led her to the conclusion: It is often not a student’s lack of innate ability or talent, but rather a lack of effective learning strategies, that can make the difference in academic success. (Growth mindset)
What are the benefits of using metacognitive strategies in your classroom?
When instructors assist students to develop strong metacognitive abilities, students develop a deeper awareness of the learning process and gain control over their own learning. This leads to:
- enhanced personal capacity for self-regulation
- increased ability to manage one’s own motivation
- students becoming more independent learners.
Examples of metacognitive strategies you can incorporate into your course:
From Cornell University:
- Use a pre-class survey, homework assignment, polling questions in class, or a short reflective writing piece as a way for students to explore their existing knowledge about a topic.
- Ask students to prepare for class by reviewing the week’s syllabus topic and reading. Use the Canvas online quiz tool, in-class polling, or index cards to learn how students understand the goals for the class meeting, how they think they should prepare, and what they learned from the reading.
- Some potential questions:
- What is one question you still have about the reading?
- What is one thing you are curious about?
- How can you best prepare for class?
- What can you do in class to help yourself learn?
- Some potential questions:
Additional strategies include:
- Verbalize the thought processes used to consider, analyze and solve problems. This may be as simple as ‘thinking aloud’.
- Encourage students to ask themselves the following while studying or completing homework assignments:
- What should I do first?
- Is something confusing me?
- Could I explain this to someone else?
- Do I need help to understand this?
- Where did I go wrong?
- Does this relate to other situations or prior knowledge?
- How can I do it better?
In Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation (p. 85) (Available at IU libraries https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/18412847) Dr. McGuire provides details on how you can incorporate the following practices in your course:
- Previewing
- Preparing for active reading
- Paraphrasing
- Reading actively
- Using the textbook even if it is not required
- Going to class and taking notes by hand
- Doing homework without using solved examples as a guide
- Teaching material to a real or imagined audience
- Working in pairs or groups
- Creating practice exams
Quick Tip – AI Prompts for Teaching
Dr. Cynthia Alby developed the resource “Cut and Paste AI Prompts” for instructors. This comprehensive guide intends to provide instructors not only with prompts, but techniques to effectively experiment with various AI tools specific to various practices of teaching, such as course design, assessment development, and lesson planning. As Dr. Alby notes, “I have found that providing instructors with prompts they can cut and paste into AI made them more comfortable, more quickly with experimenting. I also discovered that when I can help someone experiment with AI for an hour or so, their anxiety levels tend to drop, and they begin to see it less like a threat and more like a tool.“
Using video in your course
There are several ways that you can use videos in your course, regardless of modality:
- Introduce a class or unit: Create pre-lecture videos for students to watch prior to attending class. This provides students with an initial exposure to the content, sparks interest, and improves students’ understanding. The visuals in your video can help them connect with the material.
- Building background knowledge on a topic: We know that students learn best when they take in information via multiple modalities—through reading, listening to the instructor’s oral explanations, hands on activities and viewing visual media. Images and videos support the learning of new content, concepts, and ideas. (Adapted from Educause)
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Emphasize a Point with Video:Identify key learning goals or areas where students have difficulty understanding and create a short microlecture to support students. These can be used for flipped classroom application (with active learning, clickers, orTopHatin class to review and extend video content) or for independent student review. You can use video as a tool to enhance the class discussion and make whatever you’re teaching that much more accessible to your diverse body of learners. Keep these videos focused by only discussing the learning goal. Avoid adding fun facts or informati9n not directly related to the topic. Click here for resources related to creating microlectures.
