If students are working together to solve a problem and the teacher is available but only asks students questions, chances are good that more than one student in the group is actively thinking and talking about the content. And if any student in the group may be called upon to explain and defend the group’s solution then even more group members are attending to the group’s interaction.

Relevant to answering the first question is the number of students the active learning strategy involves and how deeply it engages them.

How much active learning are teachers using? And the follow-up question: How much active learning is enough? One good result from all the attention paid to active learning during the last 25 years is that teachers now recognize it’s important. More learning and a better kind of learning happens when students are actively engaged with the content. Most, maybe close to all, teachers are in favor of active learning and if you ask whether they use it, pretty much everyone says they do.

However, standing against those claims is a lot of research verifying the most active learner in the majority of classrooms is the teacher. Students are doing things intermittently but not all that regularly and this leads to the second question. How much active learning does it take to start achieving the desirable outcomes that occur when students are actively dealing with the material? One activity per class session? One a week? True, it does depend on the nature of the activity as the example above illustrates, but we need benchmarks. How much and what kinds of active learning should teachers be using?

How does a collection of active learning strategies fit together? I’m also concerned that too often what’s happening in classrooms is activity simply for the sake of activity. Active learning has become something teachers use to keep basically bored students awake and attentive. This puts faculty on a quest to find novel and unusual activities, which isn’t necessarily bad but it can mean that activities aren’t selected and sequenced with some overall plan in mind. It is true that students aren’t going to learn the material unless they’re engaged, but activity doesn’t automatically promote learning or at least not as much as when the selection of activities is guided by some sort of purposeful design. What active learning can accomplish is compromised when it’s nothing more than a collection of techniques used to keep students busy.

We need research answers to these questions—we don’t need more research documenting that active learning makes a difference in what and how students learn. That fact is well established at this point. But I don’t think a blog post is going to have much influence on setting the research agenda. I raise the questions because they are ones individual teachers should be asking.

This post is a call for an analysis of how you use active learning. Start with how you define it. Then look at each of the activities you’re using and ask how many students it involves and how deeply it engages them in the messy work of learning. Are you using enough active learning to make a difference? How do you know? Extra points to those of you who have evidence beyond your general impression. And finally, if your collection of active learning strategies were laid out, would relationships between the individual activities be clear? Would we be able to see how they build toward your learning goals for the course?

And to finish, an FYI… if you are committed to active learning and are interested in thinking more about its role in the learning experiences of your students, I recommend regular reading of an excellent, cross-disciplinary journal devoted to the topic: Active Learning in Higher Education.

The assumption is that students will work the hardest and learn more from those course activities that count the most. In many courses, exams count for the lion’s share of the points or percentages used to determine the final grade. This means that whatever is being assessed on those exams is what’s most important in the course. Some exams (or, according to several studies, a lot of exams) assess facts—whether students know content details. They don’t assess whether students remember those details unless the exams are cumulative and even then they only need to be remembered until the final. Is factual knowledge what matters most in the course? Exams also test the ability to recall knowledge or to demonstrate thinking within time constraints and without access to resources. Is that one of the most important skills students should take from the course and their college learning experiences?

Assignments like quizzes, homework and participation are worth trivial amounts compared to exams. What’s message does that send to students? Does it tell them that the skills and knowledge acquired from participating, taking a quiz or doing homework aren’t as important as what they learn by taking exams? That these are parts of the course they don’t need to take as seriously? That there’s something less significant about the quality of the learning these activities promote?

If this sounds like I’m challenging point distribution systems that make exams significantly more important than anything else that happens in the course, you could call me on that. I do think we over emphasize exams. I don’t think most exams promote the kind of deep learning or sophisticated learning skill development we’re after.

For any class activity or assignment, our thinking should be clear about what the student will learn by completing that work. Actually, as Wiggins and McTighe propose in their model of backwards design, we should start with what it is we want students to learn (that can be knowledge or skills) and then we design assignments and select content that will promote that learning. Unfortunately, for most of us the assignments and content come first, which is all the more reason why we should take stock of what we are having students do and the priorities we’ve established for those various activities.

