Author Archives: John McCormick

The First Week of Your Online Class

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If you’re new to teaching online, the first week can be a little overwhelming. It can also be hard to tell if your students are doing anything until they start posting. Below are a few tips to help you get started. You may also want to refer to our Getting Ready for a New Semester post.

  1. Gauging Student Engagement: Use the Performance Dashboard to check on student access to the course. If a student has not accessed the course in the first week, contact them immediately (by phone if necessary). It is possible that students are not using Lesley email or have neglected to link their private email to their Lesley account.
  2. Managing Discussions: Familiarize yourself with an efficient workflow for monitoring, responding to, and assessing discussions or other group activities. A common work-flow for discussion management is:
    1. Check in briefly each day to monitor activity. If students are not on-task, use the Announcements tool to guide them back on track. If private communications are necessary, use course email.
    2. Consider your role in discussions. Keep in mind that too many posts by the instructor could discourage student interaction. On the other hand, do let students know that you are monitoring the discussion, even if your presence via posting isn’t necessary.
    3. When reviewing discussions in detail, use the “Collect” tool to view all the text at one time. You also have the option to print the discussion text.
    4. Use a printout of the students’ names, along with the text of the discussion board (electronic or paper printout), to assess the quality of interaction and postings.

For additional assistance and tutorials please visit our website or contact eLIS@lesley.edu

New Online Training: Art Portfolio Reviews

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Alumni Admissions Ambassadors from across the country can now learn to review the arts portfolios of prospective students who may be interested in applying to Lesley University. Alumni Ambassadors with a background in the arts will use online, self-paced training to learn how to assess arts portfolios and to communicate with students during portfolio review events.

This new training system is being piloted this fall semester and will be used will be used by BFA and MFA alumni admissions ambassadors. This effort to extend and streamline the training process is important to the goal of enlisting more ambassadors with training and experience in the arts to assist prospective Lesley students in applying to our university.

Central to the training was the development of a set of guidelines by which to assess portfolios. These guidelines were tested by a group including recent Lesley alums and members of the Marketing Design team and updated based on their input. Trainees will learn to assess portfolios primarily by reviewing many sample portfolios and receiving automated feedback on their choices.

Arts Portfolio Guidelines Pilot Testing Event: Lunder Arts Center

Arts Portfolio Guidelines Pilot Testing Event: Lunder Arts Center

The development of this training has been a collective effort involving staff from the Alumni Recruitment, Undergraduate Admissions, and eLearning and Instructional Support departments.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about this project, please contact Liana Caffrey (Director) or Shirley Chin (Sr. Assistant Director) of the Alumni Admissions Ambassador Program: lcaffrey@lesley.edu (x8201); schin@lesley.edu (x8806).

Project Staff

Alumni Admissions Ambassador Program: Liana Caffrey, Director; Shirley Chin, Sr. Assistant Director.

Undergraduate Admissions: Erik Gullard, Assistant Director / BFA Specialist; Mike McCarthy, Assistant Director; Lauren O’Neill, Assistant Director / BFA Specialist / International Student Coordinator.

eLearning and Instructional Support: Robyn Belair, Instructional Technologist/Interface Designer; John McCormick, Director of eLearning Design; Bill Porter, Learning Technology Designer

Getting Ready for a New Semester

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The Fall semester is fast approaching and there is so much to do. Below are a few reminders and tips from our instructional design team to smooth the way and get off to a great start.

Before Your Course Begins:

Personalize Your Course: Consider which aspects of the course you want to adjust.  At minimum, this should include parts of the syllabus (your contact information, for example). If necessary, contact eLIS or use our online tutorials to learn about Blackboard editing tools.

Review and update information as necessary in the syllabus that sets expectations for communication, group work, or instructor facilitation. For example, will the pre-established turn-around times for feedback work with your schedule? Keep in mind that changes you make in the syllabus might need to be checked against content you entered into myLesley to make sure the instructions align in both locations.

Set Up a Teaching Schedule: Consider setting up a teaching schedule to better organize your teaching time.  A schedule can help you to identify when to attend to different facilitation tasks (i.e. weekly announcements, daily discussion board check-ins, major project or paper feedback, etc.).