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Demonstrate Examples: Instead of providing students with an answer key to a problem, create a video (with narration) working out the solution step-by-step. To encourage students to watch the video, work out only part of the problem in the video and have students complete the rest and submit it online as a no or low-stakes assignment or quiz (e.g. through Canvas). PlayPosit allows you to quickly integrate questions into your quizzes so you can get a sense of how well students understand the problems. It also allows students to receive immediate feedback. Click here for resources related to creating PlayPosit. Quick Check in Canvas also allows for quick inline low-stakes assessments in Canvas (Adapted from University of British Columbia)
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Interview with an Expert: Record interviews with experts in the discipline, providing examples and explaining concepts relevant to what is being covered in class. This enriches students’ learning by allowing them to hear what other experts have to say about a particular topic. (Adapted From University of British Columbia)
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Dispel misconceptions – A video that explicitly dispels common misconceptions about a topic can help students achieve conceptual change. This can be as simple as a video that starts with ‘you might think that… but you’d be wrong’. Simply presenting facts can reinforce students’ incorrect assumptions. Indeed, deliberately using a video that presents incorrect information then discussing these mistakes can also be an effective way of handling student misconceptions at the start of a unit. (from Monash University)
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Make video part of a larger homework assignment. Faizan Zubair and Mary Keithly are each part of the BOLD Fellows program at Vanderbilt University, in which graduate students develop online learning materials for incorporation into a faculty mentor’s course. Faizan developed videos on that were embedded in a larger homework assignment in Paul Laibinis’ Chemical Engineering class and found that students valued the videos and that the videos improved students’ understanding of difficult concepts when compared to a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework. Mary worked with Kathy Friedman to develop videos and follow-up questions to serve as pre-class preparation in a genetics class. Although there was no apparent change to learning outcomes in the class, students valued the videos and post-video questions as learning tools and thought that they were effective for promoting student understanding.(from Vanderbilt University)
CITL has created this resource guide related to producing videos for courses.
Getting to Know Your Students
Jennie Carr, an Associate Professor at Bridgewater College, explains that researchers have found “strong positive correlations between [faculty] building relationships and rapport with students and academic achievement, attendance, student interest, motivation, empowerment, self-efficacy student attention, classroom behaviors and interactions (Benson, Cohen, Buskist, 2005, Houser & Frymier, 2009, Kozanitis, Desbiens, Chouinard, 2007; Myers, Goldman, Atkinson, Ball, Carton, Tindage & Anderson, 2016)”. Some ways you can develop connections with students in the first few weeks of class are listed below. Some techniques work better for smaller (n<60) classrooms while others work well with all class sizes. As the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon notes: “Even in large lecture classes, it is possible to get to know a conspicuous number of your students, a few at a time. For students, it’s the effort that counts”. Some of these tips I have shared before, however, I have added some new insights and additional information that may be helpful (hopefully).
Learning Student Names:
Name Coach: https://kb.iu.edu/d/appu – Assign students the task of recording their name and writing the phonetic pronunciation of their name. Name Coach slows down the recording to help you hear how they pronounce their names. This will help you to listen to their names and learn how to pronounce their names correctly. Use Name Tents – If seating allows space for students to have name tents, ask students to write their names in large letters on both sides of a folded 5 x 8 index card and to keep this card on their desks/tables for the first few classes. The Canvas Roster: https://kb.iu.edu/d/bffz is available in the People menu of the Canvas course to all Canvas roles except Observer, displays the name, email address, role, photo, and NameCoach recording (if available) for each member of the course. Using the Photo Roster tool, you can change the page or print layout; search and filter the list of course members; group by role, section, or group; and print or export the current view. Official IU photos and associated features are only available to instructors in SIS courses. The roster has a feature that allows you to print out an attendance sheet. You can use that sheet to make annotations that will help you remember your students’ names. The Eberly Center suggests taking a few extra seconds for each student to identify their most 1-2 noticeable traits. Be sure to include ways of pronouncing names that are unfamiliar to you.
Introduce Yourself
Consider sharing information with students beyond your name and the name of the course you’re teaching. Vanderbilt University suggests one of the following:
- Personal biography: your place of birth, family history, educational history, hobbies, sport and recreational interests, how long you have been at the university, and what your plans are for the future.
- Educational biography: how you came to specialize in your chosen field, a description of your specific area of expertise, your current projects, and your future plans.
- Teaching biography: how long have you taught, how many subjects/classes have you taught, what level of class you normally teach, what you enjoy about being in the classroom, what do you learn from your students, and what you expect to teach in the future.
