The basic assignment, also called the 3-2-1, has three requirements:

• Requirement 1: Students read what is assigned, then choose and describe the three most important aspects (concepts, issues, factual information, etc.) of the reading, justifying their choices.
• Requirement 2: Students identify two aspects of the reading they don’t understand, and briefly discuss why these confusing aspects interfered with their general understanding of the reading. Although students may identify more than two confusing elements, they must put them in priority order and limit themselves to the two most important ones. Students seldom understand everything in a reading and, knowing that they must complete this part of the assignment, will reflect on their level of understanding of all the reading’s content.
• Requirement 3: Students pose a question to the text’s author, the answer to which should go beyond the reading content and does not reflect the areas of confusion in requirement 2. The question reflects students’ curiosity about the topic and reveals what they think are the implications or applications of the reading content. This last requirement lets you know how well students understood the article’s intention.

The completed assignment is submitted on an electronic template before the class when the reading will be discussed. I grade and return the assignment electronically before the class, as well, although this is not critical if you find yourself short on time to complete the grading. With larger numbers of students, I review the assignments before class to identify the areas of difficulty and misunderstanding, and grade later. The grading process is minimal; three marks for part 1, two for part 2 and one for part 3, all based on a simple rubric, also provided to students.

Using my graduate course on teaching and learning as a ‘test bed’ for this assignment, I was amazed at the impact of this seemingly ‘little’ assignment on students’ engagement and empowerment. Their responses were thoughtful and reflected full engagement in the reading. In class, discussions were sophisticated and more in-depth than formerly. Students made meaningful comments and debated the most significant aspects of the readings, all with substantially less input from me. The benefit to teaching was that I could clearly identify areas where students were experiencing difficulty and those that they handled well. Requirement 3 gave me a sense of the connections they were making. I was able to be much more specific in the ways I helped students to fully understand the concepts. This process is similar to “just-in-time-teaching” (Novak, 2011).

After using the 3-2-1 several times in this course, we discussed its use as a tool for learning. Students were unanimous in their agreement that the three questions made them think deeply and critically about the readings. They reported greater confidence in their capability to discuss the reading and to achieve this they had to read the article for general understanding and then again to enable them to complete the report.

Following on that experience, I have used this assignment in other graduate and undergraduate courses. I have discovered I need to be judicious, particularly in first and second year courses, about the number of 3-2-1 reports assigned, as they are challenging. A 3-2-1 should only be assigned when the reading is difficult; otherwise, it may be perceived as ‘busy work’.

Since the first graduate class in which I used the 3-2-1, I have analyzed the mid- and end-of-term course feedback to the question, “What aspects of the course were of greatest benefit to your learning?” The purposeful, 3-2-1 reading report is the most frequently cited in all courses (mid-term =72% of all students, n= 549, end of term = 65% of students, n= 513). A typical response is revealing: I hate to admit it because they required quite a bit of effort, but the 3-2-1 reports were really helpful. Students appreciate their effectiveness, but don’t particularly enjoy doing them; therefore, it is important to assign a grade to the report that is consistent with the effort required and to ensure that the reading discussion draws on the content of their reports.

I encourage you to try this powerful but simple assignment as it has both an intellectual benefit for student learning and a practical benefit to the instructor. At the very least, it means never having to say I hope you are ready to discuss the reading for today.

An extended version of this assignment is available here »

References
Novak, G. M. (2011), Just-in-time teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2011: 63–73. doi: 10.1002/tl.469.

Roberts, J. C. and. Roberts, K. S. (2008). Deep reading, cost/benefit, and the construction of meaning: Enhancing reading comprehension and deep learning in sociology Courses.” Teaching Sociology 36(2):125-4.

Author’s note: Until recently, I had been referencing the Purposeful Reading Assignment as one that John Bean of Seattle University had suggested on a visit to our campus. In a conversation with him, in preparation for this article, he told me that it didn’t come from him. Despite significant effort, I can’t find the original source of this assignment. If you can help me to find the originator of this writing assignment, I would be grateful so that I can acknowledge her or him.

Dr. Geraldine Van Gyn is a professor in the School of Exercise Science at the University of Victoria.

With all of this discussion around flipped classrooms, more instructors are asking this question and wondering when and where flipped strategies are best integrated into the learning environment. Certainly, some topics lend themselves more easily to flipped strategies than others, but every lesson plan has the opportunity for at least one “flippable moment.” This is the moment during class when you stop talking at your students and “flip” the work to them instead. This is the moment when you allow your students to struggle, ask questions, solve problems, and do the “heavy lifting” required to learn the material.

The Internet, online textbooks, online lectures, MOOCs, and other resources provide access to endless amounts of content, much of it free. Students can discover information on their own and find the answer to a question within a matter of seconds. What they can’t always do on their own is analyze, synthesize, and experience the process of engaging in higher levels of critical thinking. This is when they need to do the messy work of learning, evaluating, and critiquing. This also is when they need your structure and guidance, but not your answers. They have to make meaning for themselves. This is a “flippable moment.”

So, back to the original question: How do you determine what can be flipped? Here are four locations in your lesson where flipped strategies might be needed:

Flippable Moment #1: Look for confusion.
Ask yourself, “What’s the most difficult or challenging part of this lesson?” “Where do I anticipate students’ having problems or encountering difficulty?” These are the places in your lesson that would benefit from flipped strategies. Re-think this section of your lesson and design an activity for students to engage in. Maybe they need a video to watch and re-watch several times before and after class to reinforce the main points. Maybe they need a group activity to discuss the material with their peers. Maybe they need more time to practice and test their skills.

If this is a lesson you’ve taught before, then you probably know where confusion is likely to occur. If you’ve never taught this lesson before, consider adding a classroom assessment technique to the middle or end of your lesson. This will allow both you and your students to determine where additional work is needed to achieve the learning outcomes.

Flippable Moment #2: Look for the fundamentals.
Ask yourself, “What’s the most fundamental, most essential, and most critical part of today’s lesson?” “What MUST students know before they can move forward?” Some may argue fundamental knowledge isn’t what needs to be flipped, but if this is an essential skill your students need to develop before moving on, then it might be the perfect place to flip your approach. Your challenge is to design multiple learning opportunities and create a variety of opportunities where students can practice, test, and reinforce their knowledge to ensure mastery.

Flippable Moment #3: Look at your extra credit question.
Ask yourself, “What makes this an extra credit question?” “How could I turn this extra credit question into an activity or project for all of the students?” Extra credit questions are often designed to test the next level of thinking by moving students beyond memorization or comprehension, and therefore they can provide the perfect opportunity to flip your lesson. An extra credit question might encourage students to analyze, synthesize, and create alternative models or hypotheses. Students who think they know the answer will go for it just to show you how much they know (and to get a few bonus points, of course). That’s the moment when your students are motivated and curious. Motivation and curiosity are cornerstones for learning, and you can leverage that energy by using the extra credit question as a place to flip your lesson.

