• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
    • Become a Blogger
    • How To Blog
    • FAQ
  • Core Matters
  • Mentally Healthy
  • Subscribe
  • TL Hub

Benjamin Kahn

February 16, 2019 By Benjamin Kahn

Need a Moodle Question Answered?

Do you have Moodle questions? Maybe you are new to UP and are coming from using a different LMS like Blackboard or Canvas. Perhaps you’ve been using Moodle for a while but want to leverage it more to create efficiencies or open up new opportunities. Or maybe you are brand new to the world of Moodle – in any case, Academic Technology Services & Innovation is here to help!

Contact Us!

You can always reach us at atsi@up.edu – you can get questions answered, or get connected to more resources if you need hands-on tech-training or instructional design consulting to enhance your use of digital resources in your teaching.

Are you more of a “show me the tutorials and let me have a go at it” type person? Check out our Moodle Guides site for quick tutorial articles and videos on common Moodle tasks. Here are some of my favorites to spark your interest:

  • Moodle is a great way to post announcements or send students a quick email
  • Share a video with your class by embedding a YouTube link in a course
  • Do you use discussion forums in your course? They are much, much easier to grade using Forum Ratings.

*/ Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: moodle

November 5, 2018 By Benjamin Kahn

What can an instructional designer do for your course?

woman holding blue paper over her faceHave you ever worked with an instructional designer to improve a course? According to a recent study released by Inside Higher Ed, the chances are that you haven’t. Only a quarter of faculty participants in the study have experience working with an instructional designer, but those who have “overwhelmingly appreciated the experience” – a full 93% of respondents rated their time with an ID as a positive. So what gives? Why are IDs underutilized in higher ed institutions? The truth is that there is sometimes a dearth of available information about available ID resources on campuses coupled with lingering misperceptions about what, exactly, that IDs can do for you.

So, what can time with a UP instructional designer do for your course? According to the study, instructional designers can help faculty understand available technology tools and integrate them into instruction, improve the overall quality of courses, and share ways to foster engagement with 21st-century students, for a start. If you work closely with an ID, they can help you to align the learning objectives and assessments in your course and help you to work out a plan to create multimedia or other elements you may need to develop for your course.

A common refrain from Instructional Designers is that they are not there to change your teaching style – they want to help you get the technology aspects of teaching out of the way so you can focus on what matters most to you and to your students.

You’ve got nothing to lose by taking advantage of the ID resources we have on campus.  Check out these ID and Instructional Technology related links:

  • Contact Academic Technology Services and Innovation’s ID,  Maria Erb today for 1:1 consult. : erb@up.edu
  • Need a quick tip when adding course materials to Moodle? Check out UP Moodle Guides
  • Got a long commute and need something good to listen to? UPTechTalk keeps you up to date on how UP faculty are leveraging technology for all kinds of great outcomes.
  • Sipping some coffee and want something you can use right away?  Gulp down a Tech Tip and set something new in motion.

Photo by Toa Hefitiba on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured Tagged With: instructional design, tip of the week, tlc

April 27, 2018 By Benjamin Kahn

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Try Digital Notes

a latop with digital handwriting on the screenWhen I first began using digital notes, I was seriously impressed with the positive impact on my work and learning. You see, I have always been a poor organizer of paper notes. Even if I carefully wrote down key points or things I needed to remember, the information invariably ends up lost, crumpled up, and forgotten because I struggle to keep track of paper. When I tried OneNote, I found that having the ability to capture and access info across any of the digital devices I carry everywhere, quickly search for keywords, and to integrate digital content like PDFs or images provided a massive boost in my organizational prowess – while also enabling a nearly paperless workflow.

Of course, there have always been, and probably always will be those who prefer to take notes on pen and paper, and that’s great! But, I have long championed OneNote as an opportunity for faculty and students to enhance and organize teaching and learning while trying out digital notes and research if they are inclined to do so.

I’ve been a happy OneNote user for years and have seen Microsoft steadily make small, continuous improvements to the tool over that time, so I wanted to write a quick blog post summarizing what’s new and why I love this app so much for any who may be ready to give digital notes another look.