Have a seating plan
When students arrive in your class, let them sit where they want, and then ask them to remain in those seats for at least two weeks. Create a seating chart for the room and have students fill in their names on the seating chart. Refer to the chart as you conduct the course. This reference will allow you to learn names according to placement in the classroom. (University of Lethbridge)
Icebreakers: The Center for Teaching and Learning at IU-Indy https://ctl.iupui.edu/Resources/Preparing-to-Teach/Using-Ice-Breakers reminds us to use icebreakers as a way of getting acquainted with students and establish classroom community on the first day of class. However, you can use small icebreakers beyond the first few weeks of class to help build rapport. Top Hat https://app.teaching.iu.edu/tools/top-hat provides a list of icebreakers that can be used in various contexts, including course- or assignment-specific icebreakers https://tophat.com/blog/classroom-icebreakers/
Having One on One or Small Group Meetings/Office Hours – Carr (2020) recommends setting up 1:1 or small group appointments to meet with students during the first few weeks of class. “Meaningful interactions with students outside of classes is listed by the National Survey of Student Engagement as a high-impact educational practice (NSSE, 2017). Approximately 95% of my students attend. During the 1:1 meet and greet meeting, my primary goal is to get to know the students on a personal level. I explain to them very simply, “I care about you first and foremost as a person – I want you to be successful in this class.” The meeting encourages students to not only find my office but also helps reduce anxious feelings about meeting with faculty when they have a more serious concern”The Canvas Scheduler Tool https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-add-a-Scheduler-appointment-group-in-a-course-calendar/ta-p/1021 allows you to create a block of time where a student or groups of students can meet with you. Students can sign up for appointment times in their own calendars. Have students say their name when asking for a response to a question during your lecture or discussion, or when they ask a question. Explain to them that this helps not only you, but their classmates learn their names.
In addition to office hours – When possible, arrive to class a little early and stay a little later to chat with students. This will also allow students who may not feel comfortable raising questions during class to approach you in a low-pressure way.
Asking students to complete confidential student profiles – Another way to get to know your students is to have them complete a student profile (you can use Google Tools, Microsoft 360, or Qualtrics to create a profile: https://forms.gle/P2upb3JKzhSnzBRE8). Profiles are a form with questions that allow you to better understand who your students are, what they know about the class/discipline, as well as the types of expectations they have for the course. It also allows you to understand what types of boundaries they have in terms of work and family that may impact how they perform in your course.
Side Note: Consider letting students know During Week 1 that one way you plan to support their academic success is through the use of the Student Engagement Roster (SER).
Here’s a sample text (from IU’s SER website: https://ser.indiana.edu/faculty/index.html) you could put into your syllabus or share during the first week of class:
This semester I will be using IU’s Student Engagement Roster to provide feedback on your performance in this course. Periodically throughout the semester, I will be entering information on factors such as your class attendance, participation, and success with coursework, among other things. This information will provide feedback on how you are doing in the course and offer you suggestions on how you might be able to improve your performance. You will be able to access this information by going to One.IU.edu and searching for the Student Engagement Roster (Student) tile.
For a weekly plan on how to use the SER in your class scroll to the bottom of this page to find the Suggested Timeline for SER: https://ser.indiana.edu/faculty/index.html
Quick Tip: Working with AIs
Dr. Angela Jenks and Katie Cox , in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine developed a checklist for faculty that work with teaching assistants. The checklist contains categorized questions that faculty should answer for the teaching assistants they supervise in order to help the course run smoothly and minimize misunderstandings over faculty expectations.
Topics include but are not limited to:
- What to discuss during your initial introduction
- AI Roles and Responsibilities
- Communications Protocol
- Course Objectives and Topics
- Course Management Protocols
- AI Professional Development Opportunities
- Teaching Reflections
- How to Manage Student Observations and Feedback
- Midterm and Final Exam Grading/Protocols
If you would like to brainstorm ways to customize this list to your course. let’s meet!
Quick Tip: Canvas Checklist
This Start of Semester Checklist for Canvas, adapted from the University of North Texas, is comprised of pointers, reminders, and resources, useful for setting up a course in Canvas. The document has four sections:
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Canvas Setup – Contains reminders on how to complete task such as how to import a course from previous semesters or move section enrollments from individual courses and combine them into one course.
- Content Review – Provides tips and reminders related to writing measurable learning objectives and establishing a grading policy.
- Review Important Settings – Gives helpful points related to course navigation and accessibility.
- Publish Your Course – Reminds you how to do a final proof before publishing your course.
In the content review section, there are a few links to resources from or related to Quality Matters., a respected organization that has developed rubrics for course design standards. (IU is an institutional member). CITL has also developed resources based on Quality Matters rubrics. If you would like to have more information about these resources, course design, or rubrics, please reply to this email.