Flippable Moment #4: Look for boredom.
Ask yourself, “Are the students bored?” “Am I bored?” Boredom will destroy a learning environment. When you come to a point in your lesson or course when boredom strikes, it’s time to flip your approach. Design a task for your students to DO. Instead of continuing to lecture to them, take an actively passive approach and step to the side. Put them in pairs or groups. Pose a challenge. Allow them to design or evaluate something. Give them the space to struggle, practice, and imagine “what if?” so they are challenged and inspired. That’s the power of the flip.

When you sit down to plan your lesson, always begin by asking yourself, “What should students DO to achieve the learning outcomes for this lesson?” To learn what you know now as an instructor, you had to do the “heavy lifting” yourself. You had to analyze, reflect, and evaluate. You had to make meaning for yourself. Now it’s your students’ turn. Flip it to them.

Dr. Barbi Honeycutt is the founder of Flip It Consulting and the director of graduate professional development and teaching programs at North Carolina State University.

I see the need for students to understand that the work they do has value-added merit as part of their overall repertoire of academic preparation and social contributions. It has become increasingly clear to me that if students realize they need to validate what they are learning for future use, they are more likely to produce a level of work that looks to future application in the workforce rather than just another required assignment.

For example, when I begin the e-portfolio class, I ask students to compile a list of items they would want to use as samples of actual work accomplishments: community service participation, papers written, projects developed, presentations, poster sessions, conferences attended, professional development, and the like. Once this list is compiled, I instruct them to create an outline indicating how these materials might be organized in an e-portfolio that they could use in a job search. The problem, of course, is that these students would have been better prepared to accumulate their materials had they been aware of this need long before they are enrolled in my e-portfolio class.

In our media-hyped, socially networked, information-at-your-smart-phone-apps world, why have we in higher education not capitalized on this process? Won’t our students need e-portfolios to be globally competitive in the job market? You might disagree, arguing that skills of the brightest and best will be clearly visible during interviews. Yes, but give me someone who can validate his or her technical, communication, and critical-thinking skills with samples of work completed previously and I will give you an individual with a distinct competitive advantage.

Recently, I attended an Oracle workshop at a neighboring university. Oracle is the largest relational database organization in the world. As part of this workshop, the speaker told students that to get a job at Oracle, they must have technical, communication, and critical-thinking skills and those skills needed to be documented in an e-portfolio! I breathed a sigh of self-validation after so many years of striving to inform students to treat this e-portfolio development process as a vital part of their overall educational experience.

E-portfolios can be handled as if they are just another one of those required assignments, without the students ever realizing their potential. Those of us who help our lifelong learners develop e-portfolios must ensure that they understand that an e-portfolio is as close to the “real world” as they will ever realize. Moreover, the content of the e-portfolio has life-changing potential. If a student becomes fully aware that a project he or she is part of or leads will be reviewed by prospective employers as integral to the hiring process, I believe that this knowledge will impact the student learning outcomes tenfold. Our colleges and universities need to recognize the importance of e-portfolio development. They should be created, reviewed, assessed, and revised across a college experience, not just in a capstone course as an afterthought to education.

My e-portfolio students leave the class with the knowledge that they didn’t just do an assignment for me. What they prepared in this class will help them achieve their future dreams. Their e-portfolios validate their past successes and demonstrate how well prepared they are for future employment.

Dr. Ken Scott is an instructor at Trenholm State Tech College.

Reprinted from Using the E-Portfolio to Validate Student Learning, The Teaching Professor, 26.1 (2012): 1.

Despite these beneficial design features, there is a need to document quantitatively that completion of online homework positively impacts student achievement. Some work in this area has already been done, and somewhat surprisingly, the results to date are mixed. Some studies reported a positive impact. In some studies, the correlations were weak, and in others online homework had no impact on exam scores. “The lack of consensus on the effectiveness of online homework highlights the need for further investigations.” (p. 71)

This research team decided to go with an online homework system that had showed better student performance than text-based homework in previous research. “For our study, we examined whether the previously reported learning gains for this online homework system were an isolated instance of success, specific to an instructor, or whether the system had the same efficacy when taught by multiple instructors over multiple years.” (p. 72) To answer that question, researchers collected data from 13 sections of the same course, enrolling 3,806 students and taught by five different instructors over a six-year period.

The course was the first term of a yearlong chemistry sequence. Each course was taught using the traditional lecture-discussion format. Individual instructors did make course-related decisions. “We designed the study to examine whether there was a correlation between success and the use of this online homework in different settings in which the instructors were free to make all the teaching decisions.” (p. 72) Instructors had to agree to use the online homework consistently across the course sections.

“The study revealed that the online homework system provided an overall benefit that promoted student learning in large-scale introductory science instruction.” (p. 77) Completion of the homework led to higher scores on the finals. Even when the researchers adjusted for students’ level of preparation for class, “the online homework substantially influenced exam performance.” (p. 70)

Students also noted the value of the homework. In response to a survey question that asked how much each of several aspects of the course helped their learning, they rated the online homework problems in improving their understanding of course material a 3.55 (SD 0.91) out of 5 points possible. In a summary of the student assessments, the researchers write, “Overall, students appreciated online homework most when it was easy to use, carefully planned and integrated seamlessly with course material, and supported by the instructors and teaching assistants.” (p. 77) Among a number of recommendations made for implementing online homework across multiple sections with different instructors, they point out the importance of faculty and teaching assistant attitudes toward online homework. “If the instructors and teaching assistants enthusiastically embraced the approach, integrating the assignments with their course materials, their students embraced it too.” (p. 76)

Reference: Arasasinghma, R. D., Martorell, I., and McIntire, T. M. (2011). Online homework and student achievement in a large enrollment introductory science course. Journal of College Science Teaching, 40 (6), 70-79.

Reprinted from Online Homework Makes a Difference, The Teaching Professor, 25.10 (2011): 2.

The authors follow with another important point. Advice on assignments that promote critical thinking is pretty generic. “Most suggestions … offer vague advice: allow students to discuss matters, tell students they need to think critically, ask them to rewrite.” (p. 624) Concrete examples that have been used in the classroom and assessed for their effectiveness are not commonly available. And one goal of this article is to remedy that deficiency.

The article, written for political science teachers, is a bit more discipline-specific than those customarily highlighted in this newsletter, but the assignment suggestions would work in other fields and the article has great value as a model. All disciplines would benefit from pedagogical scholarship like this. All disciplines are pretty nonspecific on the details of assignments and activities that promote and develop these all-important critical-thinking skills.

If one aspect of critical thinking is questioning the evidence presented in support of a claim, these authors maintain that students need to be able to differentiate between factual statements (those that make concrete assertions that can be verified), normative statements (which use value-based ideas, either good or bad), interpretive statements (which use textual materials to establish what an author means), and causal statements (which make cause-effect arguments).