The Web Clipper Comes to UP

One of the best features of OneNote has always been its web clipper.  Installing a simple browser extension adds a OneNote button to your web browser that allows the quick saving of web pages, articles, links, and PDFs to OneNote. Unfortunately, due to our cyber-security policies, we have not been able to use this add-in feature at UP in the past.

Thanks to the hard work of our Office 365 administrator, a workaround has been put in place that allows community members to use the OneNote web clipper with their UP accounts while at the same time keeping our private data safe. It’s a win-win!

Visit https://www.onenote.com/clipper to get started with the clipping tool.

Meeting or Class Notes

 OneNote is an awesome way to take notes in a meeting or class. You can type, use a stylus to write with digital ink by hand or even record audio into OneNote. To make setting up a page for meeting notes easier, OneNote can grab details from your Outlook calendar and automatically add the date, location, invitees and details of a meeting. It also adds a link on the page to email your notes to other attendees.

Inking

As I mentioned earlier, OneNote is great for writing with digital ink. I see more and more Surfaces, iPad Pros and other stylus enabled devices on campus that would be perfect for use with OneNote. The comfort and feel of writing with styli have improved over the last few years, and when you set up a page in OneNote, you can add a ruled or graph background to make digital writing notes more natural. Even better? The app uses Optical Character Recognition in your handwriting so that you can search for your ink notes by keyword later – as you can see below I was so amazed by this I had to tweet about it!

#onenote now OCRs and can return search results of my chicken scratch digital ink notes. #amazing #scary pic.twitter.com/BzMqOVdnSz

— Benjamin Kahn, Rebel Scrum (@thebenkahn) August 4, 2016

New design and Windows 10 version

a tablet, laptop, and phone all showing the same onenote document
The new OneNote is easy to use and consistent across all your devices

There are many versions of OneNote for all types of computer and mobile device. In fact, there are two versions of the software on Windows 10 – a newer native Windows 10 app and the longstanding Office 2016 version. Last Spring Microsoft rolled out a major redesign of OneNote on every platform except the Office 2016 version and recently announced that the Windows 10 version would be the sole Windows OneNote app going forward. If you have a Windows 10 device, such as a Surface, I recommend checking out the Windows app version of OneNote. It’s fast, works well for typing and with a stylus, and makes accessing and organizing your notebooks much easier. The simplified design is much more intuitive and user-friendly than the old OneNote 2016, which frankly was a bit cluttered and confusing at times.

Integrated Scanner

I’ve written before about Office Lens, my favorite app for turning my phone into a mobile document and whiteboard scanner. As often as not when using Office Lens I would send my scans over to OneNote, so it’s pretty convenient that the scanning functionality has been integrated directly into the iPhone, iPad and Android versions of OneNote. Now, you can tap the camera icon directly from inside your notes to capture paper notes, printed documents, or whiteboards. 

Awesome Collaboration

Individual notes are great but what we often need is a collaborative space for planning, brainstorming or research. OneNote is tightly integrated into the Office 365 collaboration tools that have launched in the last few years, including Microsoft Teams. It’s easy to add OneNote to a channel in Teams to create that shared information space that anyone on your Team can reference or contribute to. You can add an existing OneNote notebook or create a new notebook for the Team.

In conclusion, OneNote has really impressed me from the start and has only gotten better. It’s improved my ability to stay organized at work and been the cornerstone of my note-taking and research workflow in my studies. If you are at all interested in digital notetaking, I highly recommend giving OneNote another look!

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Professional Development Tagged With: microsoft office, notetaking, onenote

April 13, 2018 By Benjamin Kahn

Avoiding Death By Discussion Forum

Note: This piece was originally published on moodleuserguides.org

Discussion forums are a mainstay of online and blended classes. Any learning technology that becomes ubiquitous is a fair target for critical interrogation (Death by PowerPoint comes to mind); discussion boards, too, have their fair share of detractors. A common criticism is that forums lead to rote, dull, perfunctory work from students and instructors. Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris of Hybrid Pedagogy write:

Instead of providing fertile ground for brilliant and lively conversation, discussion forums are allowed to go to seed. They become over-cultivated factory farms, in which nothing unexpected or original is permitted to flourish. Students post because they have to, not because they enjoy doing so. And teachers respond (if they respond at all) because they too have become complacent to the bizarre rules that govern the forum.