Beyond the actual point distribution and how we make those determinations, what we know about how that distribution influences student behavior in our classes. Have you ever talked with students about this? The discussion is not about how they would distribute the points in the course (although that might be interesting to hear), but how the current distribution affects their efforts to learn, how it affects when and what they study, and what they think they learn by spending more time on certain assignments.

This is also a topic profitably discussed with colleagues. The goal of the conversation should not be determining the “right” way to distribute points or percentages. The right way is the way that accomplishes the learning goals and objectives of the course and those are different depending on the course.

Like so many aspects of instruction, we tend to do things the way we’re used to doing them. That may not be the wrong way, but right or wrong we should have probed the reasons why. So take a look at your points or percentage allocation, share what you do and more importantly what justifies the particular allocation you use.

Reference: Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. Understanding by Design. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall, 2006.

Data Driven Decision Making for Online Instructional Design

If you’re feeling the heat to improve your online educational offerings, use the one tool readily at your disposal: Data. Applied in the correct points of the instructional design process, data can help to dramatically improve the overall effectiveness of your courses.

Despite its many benefits, online education faces serious obstacles. High drop-out rates and an increasingly skeptical Congress have caused many to question the effectiveness of online education, forcing online programs to continually evaluate their courses with an eye toward increased effectiveness.

Now, more than ever, you need to institute an established method for improving your online programs. You’ll discover it in the video online seminar Data Driven Decision Making for Online Instructional Design. The seminar will introduce you to methods for leveraging analytics in the instructional design process and ultimately enhance your courses, helping you to:

• Understand how data relates to instructional design elements, and develop strategies for measuring the relationship between implementations and learning outcomes.
• Utilize end-of-course and real-time intelligence to understand your instructional strengths and weaknesses, and to influence your future improvements.
• Develop ways to streamline your design team through the application of institution data points.
• Create strategies for using data to best allocate financial resources.

Order this Seminar

You’ll develop both a theoretical understanding of how to improve your instructional design process, as well as practical methods for enhancing your own efforts. The seminar will help you discover:

• How to utilize institutional data sources to optimize instructional design strategies and components.
• What methods you can use to collaborate with faculty and staff to inform instructional design initiatives while complementing institutional research objectives.
• How to include data collection elements in the workflow so that analytics can help optimize your instructional design.

By the end of the seminar, you’ll understand strategies that will aid in the development of workflows, content refinement and enhance your program’s overall learning effectiveness.

Who will benefit
From the one-person shop to instructional design teams, anyone involved in an online program will benefit from the seminar. Recommended positions include:

• Instructional Designers
• Institutional Researchers
• Instructional Technologists
• Online Faculty
• Program Directors
• Department Chairs
• Deans
• Associate Provosts (responsible for institutional effectiveness or online programs)
• Learning Strategists

If you wish to share this seminar with others across your campus, consider ordering a Campus Access License. For an additional $200, a Campus Access License allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

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New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Course Design and Development Ideas That Work

So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course — from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assignments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes.

Featuring 12 articles pulled from the pages of The Teaching Professor, the report will inspire you to rethink some components of your course, especially if it’s one you’ve taught for a few years and you are feeling in a bit of a rut.

Course Design and Development Ideas That Work

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This special report Course Design and Development Ideas That Work examines this multifaceted issue from a variety of fronts to bring you proven course design alternatives implemented in courses of varying sizes and disciplines.

For example, in the article titled A Large Course with a Small Course Option, we learn about an innovative course design for a large 300-level course. Essentially, the instructor created two options: in one, students attend lectures and take four exams. In the second option, students are responsible for those same lectures and exams, but they also participate in small group discussions and complete a set of writing assignments. The second option was most valued by students who are not very good test-takers or who have a keen interest in the subject.

In the article The Placement of Those Steppingstones, the University of Richmond’s Joe Ben Hoyle compares the placement of steppingstones in a koi pond to the educational processes teachers use to help their students get from point A to point B. Hoyle theorizes that “education stumbles when either the learning points are not sequenced in a clearly logical order or they are not placed at a proper distance from each other.”