As a reminder:
The checklist from last year contains ideas and quick tips for taking full advantage of the resources available in Canvas. While this post from 2021 contains a chart (created by Instructure, the developers of Canvas), which explains how Canvas functions can be used at lower and higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, to create different types of learning experiences in Canvas.
For example: When you think about Announcements as a Communication Tool in Canvas, you can use announcements in simply to provide one-way updates and communication, or more robustly to:
- Reinforce classroom activities, display student work, and encourage best practices.
- Allow students to reply, and are often used for classroom interaction and Q & A.
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Encourage and expect student replies, often being used as question starters, contests, and ways to extend learning.
As always, please let me know if there is any way I can help you in your planning.
Sample Syllabus
Our colleague, Alexis Peirce Caudell, shared a three-part syllabus to encourage more students to read the syllabus. The main syllabus starts with information on three ways students can garner information from the syllabus.
- Part 1: Is a one-page summary of the most important components of the class, as well as the frequently asked questions that occur that are addressed in the syllabus: https://go.iu.edu/4NWa
- Part 2: is a detailed syllabus that was created in Google Docs. This syllabus has a table of content that is aligned to the side of the document, and allows students to click to the section that is pertinent to their immediate concern https://go.iu.edu/4NWb
- Part 3: is embedded within the learning management system (in this case Canvas). She used the Interactive Syllabus template: https://www.interactivesyllabus.com/about.html which allows instructors to create an interactive quiz in the LMS or Qualtrics. This syllabus encourages students to ask questions/express concerns about assignments.
A general example of what a syllabus looks like created using this template in Qualtics can be found here: https://stmarys.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6ytrpG7V0CsKPEF. A few more tips for creating an engaging syllabus can be found here: https://blogs.iu.edu/luddyteach/2022/07/12/engaging-syllabus-and-upcoming-teaching-conferences-cfps/
Call For Proposal:
Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum Conference at James Madison University,
Conference Theme: the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
October 1 – 3, 2023
The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum (SEAC) is dedicated to fostering ethical scholarship and promoting the teaching of ethics in all academic disciplines. We invite researchers and educators to join us in October as we strive to advance ethical understanding and reasoning in academia. Be part of our vibrant community by submitting your research paper to SEAC, where we welcome submissions on a wide range of topics related to the teaching of ethics.
Submissions for presentations and require either a full paper or an abstract by the (extended) August 15th deadline. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words. We encourage a variety of session formats. To submit an abstract, send by email to mark.doorley@villanova.edu
Upcoming Conference:
Focus on Teaching and Learning (FOTL) Conference (hybrid)
Conference Theme: “Decolonizing the Future.”
August 17, 2023
Organized by Loyola University Chicago’s Faculty Center for Ignatian Pedagogy (FCIP), with co-sponsorship by the Institute for Racial Justice, this year’s theme is “Decolonizing the Future.” Featuring a keynote from Dr. Donna Y. Ford and sessions from Loyola University Chicago scholars, the conference invites attendees to explore orienting our teaching and learning toward greater equity and justice. View the schedule and register to attend in person or via Zoom.
Article: Humanizing STEM Education; OER Follow-Up
One of the three pillars of the 2030 strategic plan is Student Success and Opportunity.
Goal 1 of this Pillar for Bloomington’s campus focuses on Undergraduate Academic Experience and Career Preparation, with one of the objectives calling for us to consider evidence-based pedagogy, with the goal of enhancing evidence-based pedagogy and inclusive teaching practices to improve student outcomes in academic courses.
The article: Humanizing STEM education: an exploratory study of faculty approaches to course redesign explores the challenges faced by STEM faculty in promoting inclusive practices and equity in higher education. The research analyzes reflections from 26 STEM faculty members across various US institutions who participated in the online course “The Humanity of Inclusive Practices” offered by the John N. Gardner Institute as part of a Teaching Learning Academy (TLA) focused on undergraduate education.
Participants answered three questions at the end of the online course:
- What are your equity challenges?
- What are your goals?
- How do you measure your success?
Two main themes emerged in respect to challenges:
Communication: STEM educators expressed concerns about the challenges posed by the instructor-student relationship, particularly with first-generation and marginalized students. They found it difficult to establish equitable student discussions and connect course content to students’ real-life experiences.
Students’ Prior Knowledge: STEM educators faced challenges due to the varying levels of preparedness among students entering STEM courses. This discrepancy in prior knowledge affected equity in testing and created difficulties in designing assessments that were fair for all students.