Even for those optimistic about the use of forums for real learning, the tools can be confusing to configure properly and are often an unwieldy chore for faculty to manage and assess. Indeed, the term “Death by Discussion Forum” would be an appropriate way to describe some online courses. Done well, however, online discussion forums can be an instrumental tool to build community, foster student engagement in the knowledge-building process and enrich learning via the reflective and socially rich exchange of written dialogue.

Therefore, while it is important that forward-thinking and innovative instructors experiment with new ways to supplement and build on established digital teaching and learning practices, it is also vital for instructors who are using discussion forums to work at their practice in the here and now. Instructional and pedagogical goals must be carefully aligned with the real-life use of forum activities in Moodle. Effectively facilitating a space for “brilliant and lively conversation” requires a deep understanding of the ways that adjusting various Moodle Forum activity settings impact the learner’s experience as they embark on writing and engaging with their peers.

Aligning Your Pedagogy with Forum Activities

Many critics of “bad PowerPoint” note that tools can be used well or poorly. An excellent slide deck isn’t the presentation; it supports the presentation. The most effective use of technology happens when our tools fade into the background. The irony, of course, is that creating the conditions in which technology disappears requires careful forethought and a relatively sophisticated understanding of said technology’s capabilities to support one’s work. So, before assigning a discussion forum for its own sake, or out of habit, take a step back and consider the instructional goals you wish to achieve. Do you want students to reflect on a specific aspect of coursework, to research and answer a specific question, or to share progress and critique their peers’ work? Is a forum the best tool to support this goal? If so, there are several different flavors of forums available that can help address your specific teaching needs, important settings that can be tweaked to expedite a suitable learning environment, and some best practices to consider as a facilitator.

Forum types in Moodle

The Standard Forum for General Use is the most versatile and is a good fit for most discussion activities. It allows students to start their own discussion threads and reply to others, which is appropriate for forum activity structures in which students are asked to add their post as well as reply to peers. It provides the greatest potential for learner agency; students have space to “own” the threads that they start. They can express themselves via the choices they make when titling their threads and structuring their prose.  Further, they can choose to participate in and reply to threads from others that they find the most interesting or stimulating. Instructors can also easily add topics or reply directly to student threads in this format.

For a conversation that is more tightly focused on a single topic, consider the Single Simple Discussion format. Here, students and faculty are all locked into one thread together, which narrows the scope of conversation and is best when the entire class needs to attend closely to each student’s post. This format emphasizes the communal and deemphasizes the individual.

Because it hides all other posts from students until they make their own initial post, the Q&A Forum is popular with instructors who want to ensure that students are uninfluenced by reading the work of peers who happen to post earlier in the discussion cycle. It can be effective, but it also tends to shut down conversation and inhibit elaboration or further exploration of a topic. If both originality and in-depth discussion are desired, it is recommended to collect original work via an Assignment Activity first, and then follow up with another type of forum for sharing and peer response.

Setting expectations

In any class, but particularly online, setting expectations and establishing clear lines of communication are important. Face-to-face, you might have an opportunity to set guidelines for your in-class discussions early on. In an online environment, you need to be proactive. You should clearly communicate details and expectations about writing voice, citation requirements, and timeliness expectations. Will you require an initial post to be submitted early in the week, or can all posts be made last minute? Write up (or record and post an audio or video message) detailing what you expect from students and “pin” it to the top of the first discussion forum.

Further, consider using the discussion board itself as a tool to streamline communication — set up a dedicated, ungraded forum for students to ask questions relating to the course information or content. Just like in a live class, shyer students may benefit from the questions that bolder students ask, and some may be able to answer each other’s questions.

How often should you jump in?