Course Design and Development Ideas That Work

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Other articles in Course Design and Development Ideas That Work include:

• A Course Redesign that Contributed to Student Success
• Pairing vs. Small Groups: A Model for Analytical Collaboration
• How Blended Learning Works
• Should Students Have a Role in Setting Course Goals?
• In-Class Writing: A Technique That Promotes Learning and Diagnoses Misconceptions
• A Critique of Scaffolding
• A Blog, a Physics Course, and a Change in Student Attitudes
• When to Begin the End: The Role and Use of Summary in Course Design

If you’re looking to update an existing course, this report will give you sound strategies to consider.

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Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material on all of the key issues that matter to today’s top faculty and administrators. It’s packed with strategies, tips, and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school, and your work, including:

• Instructional Design
• Faculty Development
• Teaching Strategies
• Distance Learning
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Faculty Evaluation
• Learning Styles
• Curriculum Development
• Trends in Higher Education
• And much, much more.

Course Design and Development Ideas That Work

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These offerings include an online teaching tutorial; on-site beginning, advanced, and instructional design workshops and open labs at all campus locations; online peer mentoring by discipline, an online faculty recourse center, and a variety of personnel to support faculty training. The center of all of this activity is Mary Jane Clerkin, coordinator of online faculty support.

Tip #1: Remember that although not all online faculty will be physically located off-campus, that doesn’t mean they will have a great deal of available time for face-to-face training. Online training can be a good solution to varied and busy schedules.

Clerkin notes that the college piloted an online workshop with just seven faculty members as participants. This initial group liked the training, so the college made a two-week workshop for beginning online instructors available. The team is now working on offering courses for advanced faculty and for instructional design.

The online workshop also includes an online faculty resource center, which features tools and resources that faculty likely will need. This includes a faculty handbook, a checklist for a successful course created by the dean, and a section on academic integrity.

The online faculty resource center is conceived as “a place where faculty can share,” says Clerkin. For example, all faculty meetings are held online through a section of the resource center dedicated to discussions. This section also includes discipline-specific discussions for faculty in certain subject areas, and an option for voice discussions. There is even room for faculty-initiated interaction projects; for example, one faculty member has asked to run an online book club, so that discussion area is now found online.

Tip #3: Allow faculty the chance to personalize online space in order to keep them coming back. An online book club or other non-work interaction may make them feel more at home online.

The site also includes a number of forms that the faculty members will need as they do their work, such as progress reports. “All they have to do is click to take any one of those forms,” says Clerkin.

Tip #4: Put all of the forms and information your faculty will need online in easily downloaded formats, so that they can be accessed at all hours from any computer.

The site is filled with models and best practices. One section includes sample courses in a variety of disciplines, which allows participants to view a successful course and learn what aspects they might adopt for their own. There are also many sets of directions and instructions for using common tools, like Blackboard.

Tip #5: Just as you would have tests and assignments for students in an online course, consider having assessment activities for participants in an online training workshop, so that they may demonstrate mastery of the materials.

The online faculty workshop requires the participants to demonstrate competence with practical applications. Each participant is asked to complete certain tasks, like posting a comment, to show their readiness to teach online. At the end of course completion, they are sent certificates of completion to show that they successfully navigated the course.

Excerpted from Distance Education Report, Dec. 15, 2007.

When we step into a physical classroom we are stepping into a time-tested model with well-defined operating parameters. There is a class schedule and syllabus that tells me when to meet with my class, for how long, and even the room location. There are a set of familiar tools such as a chalkboard, a podium and seating for the students. There is also an inherited protocol of classroom experience—I am the teacher and you are the student. We both roughly understand the dynamics of the interactions of this arrangement. My responsibility as the course instructor is to show up in the designated location, and conduct the course to the best of my ability through to successful completion for the students. The responsibility of the learner is to meet the criteria for satisfactory course completion as measured by the instructor.