Other emerging equity challenges included financial inequity, lack of inclusive materials, disinterest in seeking help, and student mindset issues. Students’ limited engagement in class and negative attitudes towards certain disciplines or courses presented additional obstacles for instructors.
Three major themes emerged from the responses based on their frequencies: higher grades, empowering students, and inclusive materials
Higher Grades: Educators aimed to improve student attendance, retention, and pass rates, considering them as significant goals for humanizing their courses.
Empowering Students: Participants focused on enhancing various skills, behaviors, and mindsets in students, including confidence, problem-solving, time management, and reflective learning.
Inclusive Material: Goals included linking course material to students’ real life, using diverse perspectives, promoting inclusive design approaches, and enhancing a sense of belonging.
Participants were asked to reflect on how they would measure their success in humanizing their teaching. The following themes were captured:
Grades: Measuring success based on students’ final grades, course performance, and progress toward their degrees was a prominent theme among educators.
Feedback: Educators emphasized the importance of student feedback through surveys, journals, and interviews as a measure of success.
Student Engagement: The level of student participation, discussions, and attendance in class was considered an indicator of success in humanizing courses.
The study indicated that STEM educators were incorporating liberatory pedagogies and practices into their course redesign efforts to humanize their teaching.
The findings highlighted the potential impact of such experiences in creating more inclusive and equitable STEM courses. The researchers note that further research and follow-up studies are planned to explore the specific approaches and outcomes of these efforts in greater detail.
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OER Follow-Up
In my last update, I shared resources related to Open Educational Resources. Haley Norris, the Scholarly Communication Librarian and Diversity Resident at the IU Libraries
(hjnorris@iu.edu), asked that I share the following with any faculty who are interested in exploring OER course materials:
Our dept hosts fellowships like the CMFP and recently co-hosted an OER Sprint with the College of Arts and Sciences. Beyond fellowships, we offer assistance to any faculty member that wants to transition to OER, affordable course materials, and/or library-licensed materials. If you or your faculty have any questions about OER, please feel free to reach out to me or send my contact information to them.
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Upcoming Conference
The Association of Internet Researchers is happy to announce that the AoIR2023 conference will be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Dates: 18-21 October 2023
Location(s): Temple University (TU) and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).
Preconference Workshops include:
- Undergraduate Teaching Workshop
- AI-systems for the public interest at the AoIR2023
- Building an Alternative Social Media Network
- Image Analysis Workshop
- The Social Moving Image: Meme Analysis with Tiktok Metadata
- 20 Years of Situational Analysis: Workshopping Methods for Mapping Complex Information Systems
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER), can be defined as materials intended for educational purposes that are freely available for use, sharing, and/or modification by anyone. OER includes a wide range of resources, such as textbooks, lecture notes, videos, quizzes, and interactive modules, that can be used to support teaching, learning, and research. These resources are typically released under an open license, such as Creative Commons, which allows users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the content.
A recent report by Nagle and Vitez (2021) examined the results of survey on textbook use during COVID. While their results immediately convey how students were negatively impacted by COVID. They believe their data reflects “more long-term problems that institutions and national leaders must work to solve related to the textbook market”(p. 2) when also considering previous studies on textbook affordability. One key finding explained that using OER materials may increase access for students with economic difficulties. Food insecure students skip buying course materials at significantly higher rates. Students who can’t afford books due to economic insecurity will miss out on key aspects of the course due to access despite concerns it will impact their grade.
This OER Starter Kit provides a large amount of information related to locating and teaching with OER materials and attempts to address some of the concerns related to OER, such as:
- Is the content accurate based on your expertise?
- Are there any factual, grammatical, or typographical errors?
- Is the interface navigable for students?
While this OER Research Hub provides research to examine many beliefs widely held regarding the benefits of OER by examining hypothesis (such as “Use of OER improves student performance”).
This page list several places where you can locate OER resources, including Green Tea Press Textbooks which focuses in on: Computer Science, Programming (Bayes, Python, MATLAB, Java, DSP)
There are two conferences coming up related to OER
- October: Open Education Global (OEG) is a global, members based, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world.
- November: The Open Education Conference (“OpenEd”) is an annual convening for sharing and learning about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open education initiatives.
I want to acknowledge Erin Milanese at IUI who shared many of these resources with me.