After presenting material on evidence, offering examples, and giving students a chance to practice recognizing different statements, these authors give their students a quiz that contains samples of each of these statements. They usually devote an entire period to going over the quiz, as it generates much discussion. If students effectively argue that a particular statement might belong to another category, they are given some extra credit.

To learn the difference between relevant and irrelevant facts, students come to class with two double-spaced copies of a paper due that day. Before submitting the paper, they are instructed to go through it and identify each statement as one of the four described in the paragraph above. “If the paper assignment is to make and support a causal claim, student submissions should propose causal arguments and use relevant facts and logic to provide supporting evidence.” (p. 621) Frequently students find they have made errors. If they identify them, they can earn back some of the points they have lost for making them. The authors note that after this activity, student performance on subsequent papers improves significantly.

To help students understand how interpretive arguments work, teachers have them complete an assigned reading and then “write two logically distinct but plausible interpretations of a particular quotation that they select from the text.” (p. 621) In class they spend time in groups discussing their interpretations, offering each other feedback. Each group then presents the best pair of competing interpretations to the rest of the class for more discussion and feedback.

Other assignments are presented in the article, along with specific recommendations as to the political science content used in them. They are not relevant to those outside the discipline, but the authors make one final point that is extremely relevant. Faculty do not share assignment designs all that frequently, and that is our loss. The various electronic media options expedite this kind of exchange. Assignments carefully designed to accomplish specific goals, like the development of critical-thinking abilities, take time and effort to create. We should be sharing the results with each other. This article illustrates the valuable contribution made by this kind of scholarship.

Reference: Fitzgerald, J. and Baird, V. A. (2011). Taking a step back: Teaching critical thinking by distinguishing appropriate type of evidence. PS, Political Science and Politics, (July), 619-624.

Reprinted from Assignments That Promote Critical Thinking, The Teaching Professor, 25.10 (2011): 4.

Not only is it a learner-centered approach that gets students off the sidelines and actively involved in and responsible for their learning, but, pragmatically speaking, experiential learning inside the classroom is welcomed by students with busy schedules and doesn’t carry the logistical burden for faculty that community-based programs can, said Barbara Jacoby, Faculty Associate for Leadership and Community Service-Learning at the University of Maryland, College Park.

During the recent online seminar Experiential Learning Inside the Classroom, Jacoby explained what experiential learning is, and what it’s not. She also talked about the most appropriate times to use it, and provided examples of how to set up an experiential learning exercise using role-plays, problem-based learning, group projects, and debate and deliberation — any of which could occur in a variety of disciplines.

“In experiential learning, the teacher takes the role of the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage,” Jacoby said. “So the nature of the teaching experience really changes from transferring knowledge to be regurgitated on an exam to guiding students through the process of learning, providing information and resources as needed.

“Faculty roles include selecting suitable learning experiences, posing challenges and problems, co-creating with students the safe learning environment that learning requires, supporting students as learners, and facilitating critical reflection. Experiential learning in the classroom looks and is different from what happens in the traditional classroom. It is not, as it is sometimes accused of being, students teaching themselves. It is certainly not lightweight, fluffy, or busywork. It is not about experience alone.”

Critical reflection, and getting students to participate in that process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning, are key components of any successful experiential learning exercise. Critical reflection can be done individually or in groups, and it can take many forms — oral, written, or through digital media, Jacoby said.

Steps for Design and Implementation of Experiential Learning
To get started with an experiential learning activity in your course, Jacoby offers the following guidelines:

1. Identify learning outcomes.
2. Create a safe environment.
3. Select an activity that pushes students to their learning edge.
4. Introduce students to the concept and practice; cover basic material.
5. Engage students; provide guidance and support.
6. Discuss the process and result.
7. Provide structure for critical reflection.
8. Obtain feedback throughout the process.
9. Assess learning.

“Assessment and grading in experiential learning often produces angst for faculty members who have never done it. They wonder ‘How will I know it? How will I know that they’ve achieved it? How will I know it when I see it?’” said Jacoby. “The answer? Rubrics. I can’t emphasize enough how effective I believe rubrics are. I give students rubrics early. That way they know my expectations, and it also enables me to be consistent in my grading.”

If there is one major paper in the course and 80% of their final grade depends on their ability to meet the high expectations of that paper, they better be able to produce a quality piece right out of the gate. However, often they’ve not had any preparation to meet these high expectations and no opportunity to revise and resubmit their work. Whether your students are “grade-focused” or “learning-focused,” they will benefit from the energy you put providing scaffolding opportunities for each major or key assignment in a course. A good rule of thumb is the higher the stakes, the more scaffolding you need to include. In other words, the heavier the weight, the stronger the support.

Getting Started with Scaffolding
Take some time to evaluate how you’ve designed the learning experiences in your courses. Identify what your major assignments/assessments are and then create a scaffold for each. One unintended outcome of this exercise is that you may discover that either you have an assignment that is no longer relevant or you are missing something that might even be a more meaningful gauge of student learning. Consider these tips to scaffolding a major assignment or assessment.

• Write a brief description of each major assignment/assessment which should include the necessary skills you intend to evaluate using the assignment/assessment.
• Ponder what prerequisite skills are necessary for students to have in order to be successful on this assignment/assessment and list them.
• Determine whether these prerequisite skills are reasonable for students to have already mastered prior to beginning your course.
  • If not, these are the skills you will want to scaffold into your current course in order to better prepare learners to be successful on the major assignments/assessments.

• Look at the scope of the course and come up with mini assignments or learning experiences that can be purposefully introduced throughout the schedule of sessions in a way that offers learners time to learn and practice these prerequisite skills.
• Create a curriculum map or outline of how each major assignment/assessment is scaffolded.
• Learners should be made aware of this scaffolding; be transparent about how you designed their learning experiences to work together in a relevant and logical way.
• If you are the lead on this course, make sure that anyone else who teaches it understands the rationale behind the design of each major assignment/assessment and includes the scaffolded experiences. Avoid using scholarly jargon in your rationale so that the purpose of your design is clear for everyone who encounters these learning experiences.

For examples of scaffolding assignments, go here »

References
Hogan, K., & Pressley, M. (Eds.). (1997). Scaffolding student learning: Instructional approaches and issues. Louiseville, Quebec: Brookline Books.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (J. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dr. Vicki Caruana is an assistant professor at Regis University, College for Professional Studies, School of Education & Counseling.

Q: What do instructors tend to struggle with in terms of teaching inclusively?
Ouellett: People really struggle with the need to break teaching inclusively into manageable pieces. They tend to see it as all or nothing. Either I’m inclusive or I’m not. I think one of the things Christine and I try very hard to do is to get people to see that it’s a continuum, not a binary. No matter where your class is or where you’re starting, there are always ways to think more deeply about how to make it a more welcoming and inclusive environment for the success of all students.