The asynchronous online classroom has little or no similarity to the classroom experience. There may be no “class schedule,” no meeting room or physical location, and, certainly in the asynchronous classroom, no defined timeframe for operation. Even the dynamics between teacher and student is challenged because online we can all appear to “be equal.” Other than a vague sense of responsibility to “teach the course,” the instructor has little definition of these new and often ill-defined operating parameters. The course instructor is left on their own to figure out what constitutes a successful learning experience.

Dr. Lawrence C. Ragan is the Director of Instructional Design and Development for Penn State’s World Campus.

Excerpted from 10 Commandments of Effective Online Teaching, Distance Education Report, May 15, 2007.

To create more effective learning environments, and minimize forgetting, some faculty are turning to Situation-based Learning Design (SBLD), which aligns learning context with performance context.

“SBLD begins with the magic question: What do we want our learners to be able to do, and in what situations do we want our learners to do those things,” says Will Thalheimer, president of Work-Learning Research. “It’s based on a fairly simple concept but can have profound implications.”

In the recent online seminar, Transforming Your Online Class with Situation-Based Learning, Thalheimer discusses the theory behind situation-based learning and how it can be used to provide deeper more meaningful learning and retention.

Using the Situation-Evaluation-Decision-Action (SEDA) model to evaluate instructional design, Thalheimer talks about the importance of giving students the opportunities to evaluate, make decisions and act on the problem or situation presented to them within relevant contexts and without artificial hints or supports. For example, when educators “chapterize concepts”, and don’t provide comprehensive knowledge checks or cumulative exams, they are not providing the student with proper evaluation opportunities to retrieve knowledge in a way they will be asked to retrieve it in the real world.

Whether you’re teaching in the classroom or online, Thalheimer provides the following tips for incorporating SBLD and creating performance contexts in your courses.

• Provide real-world examples
• Assign project work to happen in the targeted situations
• Provide scenario-based questions
• Have exercises related to targeted situations
• Use relevant case studies
• Provide simulations

The benefits, he says, includes more engaged learning, better long-term memory and recall, and improved results.

The start of the semester in general chemistry felt unsettled as I went through the first few lectures without a syllabus. My strategy was to wait until students asked about some organizational issue and use that question as a segue to a discussion about what they wanted in the syllabus. At the end of three lectures, no one had asked about any organizational issue; they seemed oblivious to the potential for high drama that could occur with no agreement on course issues. I cracked first and told them of my intent to let them decide the major course structural issues. That first conversation was halting, dispersed, and punctuated with silences. We decided to drop it for a day and return to it during the next lecture. But once students got the idea, things began to move. We created a student committee to brainstorm suggestions, report to the class, and negotiate with me.

The committee’s first act was to name themselves the “Squadron.” We hashed out a syllabus over a couple of weeks, using suggestions that came from students. The final syllabus wasn’t greatly different from the usual, but the students negotiated all aspects, e.g., late homework policy, number of quizzes and exams, and exam formats, and voted to approve the syllabus as a class. I continued to have weekly discussions with the Squadron that covered a range of course organizational topics. Squadron members became an open communication channel between me and the rest of the class. Requests from students started small, like which days assignments would be due, but as the semester passed they became larger, like the inclusion of multiple-choice exam questions. We negotiated a system in which students could opt to write a paper instead of taking one of the one-hour exams (about five students actually did so). It was a stretch for me to honor a persistent request for extra credit, but I made the stretch and, for the first time ever, gave extra-credit assignments in lecture and lab. The negotiated extra-credit system, while still not a big hit with me, enabled diligent students to raise their letter grades by a fraction and seemed to provide a large morale boost as the semester played out, something I appreciated.

So who is playing first in my course: me or my students? For years, I have tried to encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning. However, I’ve done it by saying that they should do it rather than by empowering them to do so. This experiment with letting students have significant say in decisions about course structure has led me to believe that empowering students to make decisions about the course is a great way to get them to take responsibility for it.

