Monthly Archives: March 2021

Which Tool is Best?

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One question we in eLIS are often asked is which tool is best for a particular assignment, or the obverse; what sort of assignment would a particular collaborative tool work best for? The answer, which I always imagine frustrates instructors looking for clear, unambiguous information to apply to their teaching practices is, “It depends.” We also make the point that it’s important to start from your learning objective and go from there. The tool should always be in service to what you’re trying to accomplish.

Once you have your objective defined, there are a number of considerations that can go into choosing which tool to use for, say, asking students to reflect on a reading, getting formative feedback to help determine what to emphasize in an upcoming unit, or encouraging your students to interact to inspire collaborative learning. Should you use the assignment tool or a journal? The discussion board or a blog? A wiki or VoiceThread? There may be instances where one or the other of these tools is the clear best choice, it’s true.

However, one of your main considerations should be what’s convenient and familiar to you and your students: what tool you know well enough that you can create an exercise that will bring the material or concepts you’re working with to life for learners. There’s no one tool that’s going to be the best in all instances, but if you have a go-to tool, you can almost always figure out a way to make it work for the task at hand.

In my parents’ home, the go-to tool for around-the-house, quick-fix situations was a butter knife. We used them to drive screws, scrape gunk off of pots and pans, pry up nails or push-pins, remove staples, open envelopes, scrape off excess putty or glue from quick repairs, spread butter on bread or baked potatoes, cream cheese on bagels, icing on cake, pull up burning toast out of the toaster, or in any number of other scenarios.

It may surprise you to learn that my dad was an auto body repairman, and there was always an extensive collection of tools out in the garage at our house, one of which could do almost any particular (non-food-related) job a little bit more efficiently. But a butter knife was handy, right there in the kitchen, and frankly, it did most of the jobs it was apt to be used for nearly as well as the thing you would have to go out to the garage on a cold night and rummage around to find.

Arguably the most versatile tool in Blackboard/MyLesley’s suite of tools is the discussion board. While there’s no justifiably convenient way to make it function as a private journal, for example, it does have capabilities well beyond its named purpose. It can be used as a makeshift blog or as a place to host visual student work, which is the way we most often see the wiki tool used. We’ve also seen it used as a place for students to post assignments.

The discussion board can be made gradable. Using the viewing setting “Participants must create a thread in order to view other threads in this forum,” it’s easy to make sure that students don’t see each other’s work before they submit their own. Once they do, they can automatically view the work of their peers. With the default settings of MyLesley forums, students are not able to edit their own work once it’s been submitted, although you can change that setting if you wish.

While the discussion board may be the most versatile tool in MyLesley — the true “butter knife” in your course site — it’s certainly true that virtually any of the tools available in your course site can be used in unexpected ways. It only requires your creativity and resourcefulness to find those new, unconventional repurposings.

How have you used MyLesley’s suite of tools in novel ways? We’d love to hear about it.

Community Conversations: Peer Feedback

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February’s Community Conversation focused on Peer Feedback, led by CLAS and LA+D faculty Kim Lowe, Summer Clark, Lisa Spitz, and Bill Porter. They are members of a long–standing research group that looks at ways to implement and improve peer review and critique and to “create a better learning experience.”  

Kim Lowe kicked off the conversation by explaining how she had hated peer review as a student and had vowed, “when I became a professor, I would never do it.” However, she saw the learning benefits and found the peer review protocol the group created highly effective for her students.  

Creating the Peer Review Protocol

In 2016, the interdisciplinary group began to study peer review by researching best practices for conducting peer feedback assignments, the benefits of peer feedback, and how to address challenges. The benefits of peer review include self-reflection, self-regulation, critical thinking, and communication skills that transfer not only to other classes, but to students’ professional careers. It enhances empathy and students’ ability to navigate social and emotional interactions in the classroom while exposing them to perspectives and opinions other than those of their instructor.  

Peer review also requires students to participate at a higher level of engagement. They must spend time and energy to provide constructive feedback that the other student can utilize. However, students may not trust the feedback they receive from other students and may not be sure if they should apply it or not. Students may even doubt their own ability to provide feedback.  

Due to these challenges, the first stage of the peer review protocol the group developed is to prepare students to do peer review. In this stage, the instructor builds trust in the process by discussing the strengths of peer review and, perhaps even more importantly, the reasons why they may be skeptical. Faculty should also discuss how peer review will be used within the class and model what effective peer review looks like. It’s also important to assess the feedback given, not just the assignment being reviewed.  

The second stage, the peer review session, is a scaffolded dialogue where students submit their assignment, identifying the areas where they most want feedback. Other students then provide feedback using a rubric or by answering a series of questions to guide their feedback. Students then review the feedback they received, rewriting it in their words to encourage processing, and determine how or if they will apply it.  

In the final stage, students revise their assignment. They also submit a summary noting how they implemented the feedback they received and the reasons why they made those choices. The instructor then assesses both the assignment and the student feedback.  

Internal-External Dynamic of Peer Review process

Q&A

One question asked of the group was if peer review was spreading beyond art and literature courses. Summer Clark spoke about using peer review to help her education students create better lesson plans and believes that it can be used across disciplines. The group encourages faculty to co-create criteria for reviewing work in order to create consensus and understanding around what qualities embody good work, regardless whether that work is a drawing, essay, presentation, or business analysis.  

However, that was just the beginning of the discussion, which included brainstorming strategies with the other attendees. Watch the recording to hear more and join our Faculty Community Conversation Team to continue chatting.