Stanley: Another thing they struggle with is the notion that teaching inclusively means teaching to marginalized student populations in the classroom, not realizing that teaching inclusively actually means teaching excellence. It’s not teaching to marginalized populations. Good teaching is multicultural teaching.

Q: What are the elements of a multicultural course design?
Stanley: We approach it from four conceptual areas that are all inextricably linked—content, teaching methods, who we are as instructors, and who the students are. A lot of faculty members, particularly those who identify as white, don’t see how identity connects with their disciplines, how they teach, and what they teach. That is an area of complexity that hopefully we’ll get people to think a little more deeply about.

For example, a lot of faculty in the sciences and engineering probably think that their content doesn’t lend itself very well to talking about these issues, but it does. In the real world, engineers rarely solve problems alone. They work with others to solve problems. To me, working with others is a diversity issue.

Ouellett: There are learning-outcome goals that are true across disciplines. These are often highly correlated with creating inclusive learning environments. Being able to work effectively or successfully in groups is one of them. The other thing is the importance of learning to think critically. What we know from research is that the chances of that happening are far greater if there are multiple perspectives in the group. Some of the most recent research on groupthink shows that a minority view is often tremendously helpful. Even if the minority view doesn’t prevail, it makes the people who hold the majority perspective think more deeply and harder about the view that they hold. Even if they are not persuaded to change their position, they are, in fact, engaged in thinking more deeply about why they hold the views they do. And a lot of research shows that it’s that other perspective that brings the most important information to the decision making.

Q: What advice do you have for including multicultural learning-outcome goals in course design?
Stanley: One of the first places to start is by asking, “What do I want my students to learn from this course that they could use to live, grow, and function in an increasingly diverse global and complex world?”

Ouellett: One thing is linking multicultural learning and inclusive or diverse outcome goals with your conceptualization of excellence in your course design. In other words, these goals should not be tacked on at the end or be separate, stand-alone goals. They should link directly to the discipline and to your institution’s goals for the undergraduate experience. Christine will often begin a session by asking faculty to describe what the ideal graduate of their institution will look like. When you think of the ideal undergraduate, what content knowledge, skill sets, and values will they have that will help them be truly stellar representatives of your institution in the future? In this day and age, there’s just no way those don’t link to skill sets around multiculturalism and diversity.

Stanley: I think we’d be hard-pressed to find any institution that would say they don’t have for their graduates the learning-outcome goals of social and global competence, being able to think critically, being able to solve problems, and being able to look at issues from a multitude of perspectives. All of those learning-outcome goals are linked to diversity. It’s inescapable.

Q: How can instructors gain perspective on how inclusive their courses are?
Stanley: There are a number of avenues. You do it through self-reflection, reading, and interacting with scholars in your field who are engaged in this issue. Also, don’t be afraid to try new things in the classroom and get feedback from students.

Ouellett: Another way to do this is to identify people in your social and professional network who are equally committed to these issues and then strive to have a sustained dialogue with them. There are a couple of aspects to this process that are really important. There has to be reciprocity. You can’t just call someone when you’re in the deep end of the pool and you don’t know what to do. You have to be there, listen to them, and be supportive of them. The other piece to this is that it has to be someone you’ve built a trusting relationship with so you can give and receive feedback. One way to develop this relationship is through co-teaching. Invite people into your classroom to do a module. Maybe you can observe them the first time, but I would hope that by the second or third time, you’ll be co-facilitating. The process of getting ready for that module and the process of debriefing together afterward are the kinds of experiences that build that kind of relationship.

That’s a question that has already been addressed in previous research, and this study builds on previously published work by this research team. They hypothesized that adding lots of active learning to the course and combining it with frequent formative assessment would reduce failure rates. They tested that hypothesis across six quarters, with 2,100 students enrolled in a three-quarter, introductory, biology sequence for majors and those in related fields. Their study design is robust and approachably described in the article.

Here’s a brief rundown of the active learning and formative assessment activities they included in the course.

• Socratic lecturing, which meant frequent use of questions. Students volunteered answers and were called on. Sometimes the think/pair/share strategy was used.
• Ungraded, active learning exercises including minute papers, case studies with question sets completed in groups, writing answers to exam-style questions followed by discussion, and in-class demonstrations that involved student participation.
• Clicker questions that were multiple choice. Students first answered individually and then re-answered after discussing with others seated nearby.
• Practice exams given weekly online and peer graded. Students were given 35 minutes to respond to five short-answer questions. Software then randomly and anonymously distributed the answers and grading rubrics to students. Points on these practice exams equaled about 8 percent of the total course grade.
• Class notes summaries where, in a weekly assignment, students stated the three most important concepts introduced each day in lecture and raised a question about any of this material they did not understand well. This assignment counted for about 2 percent of the total course grade.
• Reading quizzes, available online every afternoon after class until the morning of the next class session. They consisted of multiple-choice questions that were corrected electronically. Students could use their books and notes to find the answers and they could collaborate with others in the class. These quizzes counted for about 8 percent of the total course grade.
• In-class group exercises involving exam-style questions on the topic currently being discussed. After group discussion, students were randomly called on and asked to share answers with the whole class.

These activities were added gradually across six quarters, which allowed for empirical assessment of three different conditions: one with low structure, meaning fewer activities, more lecture, and fewer high-stakes assessments; one with medium structure, which included more activities and formative assessments; and one with high structure, where all the activities and assessments listed above were used. The pragmatic question that comes to mind most immediately is how they managed to get all the content covered in the course. They answer, “Reading quizzes solve one of the standard objections to active learning—the content coverage has to be drastically reduced. Reading quizzes shift the burden of learning the ‘easy stuff’—the vocabulary and basic ideas—to the students. The premise is that this information can be acquired by reading and quizzing as well as it is by listening to a lecture.” (p. 184) It is also worth noting that these were large courses that were supported by graduate teaching assistants.

As for their hypothesis: Did failure rates in the course decline, and was course rigor maintained? In most courses, content rigor is assessed by using the same exams. For reasons of academic integrity, researchers decided they could not keep administering the same exams. However, they devised a robust system for ensuring that all exams included in the study were of equivalent difficulty. “When we controlled for variation in student ability, failure rates were lower in the moderately structured course design and dramatically lower in a highly structured course design.” (p. 175) The failure rate went from 18.2 percent in the low-structured version of the course to 6.3 percent in the highly structured course design.

Reference: Freeman, S., Hauk, D., and Wenderoth, M.P. (2011). Increased course structure improves performance in introductory biology. Cell Biology Education—Life Sciences Education, 10 (Summer), 175-186.

Reprinted from “An Approach that Decreases Failure Rates in Introductory Courses” The Teaching Professor, 25.8 (2011): 4-5.