1. Multiple Intelligences. Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking book on multiple intelligences (MI) changed education by documenting that people learn in different ways. By introducing concepts like visual spatial and bodily kinesthetic learning, MI made clear that only with a variety of teaching methods can instructors reach all learners. Whether Gardner’s model leads college faculty to explore new ways of teaching or whether it simply informs conversations with students struggling to grasp certain concepts, the book is a must-read for all educators. See Gardner, H. Multiple Intelligences (1993) and Intelligences Reframed (1999), as well as www.howardgardner.com.
2. Assessment. College professors know that they must assess learning, a process they tend to loosely associate with exams or papers that test knowledge. Yet assessment and testing are not synonyms. Testing is but one strategy in a teacher’s assessment portfolio. K-12 teachers are taught to use three different kinds of assessment: 1) Early assessment—the informal information about students gathered through observation early in the semester, which provides practical knowledge about students and helps with course planning; 2) Instructional assessment—the circular process whereby teachers plan instruction, assesses their teaching (based in part on student work, responses, attitudes, etc.), and use that feedback to revise instruction; and 3) Official assessment—the traditional process of giving exams; assigning papers; and, ultimately, grading student work.
3. Lesson Plans. K-12 teachers prepare formal lesson plans as a developmental tool. Whether a formal document or notes scratched on a napkin, successful lesson plans have five components: goals, which answer “Why am I teaching this lesson?”; objectives, which answer “What should students know or be able to do after this lesson?”; materials, which answer “What supplies, media, and other equipment do I need to teach the lesson?”; teaching activities, which answer in detail “What will take place during today’s instruction?”; and assessment, which answers “How will I know that students have met these goals and learned the material?” An effective lesson plan provides a framework for student learning and a road map for getting there. See Airasian, P. Classroom Assessment, 2005.
4. Special Needs. Each year, beginning students arrive on campus with a history of diagnosed (and undiagnosed) learning challenges. Most college professors have little, if any, experience working with special needs students and can be quick to judge a weak student as failing rather than struggling to learn. K-12 teachers are trained to recognize, diagnose, and support a wide range of learning disabilities. They are also versed in the theories of cognition, memory, and differentiated instruction, which emphasize that, for students with ADD/ADHD, auditory processing disability, and/or language-based learning disabilities, key concepts become fragmented and disconnected when presented in content-intense formats. They are not easily committed to memory or retrieved for application. Faculty can take steps to support these students without sacrificing standards. See Levine, M. A Mind at a Time (2002).
5. Essential Questions. College professors often approach course design by asking what content the course needs to cover and how many weeks they have to cover it. K-12 teachers distinguish between courses that are activity focused, coverage focused, or understanding focused. The most challenging college-level courses are designed for understanding and require that faculty ask themselves: “What do I want my students to remember from this course in five years?” Considering essential questions helps a professor look at his or her course with the end—the understandings—in mind and work backward, attending to the skills and content that students will need to gain during the semester if they are to answer the course’s essential questions. See Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. Understanding by Design, (2005).
6. Brain-Based Research.Well-versed in their respective fields, college professors develop rigorous syllabi that expose students to important topics. Concerned about coverage, instructors often deliver content-packed lectures every class period. However, brain-research suggests that student retention of new information will be greater if lectures are interspersed with short breaks that give students time to process new information. During such breaks, instructors can ask students to think about personal experiences related to the topic or challenge them to apply the material to their everyday lives. See www.jensenlearning.com.
7. Student Ownership. Students often ask college professors, “What do you want me to do in this assignment?” Although it is easiest to just answer, thereby maintaining complete control over course content and assignments, educational research has found that when students participate in the design of course assignments, they are more accountable in their work and more committed to learning course content. The choice can be small, but having the opportunity to choose can make a big difference in how engaged students become in their work. See Allen, R. H. Impact Teaching (2002).
8. Instructional Technology. With the prevalence of mediated classrooms, electronic presentations, and Internet access, college professors have many options for presenting course information. Doing so effectively can be a challenge, however. K-12 teachers focus on how to incorporate technology into pedagogy so that technology assists student learning rather than replacing effective teaching. Instructional technology in the classroom does not guarantee student comprehension. What technology can do is help teachers reach students in a medium that is familiar and comfortable to students. See Bates, A.W., & Poole, G. Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success (2003).
9. Student Aspirations. K-12 educators have researched and documented that teaching and learning thrive when the conditions are in place that support student aspirations. When student-faculty relationships are strong, and curriculum is rigorous and relevant, students are more engaged, retain more information, and transfer what they learn to other areas of life. Education takes on a purpose that increases student confidence and achievement. See www.qisa.org and www.daggett.com.