Familiarize Yourself with These Tools:
Performance Dashboard: Use this tool to quickly view if and when students are accessing the course.
performance dashboard

Announcements Tool: Recommendations for using this tool include:

  • Always make sure to send Announcements as emails. Embedded images, video, or audio will NOT be available to students in emails.
    emailannouncement
  • Use the Announcement Tool for:
    1. Welcome messages, briefly introducing yourself and the course
    2. Introducing a new week and wrapping up a previous week
    3. Providing whole-class feedback on discussions, group work, etc.
    4. Updating students on changes to the course or assignment scheduling
    5. Clarifying any confusion that multiple students have experienced

Post a Welcome Announcement: In addition to welcoming students to the course, you might point out the syllabus and other key documents to review before beginning the first module.

Taking care of these seemingly small things now can greatly help you stay organized and in contact with your students as you move through the course.

Design Studios: Learning from Designing

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design_studio
From integrating engineering projects into K-12 education to new problem-solving processes in business, design thinking is an idea that is finding its way into areas that previously did not include such an approach. Many educators are finding that design projects provide authentic collaborative learning opportunities.

Designing thinking can also guide one’s approach to planning a course. Designing an online or hybrid course for the first time can be extremely challenging. For instructors who someday may teach in these modalities, planning a “blended activity” for a face-to-face course is a useful learning experience that serves as a great preparation for online or blended teaching. This planning process, including thinking around technology integration, benefits from a collaborative problem-solving approach. During last June’s Summer Technology Institute hosted by eLIS, instructional designers worked with small groups of faculty on identifying and working on such design projects. The week-long time period for the Institute was conducive to such work because it allowed the inclusion of both individual reflective time and collaborative discourse. The important interplay between these learning and thinking modes supports the challenging work of transforming face-to-face learning experiences into online or blended ones.

We encourage faculty members to approach this work as experimental and to consider pilot-testing the design and learning from the first iteration. If you would to learn more about how eLIS can support work of this type, please, please contact elis@lesley.edu or email John McCormick or Sarah Krongard.

Ideas for Giving Online Students Clear Feedback

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By Koui² (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsStructuring a feedback cycle in online course is in many ways no different than in a face-to-face one.  For example, if you are using peer feedback, you may already be using some of these strategies:

  • Ask students to use a standard set of criteria and a protocol to guide their feedback
  • Set expectations – emphasize the value of giving feedback. Research shows giving feedback has a positive impact on students’ own work.
  • Make giving, receiving and using feedback part of assessment
  • Create  a feedback loop:
    1. Ask those whose work is being reviewed to point out to reviewer(s) what they’d like help with in particular. Encourage them to ask questions of the reviewer.
    2. Ask students in final drafts to write a brief piece explaining how they used the feedback they received.

Some benefits of this feedback structure include:

  • Increasing student accountability for quality of feedback
  • Increasing skills in giving and using feedback
  • Streamlining  final review of student work
  • Determine the success of the feedback system
  • Determine/improve students’ skills in giving and receiving feedback

Due to the lack of physical presence and changes in learning and teaching workflows, there are a few options that can improve that cycle.

Online Tools

Voice
feedbackIn addition to the suggestions above, online tools can strengthen feedback and in some cases save time in giving feedback. For example, using voice rather than the written word can deepen the quality and quantity of feedback. Consider that speaking for three minutes produces about 500 words at an average rate of speech. Quality of feedback can also improve because the tone and quality of voice is retained, and this can enhance the depth and clarity of information in a message. Voice feedback has an immediacy that text does not, increasing students’ sense of your presence.  Tools using voice include Blackboard voice email and the voice authoring tool that is available wherever the full text editor exists.

Video
Blackboard’s Video Everywhere tool allows you to record yourself speaking to students. Consider whether your feedback would be enhanced by the use of video. In the case of online course welcome messages, video of the instructor can be very useful in establishing a sense of your teaching presence.

Narrated Movies
Sometimes called “screencasts”, narrated movies can add a visual element to your feedback. For example, you may want to give feedback to the whole class, highlighting some key points in an assignment. Using VoiceThread, you can post a PowerPoint slide with bullet points and narrate those with a voice-over. You can also embed your webcam video directly into a slide.  Using SnagIt, you can record a narrated movie of whatever is open on your desktop. This might include written or visual student work. With a tablet computer, you can draw on the screen as you speak, adding emphasis to the points you speak to.

Articles on Feedback in Higher Education:

If you would like more information about any of the feedback strategies or tools in this post, please contact elis@lesley.edu.