Begin with a solid foundation in online learning pedagogy and technical knowledge. “If you are an experienced online instructor, you are much more likely to produce a much higher-quality blended course because you’ve been involved in all the technology-mediated types of issues that you would have come across in an online modality. So you’re familiar with what can go wrong. You have something you can really build on.

“Whenever you talk to online instructors who are moving into blended, they say, ‘I’m so glad I can do this because there have been these three or four units that I’ve always struggled doing online, and I would love to do them face-to-face.’ They’re really eager and have a really good sense of what they want to do in the classroom, which is something that the face-to-face instructor does not necessarily have the benefit of.”

Use a modular design. A blended course that is composed of modules or discrete chunks is easier to update as the instructor gains experience and finds ways to make incremental improvements, Diaz says.

Integrate the two modes. “I think when content is properly integrated there’s an interdependence between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on online. There needs to be an ahead-of-time accountability measure, such as a quiz, so that when students show up in class or when they show up online you have a way of knowing beforehand. I don’t necessarily mean the day before but maybe two or three days before so that you have a chance to intervene,” Diaz says. “For instance, if you’re going to have some project-based work in your class and you would have had to have spent some time mastering concepts to be able to execute or apply something in the class environment, you ideally would know that a few days in advance. If they’re not participating, you have a chance to do something about it.

“That implies that you’re doing higher-stakes work in class than you did before, so students cannot just come and listen to you for an hour because they’re going to be doing something. It’s less of a transmission model, where the instructor is just lecturing and students are just listening.”

Get help. Take advantage of support within your institution even if you are not required to do so. Under the best circumstances you will have the time, compensation, and technical and pedagogical support to help design your blended course. In addition to general faculty development, Diaz recommends seeking a mentor within your discipline to address issues that are specific to your course content.

For more on blended learning, see Blended Learning Course Design Mistakes to Avoid.

Excerpted from “Recommendations for Blended Learning Course Design.” Online Classroom, (October 2011): 1, 3.

Students enrolled in my class taught a family member (loosely defined as someone close to the student) about the history of our profession, occupational therapy. At the beginning of the course, I explained that we’d be using this model to learn the history. I assigned readings about our history and then presented other historical material in class. After reading and listening to this historical content, students were asked to complete a self-reflective learning audit at the end of class. They were given five minutes to write down every historical fact they could remember.

Then students went home and gave a history lesson to their family members. They administered pre- and post-tests to document changes in family members’ knowledge, and they chose how to present the content. At the next class session, I tested the students’ knowledge of this historical material. I also asked them to answer several quantitative and qualitative questions about their family members’ involvement. At the end of the course, student volunteers participated in a focus group during which I once again tested their knowledge and asked them to respond to the same quantitative and qualitative questions. I wanted to see if they had retained the knowledge and whether they now responded to those questions differently.

Success of this new approach was apparent in several ways. Students averaged a grade of “A” on test scores of their knowledge of the history. Post-test scores indicated that the students had successfully taught their family members. When I asked them, “What do you know about the historical paradigms of our profession?” on average, the number of items that they could state about each paradigm increased slightly after teaching their family members. On the qualitative questions, students’ answers were generally very positive. They felt they taught their family members successfully and that the teaching experience helped them learn the history. As one student noted, “I had to learn it well enough to teach it.” They also felt that this exercise helped them develop a skill they will regularly use in their clinical practice. They realized their strengths (“patience,” “communication,” and “creativity”) and weaknesses (“need to improve teaching skills”) as illustrated by comments like these: “It made me realize how important it is to listen to your patient/student” and “You must adapt to the person you are teaching.”

As a teacher I learned two important lessons as well. First off, if some part of the course content isn’t a joy for you to teach, you may be better off devising some sort of self-directed activity that lets students learn the content on their own. Obviously, the teacher still needs to provide resources and guide students’ acquisition of the material. I also found that this model, where students teach the content to someone else, helps them learn the material at the same time it develops their teaching skills. In my field, students need to know this content and they must be able to teach their clients.

Veronica T. Rowe is a clinical instructor of occupational therapy at the University of Central Arkansas.

Reprinted from “Teaching Something You Don’t Like: A Model That Works” The Teaching Professor, 25.6 (2011): 2.

In an interview with Online Classroom, Veronica Diaz, associate director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, talked about how to avoid common mistakes in blended course design.

Blended Learning Course Design Mistake #1: Adopting an add-on model. Diaz recommends designing a blended course from scratch; however, a lack of time and resources often means that instructors will redesign existing courses. “Nine times out of 10 there are going to be pretty significant constraints, so you’re likely to do this on the fly, where you will put some things online as a supplement rather than truly having an online component that is integrated with your face-to-face component. That’s when the problems really start. You end up having what they call ‘a course-and-a-half,’ which is a lot more than either the faculty member or students bargained for,” Diaz says.

Blended Learning Course Design Mistake #2: Lack of coherence between online and face-to-face modes. The add-on model of blended course design can lead to a disconnect between the face-to-face and online modes within a blended course. When students do not see the connection between the two modes, they tend to participate less, Diaz says. When faced with constraints, instructors often “end up adding things with really little thought given to the relationship between the online and face-to-face components,” Diaz says.

Blended Learning Course Design Mistake #3: attempting direct conversion from one mode to the other. Those who are new to blended (or online) course design tend to convert content from the face-to-face classroom without taking into account the differences between the two modes. When instructors try to convert their face-to-face lectures to the online format, the lectures often are less effective. “They don’t translate well. They’re not effective for students. Students do not [view or listen to lectures], because who wants to sit there and listen? There are too many distractions,” Diaz says.

This is not to say that lecture capture, narrated PowerPoint, or other similar content is inappropriate. “I think short lectures that are very topically based are helpful…I think there are still a lot of folks out there who will record an entire lecture. That’s not translating, that’s just converting,” Diaz says.

Excerpted from “Recommendations for Blended Learning Course Design.” Online Classroom, (October 2011): 1, 3.

For more on blended course design, see Best Practices for Designing Successful Blended Courses, an online seminar presented by Veronica Diaz that’s now available on CD.

McGown and Lightbody, authors of the article referenced below, explain how they arrived at the conclusion that there is a need for a different kind of assignment to deal with plagiarism issues. Currently, most students are taught the principles of referencing using detailed guidelines that include examples of how the principles should be applied to individual sources. Most of the time, students are taught about using the material of others and crediting those sources in some sort of composition course. Then students are expected to apply what they’ve learned when they prepare written materials in subsequent courses. McGown and Lightbody felt that students needed instruction beyond the guidelines and that they needed repeated instruction in subsequent courses, especially those courses in the major. Not all fields handle the use of sources in the same way. Once students are in a major, they need to learn the particulars of referencing for that field.