As a new teacher of this course, I was dismayed when I discovered that virtually all of the texts condense three years of law school courses into a one-semester course. It seemed to me that this was an unrealistic amount of material to teach undergraduate business students. I opted to redesign the course to promote deeper understanding of a few topics. But which topics should be covered?

The hardest part of transforming the course involved determining its core concepts, what Wiggins and Tighe call the essential questions. A colleague recommended I think about it this way: “If a student visited you five years after graduation and said ‘I remember your class! I learned that _______’, how would you like the student to fill in the blank?” After many revisions, I decided on four questions that serve as the foundation of my course:

1.Why does the government regulate certain activities?

2.Who are the stakeholders involved in governmental policy-making, and from what power base are they operating?

3.How is governmental regulation enforced?

4.To what extent do laws and judicial opinions interpreting laws reflect the policy underlying governmental regulation?

With Dr. Wiggins help, I created assignments that allow students to wrestle with the answers to the essential questions and develop a deep understanding of contemporary legal issues. Instead of taking the three-years-of-law-school-in-one-semester approach, I helped students master the essentials of legal methods (how to read a court case, the trial process, the court system, judicial and statutory interpretation, and basic legal research) and then let the students do a group research project, which, by its very structure, would require them to answer the essential questions. It worked like this.

Students could choose from one of seven pre-selected research topics based on bills currently pending in Congress (for example, medical malpractice, human cloning, and Social Security privatization) or one of several pending Supreme Court cases (the Nike free speech case and the University of Michigan affirmative action cases). Some students picked their own topics such as the reexamination of Title IX and SUV safety. Students worked in groups of three or four.

Additionally, each student was required to complete five assignments on the group topic: a book report, an editorial, Congressional testimony, a class presentation, and a group report. Students were assigned to represent a stakeholder in the group’s topic. For example, members of the Social Security privatization group chose to represent one of the following stakeholders: young Americans, women, African-Americans, and older workers. Each student read a book on how Social Security privatization would affect the selected stakeholder group and wrote an editorial on why the stakeholder group supported or opposed privatization. Each student found a Congressional bill to research and wrote Congressional testimony analyzing the bill and its potential impact on stakeholders. For the class presentation, group members introduced the class to two bills — one pro-privatization and one anti-privatization — gave Congressional testimony for and against each of the bills, and asked the class to vote on which bill should be enacted. For the final paper, the group members wrote an objective paper, outlining the pending bills and advising me (as a Senator) how each bill would impact my constituents.

This series of assignments required students to complete successive drafts of essentially the same document. For example, students used the book report to gain an overview of their topic. For the editorial, students simply had to redraft a portion of their book report, do additional research, and add evidence to support their opinion. For those who wrote an excellent editorial, the Congressional testimony was simply a longer version of the editorial in a different format. Those who had not written a strong editorial used the feedback from the editorial to strengthen their arguments and add more persuasive supporting evidence. The final presentation was a logical extension of the group work so far: it allowed students to present their previous work in front of the class and motivated them to develop a strong introduction so that the class would understand the issues involved. Finally, the final report required students to transform their persuasive arguments into a strong objective research paper. Through this sequence of interconnected, cumulative assignments, students answered three of the four essential questions.

Some professors might worry that this teaching method is more time-consuming than the traditional method. Actually it was coming up with the essential questions and developing the series of assignments that took weeks. As for extra time commitments when I implemented it, I met with each group at least once out of class to help them with their projects. But, on the other hand, I had two classes free while the librarian taught research, and at the end of the semester, I enjoyed several weeks of class presentations and witnessed the metamorphosis of college students into confident legislative interns, making any extra time well worth it.