You should consider early on how often and how heavily you plan on participating in the forum discussions. To some extent, this is up to faculty preference. Some instructors like to give specific feedback early and often or prompt for additional thinking, while others prefer to observe, letting the conversation develop naturally, and jump in only if the conversation needs to be steered back on track. There is some research-based evidence that supports the latter approach. One study found that “the more the instructors posted, the less frequently students posted and the shorter were the discussion threads”(Mazzolini & Maddison, 2007). That said, more is not the same as better; the authors caution us not to conflate volume with quality. Students in courses in which instructors were more active on the forums rated those faculty as more enthusiastic and displaying higher levels of subject-matter expertise on subsequent course evaluations. A second qualitative study notes that “students place a high value on individual responses from the instructor and a summary at the conclusion of the discussion topic” and that student engagement in online courses dropped when instructors did not post enough. (Reonieri, 2006) Clearly, there is value in faculty participation in discussion boards.

A happy medium may to be to employ a “light touch” during the active forum period — interjecting only to answer particularly difficult questions, to address misconceptions that have not been otherwise challenged, or to steer a discussion back on topic, and then provide individual feedback or summarize discussions at the end of the active discussion period. (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2007)

Keeping Up With Assessment

If forums are going to be an important part of your course and require a high degree of student engagement and work to be worthwhile, you probably agree that they should be graded. This raises both pedagogical and practical concerns. Are you going to treat forums as “participation” by giving full points for meeting basic requirements, or are you going to critically assess student work? Will students have a chance to revise and improve their work? Will you use a rubric? These are questions you should be comfortable answering. In any case, your feedback is critical for students to understand whether or not they are contributing to the course discussions satisfactorily.

However you decide to proceed, if you are going to assign grades, it is recommended that you use Forum Ratings to mark student posts. Ratings can drastically reduce the administrative overhead of assessing forum posts. They allow you to grade work directly in the context of the forum with a dropdown menu underneath each student post where a score can be recorded. This score automatically transfers to the Moodle gradebook, so you don’t need to track or transfer grades manually. Further, ratings support a variety of aggregation methods. For example, it’s easy to use ratings to automatically tally the point values of marks or the total number of posts a student makes. If you are going to be reading and assessing dozens or even hundreds of posts per week, it’s vital that your capacity goes towards meaningful feedback, rather than ledger-keeping or copy/pasting.

Consider discussion board size

What is too small or too large for a productive online discussion? Reonieri (2006) identifies a number of issues that can impede effective online discussion forums when class sizes are too small (too few perspectives, not enough interaction) or too big (too overwhelming, shallow and repeated comments, off-topic tangents, heavy instructor workload) and posits the optimum discussion group size to be a “medium” class of 10–15 students.

In situations with larger class sizes, splitting the board into smaller groups is highly recommended, and it is better to err on the side of smaller groups than larger groups. Moodle includes a robust Groups feature to accommodate this need. Students can be placed into randomized or instructor-defined groups. Additionally, forums can be configured with either Separate Groups (students can only see posts from and interact with their group forum) or Visible Groups (students can only interact with their group forum but may optionally visit and view, but not contribute to, the other group spaces).

Consider Notifications

Moodle forums can send email notifications to any forums or discussions you or your students subscribe to. If you take the time to understand and set up these notifications, they can be incredibly helpful. When ill-understood or untamed, however, email notifications can be equally burdensome. Fewer things are more irritating than realizing you missed out on an important conversation because you simply didn’t know it has happened. At the same time, a deluge of email notifications is entirely overwhelming for today’s over-stimulated students (and, let’s be honest, instructors).

You can view your default forum settings by clicking on your user profile picture in Moodle and choosing Preferences, then Forums. You can make critical choices that affect your day-to-day experience in interacting with your students. You may choose to receive an individual email for each new post or a daily digest summary, whether to automatically subscribe to threads when you make a comment, and enable tracking to flag unread posts. These seem like small decisions, but when you are involved in several courses with dozens of forum posts per day, they can make all the difference. Taking some time to review and understand these options can go a long way toward minimizing frustrations, missed information, and wasted time in your use of Moodle forums. Further, you can share your learnings and recommendations with students — it will be more appreciated than you might think!