McGown and Lightbody teach accounting, and so their assignment deals with accounting content. They write that they hoped to achieve two goals with the assignment: they wanted to increase students’ understanding of the nature of plagiarism in the accounting field and they wanted to use the assignment to develop students’ knowledge of a particular accounting issue.

Here are the details of the assignment. Because they didn’t want to devote class time to covering the plagiarism content, they had students complete an online workshop that described the nature of plagiarism, the consequences of plagiarizing, and how students could avoid doing it. Students also read a referencing guide.

With that background, students were given a short (900-word) faculty-prepared essay. It included arguments and evidence relating to the accounting topic. It also included references to a variety of sources—some Web-based and some in library databases, including an academic journal, a professional publication, and a newspaper, among others. The essay contained 10 examples of plagiarism. Some were copied word for word from the resource. Others paraphrased sentences and paragraphs, and still others used author ideas and research data without acknowledgment. Students had to consult the original sources and use them to identify the plagiarized content in the essay. Then they had to resubmit the essay with those instances of plagiarism corrected and appropriately referenced. They also had to prepare a correctly referenced, 250-word conclusion to the essay.

Student scores on the corrected essay—they had to identify and correct at least 70 percent of the plagiarized content and correct at least one example of each kind of plagiarism—indicated their understanding of plagiarism. They were able to identify it and make the necessary corrections. The authors also asked students for their perceptions of how well they understood plagiarism before and after the assignment. In the two years when the assignment was first used, 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively, rated their initial knowledge of plagiarism as good. That percentage jumped to 85 for both cohorts after they had completed the assignment. A number of student comments in the article speak to the effectiveness of the assignment. Even more telling, no further cases of plagiarism were detected in that course, and the instructor of a subsequent course taken by these students “noted a substantial decline in the number of cases of plagiarism.” (p. 281)

Reference: McGowan, S., and Lightbody, M. (2008). Enhancing students’ understanding of plagiarism within a discipline context. Accounting Education, 17 (3), 273-290.

Excerpted from The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 2.

Just as colleges have integrated Reading Across the Curriculum, at Lower Columbia College we integrate Critical Thinking and Information Literacy across the curriculum. This can lead instructors to say: “I have to teach the material of the discipline, how can I also teach the skills of source evaluation, citation, plagiarism, summarization, and formatting – all of which they should have learned as freshmen?”

Librarians to the rescue
There are many reasons students may not have learned evaluation, citation, summarization and formatting skills. Sometimes they have been exposed to these ideas, but have not been able to transfer them from course to course. Sometimes they have skipped pre-requisites. Sometimes they just need additional exposure to the ideas. Whatever the reason, the librarians can help teach or reteach these ideas. We have been integrating information literacy across the curriculum at Lower Columbia College using several different approaches.

One approach brings the librarian into the class where we can lead sessions on topics such as source evaluation. In fact, our first LSTA grant involved working with instructors to create lessons in which students review different types of sources appropriate for the subject at hand, and identify why the material would be more or less appropriate for different types of audiences. Some instructors prefer to have us grade these assignments or discussion forums, others prefer to do it themselves – but either way, it eases the burden on the discipline instructor (Determining).

A second approach involves the preparation of a subject guide for a course or entire department. We use a standardized outline of the research process (overview, keywords, article selections, article evaluation, citation, presentation format), and populate that outline with resources and links for students. One grant allowed us to create our first subject guide. It was on business management and the librarian identified subject encyclopedias and links to various books and other resources available through the college. The business instructor identified specific web resources to help students. We also linked particularly useful databases directly to the subject guide. The preferred citation format for the discipline is identified on the subject guide, as well as links to resources explaining it, and to a citation generator which does it reasonably well. The librarian embedded videos of the research process into the subject guide to make it even clearer for students as they walk through the research process (Business).

Another approach involves the use of a prepared videocast or PowerPoint presentation. Our instructors may say “I’m going to assign an article review in Genetics,” and we will make an instructional screencast showing the students how to access articles, how to compare them, and how to cite them. This third LSTA grant coincided with the development of a new genetics course, and included creating of a subject guide, research tutorials, and online assistance. The instructor asked the librarian to grade the article quality and the accuracy of the citations, allowing the instructor to concentrate on content (GillaspySteinhilper).

Instructors have found these resources helpful to their students in different ways. Some require students to walk through the subject guide tutorials for credit – others offer them as options. Other instructors embed the tutorials into an online class, or ask the librarian to visit the classroom and offer the tutorials for a refresher. And some instructors want quizzes based on the tutorials, some use them as the basis for discussion forums. Our librarians try to accommodate whatever method is most useful to the instructor.

You may not have space in your classroom to teach research skills. However, that is one basis of the library discipline, and we will teach it wherever we can. Just ask us.

Andrea Gillaspy-Steinhilper is a reference librarian at Lower Columbia College.

References:
“Business Administration subject guide.” (rev. 2011) Lower Columbia College Library Services. Retrieved May 2012 from http://lowercolumbia.edu/nr/exeres/9CC35863-7A1D-4F77-88D0-6E2E2F083DC9.

“Determining the level of scholarship, authorship, and audience of an article.” (2011). Lower Columbia College Library Services. Retrieved 29 June 2012 from https://lstahighlights.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/ppt_scholarly_v_popular.pdf.

GillaspySteinhilper, A. (Winter 2012). “Cancer and genetic mutations.” Tegrity Recording. Lower Columbia College Library Services. Retrieved 11 May 2012 from https://tegr.it/y/aom1.

Washington State Community and Technology Colleges LSTA Grant 2008-2012. (25 April 2012). Retrieved 11 May 2012 from http://informationliteracywactc.pbworks.com/w/page/19923193/FrontPage.

They undertook a major redesign of the lab report assignment, guided by three principles they believed would improve the quality of those reports. First, they decided less might be better. Rather than 10 to 15 lab reports they reduced the number to four, reasoning that by requiring fewer they could set the quality standard much higher. Second, they decided that they would give lots of initial guidance on the writing and their expectations for it, but then they would gradually reduce that guidance and have students work more autonomously. Finally, they decided that their redesigned assignment needed to give students experience with both the review and revision processes. Based on those principles, here’s what the new assignment looked like.

For the first experiment, each student wrote an abstract and a materials and methods section according to the formal journal-style lab report protocols. These were peer reviewed using a Calibrated Peer Review approach that I’ll describe shortly. For experiments 1–4, two-to-three-member student groups wrote the journal lab reports using a writing-cycle process. Each individual student produced a one-page Excel report with tables, figures, conclusion, and references that conveyed the essential aspects of experiments 5–10. Each individual then selected one of these experiments and wrote a complete journal-style lab report for it.

To help students understand the writing demands of this kind of lab report, the authors prepared an Integrated Writing Guide that included a sample lab report. Each section was accompanied with a grading checklist, which made it clear exactly what the instructors were looking for when they graded each section. For experiments 2–4 they posted detailed grading rubrics on the course website. For the final lab report, students were on their own.

