Category: Online Education

Larry C on the Chronicle’s fora said:

1. Retesting or allowing students to take a test multiple times. Especially in classes where I ahve a large bank of questions, I can set up a quiz where students may take the quiz as many times as I will allow them and keep the last grade. The way I implement this is to allow students to take a quiz twice within 3 or 4 days. If they don’t like their grade they may retake, but will get mostly or all new questions. So I tell them there is no point in retaking unless you study some more. And it is almost no effort on my part to set the quizzes up this way.

2. Show and Tell forum. For my field, history, there is so much amazing web content. I set up a forum to allow students to share whatever they have found that ties into the weeks lessons. This includes history in the news. Not everyone participates but many students love this feature.

3. Related to #1, testing and retesting over the course syllabus. I have a 20 question quiz that is basically the top 20 things students miss or find confusing about the course (because they do not read the syllabus). I put it up the first week and students may retake it until they get 100%. They love the free points, and I love teaching a class where every single student has read and understands the syllabus.

4. Rich content. Students lose my lectures but gain web exhibits, primary source databases, popular and academic history articles, podcasts, vidcasts, and blogs relevant to the course. They hardly miss me at all…

Related to number 1, being able to give the “same” quiz to different people at the same time and the answers (and the questions) can still change. I used a bank of 200 questions for a 50 question exam. It made me worry a lot less about cheating on it.

Zuzu had this to say in the same thread:

When I create discussion prompts, I love that I can embed links to online dictionaries of literary terms. For example, I just created a prompt that included the work “episodic.” Now, I am guessing maybe half of the students wouldn’t really know that term, but I am guessing about half would know it.

In a live class discussion, I can a.) not use the word OR b.) take time to define and explain the term.

Online, I can just embed a hyperlink in the word “episodic,” and whoever needs a definition can just quickly pop open a new window.

I wish I could do that with my students’ textbooks. I’m sure that soon that will be possible.

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, The New Diagnostics:

Rio Salado uses more than two dozen metrics during that first week to predict how well that student stands to fare over the entire course, but some of the most effective are the most basic: Has the student logged into the course home page during that first week? Did she log in prior to the first day of class? Other predictive metrics, such as whether a student is taking other classes at the same time, whether she has been successful in previous courses, and whether she is retaking the course, are culled from the college’s student information system.

So, they can tell which of my students are going to make it? I can see that as a very useful rubric.

I am also proud of my alma mater,

Purdue University, which has run similar predictive modeling program since 2006, and does keep students in the loop. At an “actionable analytics” symposium last month, John Campbell, the associate vice president of Purdue’s advanced computing center, said the “at-risk” students generally took that information as either a motivational kick in the rear or were prompted to quickly drop the class — and were grateful in any case. A double-blind study conducted during the first two years of the Purdue’s program, called Signals, revealed that 67 percent of students who learned they were in the middle- or high-risk categories were able to improve their grades.

Go read the whole article. It is very good.

Teaching online is an adventure.

I decided I wanted to teach online this semester in December. (Bad plan.) I had the training, but I hadn’t really played around with the software. Then the teaching session I was going to go to for two days was canceled. And I had plans for work (scholarship, research, conferences) for the break and didn’t have a lot of time to set up the class.

I did get two days of training, about a week before school was scheduled to start.

And I did get the course mostly set up by the first day.

This week, though, I discovered that on one quiz I put all the questions in one answer. So if they didn’t get 100%, they got a 0%. That wasn’t what I meant to do, so now I have to go grade those manually. (Which reminds me, I need to go see if there are other things I need to grade manually that I haven’t yet.)

Then I decided I should go through and look at what we are doing for the rest of the semester, since I really don’t remember. That is when I realized I didn’t finish the last two weeks of the class.

Oops. So I’ll be grading some forums, grading an essay, and writing the content for the last two weeks of class this weekend.

Have you ever done something foolish and not realized it?

That’s what I did.

When I set up the introduction to the course I did not set it up to track the viewers. So when I hit reports, there were none.

I worked through Automate to put up reminders that the students should access that course material, but I found that what I wanted to do I couldn’t, so I stopped. However, when I went back to look at the introduction to the course, that’s when I realized I had disabled the Track function.

So I didn’t really know whether they had looked at the material or not.

That’s something to make sure I check for each folder in the future.

By the end of the first week (not the full class week) I had 13 of my 20 registered students log into the course. If the other 7 didn’t log in by the end of the full class week, they would be dropped.

I became a pioneer.

I was the first participant (from the participant side) in a webinar through my school. Since we have 50,000 students and a very large high-tech capacity, that’s pretty amazing.

It was an online course about how to teach online.

Most of the things they were teaching I already knew and I didn’t get around to asking my questions, but… I learned some and was able to participate in something new.

Through the course I was able to find out that we have online help 12 hours a day 5 days a week for online teaching questions. That was useful.

I also found out that there are tutorials online. (I had looked for them, but in all the wrong places.)

So, I was slowly making progress with my learning and education, as my class unfolded.

One thing was very clear. If there wasn’t a grade attached to it, no one would do it. So my students totally skipped the email etiquette presentation.

At this webinar I did find out how to let them know I had noticed that. That was very useful.

The school offered two eight-hour days of online one-on-one teaching. I stayed for six hours the first day and put three weeks’ worth of my class online. Very helpful. There was an amazingly helpful online course creator there.

The second day, I stayed for three hours. I found out how to put up the electronic versions of my exams up. I figured out how to upload my pictures into my course as well.

And I found out that the reason there is no model class is because they created one last year or the year before and the teachers freaked out because they thought it was going to be required to teach it as it was. (I was among the freaking, but I wasn’t very wave-making as an adjunct.)

What I didn’t know how to do yet was use my gradebook.

That’s important, don’t you think?