Wrapping Up Part One

In Part One of this post, I detailed how  instructors can employ strategies to avoid issues that can derail successful forums:

  • Choosing the wrong type of forum for the job
  • Failing to communicate expectations
  • Posting too little, or too much
  • Difficulty in keeping up with assessments
  • Class sizes that are too large for meaningful discussions
  • Notification nightmares

See our Guide articles for help in understanding how to set up forums:

  • Moodle Guides: Discussion Forums

Look for Part Two of this post soon –  we’ll be taking a look at how the discussion forum can be used in an increasingly multimedia, multimodal world.

For more tips and thoughts on education technology, you can follow me on Twitter @thebenkahn.

  • Featured Image: Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
  • Icons: made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com licensed by CC 3.0 BY
References

Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2007). When to jump in: The role of the instructor in online discussion forums. Computers and Education, 49(2), 193–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.06.011

Reonieri, D. (2006). Optimizing the number of students for an effective online discussion board learning experience (thesis). Retrieved from ERIC: Institute of Education Sciences

Morris, Sean Michael, and Jesse Stommel. “The Discussion Forum Is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum.” Hybrid Pedagogy, 8 May 2013, hybridpedagogy.org/the-discussion-forum-is-dead-long-live-the-discussion-forum/.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured Tagged With: digital pedagogy, discussion forums, moodle

October 16, 2017 By Benjamin Kahn

Fresh Moodle Features for Fall

Every Fall, ATSI updates our Moodle instance to provide enhanced security and functionality. For faculty, it’s easy to miss finding out about new Moodle features or changes that can enrich student learning, or just create new efficiencies in your work. In this post, I want to roll-up and present the top new features available to you in Moodle for Fall 2017. Each link below leads to a short tech tip article and video walkthrough.

Top New Moodle Features

  • Tired of downloading and re-uploading student’s work? Try In-Browser Annotation of Assignment submissions
  • You can post course news to the Announcements forum to create a centralized hub for real-time course updates
  • Discussion forums have received a number of enhancements including pinned posts and private replies
  • Accidentally delete something from your course? The new Recycle Bin is a life-saver
  • Do you have an assignment that requires differing due dates for groups or individuals (for instance, students following a presentation schedule for final projects)? You can now set multiple due dates using Assignment Overrides.
  • Bonus tip: Did you know you can access all assignment and quiz due dates from one screen? This is super-handy if you import course material from a previous semester and need to update due dates for the current semester. (No, this last one is not a new feature, but it’s great time-saver!)

Well, that’s it for this roundup. Do you have a favorite new Moodle tip or trick? Let me know in the article comments.

Want more tips like this? You can:

  • Subscribe to/keep reading the Teaching & Learning blog
  • Subscribe to the UP Tech Tips email listserve
  • Follow me on Twitter @thebenkahn

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Teaching Tips Tagged With: announcements forum, assignments, discussion forums, forums, moodle, upgrades, uptechtips

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

RSS Upbeat News

  • UPdate
  • MLK Day ON: Reconciliation, Reparation, Renewal, Jan. 18
  • Stock UP Providing Access to Food and More: Jan. 27
  • Summer Internship Opportunities for Students: Applications Due February 12
  • Clark Library: MLK Day 2021
  • Fr. William E Wickham, C.S.C., 1938-2021
  • Zoom Video Retention Period To Change for Spring 2021
  • Call for Spring Butine Proposals: Deadline is Feb. 5

Get Help

Help Desk
Phone: ext. 7000
Email: help@up.edu

Media Services
Phone: ext. 7774
Email: media@up.edu

Academic Technology Services & Innovation
Email: atsi@up.edu

Archives

Tags

assessment capturespace collaboration copyright core curriculum crowdsourcing digital literacy discussion forums edtech failure fair use fine arts flickr flipped classroom google helping students images learning learning commons media mental health mentally healthy microsoft office moodle office hours online Pedagogy PLN powerpoint presentations quiz resources screencasting student health student resources students study study skills teaching teaching and learning collaborative teaching circles tlc tutoring twitter video

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2021 · University of Portland