The review and revision process used the Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) model, which includes writing, calibration, peer review, self-assessment, and then revision. Here’s how that worked with the first lab assignment. Students uploaded their written abstract to the CPR website (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu). Then they read three instructor-written abstracts of varying quality that they graded. Next, they were randomly assigned three abstracts written by their classmates, which they also read and graded online. Finally, they returned to their own abstract, which they read and graded. When students graded the work online, they were guided by questions. Once they completed the CPR process, they were given access to the reviews of their peers, and that’s when they revised their work.

In preparing the group reports for experiments 2–4, students prepared one report for each group. They were assigned roles: lead author, reviewer, and editor. The roles rotated each week so that students had the opportunity to complete the tasks associated with each role.

The authors summarize their description of the project with these comments: “We found that improving writing required giving the students more time to write, providing more specific guidance on both the form and content of their reports, and including opportunities for them to gain experience with the review and revision process.” (p. 65)

Even though your students may not do lab reports, this article is instructive because it demonstrates the careful planning that goes into designing assignments that develop skills and foster understanding. As students prepared these reports, they learned about physical chemistry, but they also learned about technical writing and how much good writing depends on feedback and revision.

Reference: Gragson, D. E., and Hagen, J. P. (2010). Developing technical writing skill in the physical chemistry laboratory: A progressive approach employing peer review. Journal of Chemical Education, 87 (1), 62-65.

Reprinted from Better Writing in Lab Reports The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 5.

Here’s one strategy that will not only encourage your students to read the syllabus, but it will also allow you to stimulate discussion, create curiosity, and assess students’ knowledge on the first day of class.

Step 1: After you create your syllabus, go back to and take a closer look at your learning outcomes for the course. As you read through the outcomes, write a discussion question related to each outcome. For example, suppose you teach a political science course and one of your learning outcomes is, “Students will be able to discuss current issues in political science informed by popular media and scholarly evidence.” Now take that learning outcome and write a discussion question. Preferably, you want to write a question that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Think about the “big picture” questions that relate to the overall goals of your course and then try to write the question in a way that generates discussion. For example, a question related to our political science learning outcome example could be, “What are the differences between sources of popular media and sources of scholarly evidence?” Or, “What sources of popular media do you rely on to stay informed about current issues in the world?” Notice how the first question assesses students’ knowledge of course content. The second question assesses their behaviors. Design your questions to focus on the information that is most important for you, your course, and your students.

Step 2: After you have written at least one discussion question for each of your learning outcomes, think about which sections of your syllabus relate to each of the outcomes. Do you see places in your syllabus where you could embed one of your discussion questions? For example, suppose you have a section in your syllabus explaining the first research paper. Using the political science example, you could embed the question, “What are the differences between sources of popular media and sources of scholarly evidence?” as a springboard to a discussion on the appropriate types of resources for an academic paper. The goal here is to use “chunking” to divide your syllabus into areas for discussion based on your learning outcomes. Continue embedding discussion questions throughout the whole syllabus. Keep the text and font consistent with your overall syllabus. You may not want your discussion questions to stand out too much. Your goal is to encourage students to read each section and find the discussion question themselves.

Step 3: After you have embedded all of your discussion questions, you’re ready to share your course syllabus with your students. Think about how you want to integrate the discussion questions into your first day of class. You might decide to go through each section of the syllabus, stopping to discuss each of your questions. Or, you might want to assign the questions for homework, or create discussion boards online to encourage students to share their opinions, thoughts, and ideas about the questions. Depending on how you design the questions, their responses will also allow you to see any gaps in their knowledge, allowing you to create resources or assignments to help them build the skills they need to succeed in your course.

Not every learning outcome will be relevant for embedding as a discussion question in your syllabus, but every course has “big picture” questions that you can use to start a discussion. Think about how your course connects to those big ideas to help students see the impact of the course beyond the semester.

Dr. Barbi Honeycutt is the Founder of Flip It Consulting, which is designed to help presenters, teachers, and managers reverse the design of “traditional” presentations, classes, and meetings. She also serves as an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy, Adult and Higher Education and the Director of Graduate Teaching Programs at NC State University.

For more on Instructional Design, download a FREE copy of Course Design and Development Ideas That Work!

Sign In Create an Account

The author who describes this idea did not adopt it to refresh his course. He developed the approach to help students in a course with content they often struggled to master. The approach works with this issue as well. In this example, the course was marketing research and the metaphor was jazz.

For this approach to work, you need a metaphor that fits the goals and objectives of the course. Here’s how that worked with the jazz metaphor. “Within the improvisational jazz medium skillful performance requires full knowledge of (a) the context, (b) techniques, options and creative application of those techniques, (c) virtuosity and artistry, (d) creative listening to work with others in the group, (e) leadership (in whole or part), (f) confidence, and (g) … collaboration.” (p. 305). And those skills are consistent with marketing research requirements that call on professionals to “improvise and creatively weave through more complex information in a way that benefits decision making and the profession.” (p. 302) In other words, the jazz metaphor represents those understandings and skills that students need to develop in this course.

The approach is further explained with a couple of examples illustrating how this instructor used the metaphor in his course. They show how an approach like this might benefit students. However, the design and implementation of activities like this would also benefit an instructor looking for a way to make a familiar course different and exciting. This instructor introduces the metaphor on the first day of class. Students are divided into groups of five, with each student assigned an instrument (guitar, bass, piano, drums, etc.). They role-play, imagining that they are in an improvising band. After a very brief rehearsal, this “band” must play (and improvise) an easy jazz tune for the rest of the class. Students are encouraged to have fun; the instructor describes their performances as entertaining. Afterward, he has them discuss the similarity of skills needed by a jazz group and those needed in the marketing research process.

The metaphor is carried across a number of different classroom activities that are described in the article. When it’s about time for students to present their research, they are divided into small groups and tasked with generating a list of characteristics that make for a bad performance. Then students consider how a jazz player might approach making a presentation more interesting.

The success of an approach like this rests on finding a metaphor that fits your course. The author does offer some useful guidelines. You want one “that is easily understandable, translates well, is not contextually or culturally constrained, and therefore can successfully aid student visualization and action.” (p. 302) You also need a metaphor that connects with student interests. Although not all students like jazz, virtually all college students do relate to music. The author also reports that the more you use the metaphor, the better the students are able to apply it to course content.

The approach as it was used here was not equally successful with all students, but a number of student comments included in the article attest to its effectiveness for some. “At the beginning I was a bit put off when this guy started off talking about and playing jazz in a marketing research course. I mean, what planet was he from? But his method gradually won me over. Now I use jazz thinking in a lot of my courses, and other things as well.” (pp. 309-310)

Clearly this isn’t one of those quick-fix solutions, but, then, courses that we’ve been through many, many times aren’t “fixed” with a couple of new techniques. More often they need to be taken apart at the seams, redesigned, and reassembled as an entirely new garment, to explain with another a metaphor.

Reference: Mills, M. K. (2010). Using the jazz metaphor to enhance student learning and skill development in the marketing research course. Journal of Marketing Education, 32 (3), 300-313.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.1 (2011): 6.

For example, I found success in using this model for a course in the domestic politics of foreign countries that I teach. Originally I lectured on political parties, election systems, leadership, major political issues, success and failure in politics in the UK. Now, with the role play model, I invite students to form teams based on political parties: Labor, Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Each team works together to assign the various responsibilities: party leader, campaign manager, fundraiser, speech writer, etc.

During several class periods, the students go through a mock election, with all the usual events – a stump speech, the unveiling of a new commercial, the leaders’ debate on television. In other words, instead of the drip-drip of information from the professor in lectures, the students immerse themselves in the content. Over the years, I have developed simulations for lobbying government, preparing a federal budget, even the application and selection process for government grants.

If you’re interested in designing a role play simulation for your course, you’ll want to keep certain principles in mind:

Breakdown the role play simulation into specific tasks with due dates. This will keep students organized and on track, and prevent them from getting overwhelmed.

It is important to structure the tasks so that the content you want is covered as close to reality as possible. It also helps to start with a role play simulation that imitates a well-known situation. Allow some class time for teamwork, but let students know that most of the work will need to be done outside of class — in face-to-face or online collaborations.

Address the natural anxieties of students being taught in a radically different way from what they have in the past. Most students are used to their teachers feeding them the information, so this will be a new experience for them.

Addressing student anxieties about this way of learning is particularly important in disciplines or universities where the lecture-essay-exam model is the most common. I’ve found it helps to provide students with examples of work produced by students in previous courses.

You also want to be clear in communicating your expectations. Write out the rules and requirements, and enforce them so the process is predictable. Make sure the teams are small enough that everyone participates and spot check to see that everyone actually does what they are supposed to – the free-rider problem isn’t going to go away. Also, take into account that, depending on their personality or culture of origin, some students may need extra encouragement to participate.

Make the introduction of role plays manageable for the instructor. This method of teaching is much more work than lecturing, so introduce it gradually, starting with an area in which you have the most expertise.

It also helps to start with a small class and move up to more students once you are fully comfortable with this new style of teaching. In some cases, you may want to have one or two single role-play exercises that fit into one class, breaking up the lectures while you find your feet.

Despite the extra work, simulations tend to result in more in-depth, long-term learning of the content as well as the development of new skills, such writing, leadership, coordination, collaboration and research.

And there’s another advantage, strictly for the instructor– it’s always fun, it’s always different, and it’s always gratifying to see students work very hard without even noticing it.

Dr. Laure Paquette is a strategist and professor at Lakehead University.

In many ways, technology can help pave the way for both faculty and students, but only if the instructor “is adept at creating a course that capitalizes on the pedagogical benefits that technology facilitates in helping students meet the desired learning outcomes for the course,” said Ike Shibley, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State – Berks. In other words, technology for the sake of technology is never good.

In the recent online seminar Learner-Centered Technology: Aligning Tools with Learning Goals, Shibley provided a roadmap for matching technological tools to course learning outcomes. Grounded in the five core principles of learner-centered teaching, Shibley explained specific ways technology can be used to get students to interact with course content in an engaging and productive fashion.

Here are some of the ways technology can help satisfy the goals of a learner-centered classroom:

1. Shift the balance of power toward the learner: Interactive online assignments can help facilitate the transfer of power and give students opportunities to practice mastering the material at their own pace. The technologies that support these activities could include wikis, online quizzes, blogs and discussion boards.

2. Use content to organize activities: Students appreciate a structured, logical flow to their courses, and how you organize your assignments and activities can go a long way in minimizing confusion. The technologies that support how you organize and communicate course materials and expectations could include an online syllabus, the learning management system, and email notifications of important due dates.

3. Think of teaching as facilitating learning: Teaching with technology enables the instructor to create learning experiences that complement each other whether the students are working on an assignment online or meeting in a face-to-face environment. The technologies that support this goal include online homework, clickers and surveys.

4. Responsibility for learning rests with the learner: Learner-centered teaching means creating assignments that allow students to practice building connections with the material, and evaluate their learning. The technologies that can be used to help students take ownership of their learning include blogs, wikis, online quizzes, and VoiceThread.

5. Evaluation provides a way to foster learning: Shibley likes to use a lot of low-stakes grading opportunities, and he gives students multiple attempts to pass online quizzes. There are numerous technologies that can help students track their progress, including online quiz banks and online platforms that enable collaboration and peer review.

Although he admits that integrating technology takes a fair amount of upfront time in terms of getting past the learning curve and choosing the correct technology to support each learning objective, Shibley says the payoff is a more engaged classroom and improved student learning.

“Technology does do a better job of keeping students on task,” he said. “If it’s well designed and it’s not busy work, students will spend more time on task and the assumption then, which I think has been borne out and will continue to be borne out in studies of how technology can be used in an pedagogically efficacious manner, time on task will correlate with more learning and higher test scores.”

“That’s one of the major pitfalls we see, but you really shouldn’t do that,” said Veronica Diaz, PhD associate director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. “You really want to integrate those two components so we encourage people to take the time to redesign the entire course. In other words, break the whole thing down and reassemble it in the blended mode.”

In the recent online seminar Best Practices for Designing Successful Blended Courses, Diaz outlined a model for blended learning course design. The first step, she says, is to “modularize your course.” The modular approach creates a more organized structure, which benefits students, and makes it easier for the instructor to update and maintain.

The process of modularization begins with mapping a course that you want to design or redesign into a blended format to ensure alignment across course objectives, activities, technology used, feedback mechanisms, assessments, and other key components. In the case of a face-to-face course that’s being redesigned into a blended course that often means looking at what the instructor and student each currently do to support or meet those objectives, and then consider the different ways of getting students more actively involved in their learning.

Diaz noted that, unlike in most face-to-face courses, blended courses often have a better balance between what the instructor does to support learning objectives and what the student is asked to do in terms of interacting with the course content.

“A lot of faculty express that they often get some pushback from students, because in the face-to-face course, there’s a tendency for the instructor to do a lot more of the delivery and interaction with the content,” she said. “In a blended course, students are going to spend a fair amount of time out of class, and you want to make sure that they’re involved in the learning, probably in a much deeper and more active way than they were in the past.”

Another part of the redesign process is to identify and prepare for potential “student crisis points” – issues that may interfere with the learning experience. Crisis points include issues related to technology, a complex concept, or waning motivation. By being aware of possible roadblocks to learning, and informing students of them as well, you can often minimize the disruption.