UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Zach Simmons

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Whiteboard Animations

Now that October has arrived, most courses have had their first exams. As students come in to review their scores, one common refrain echoes through the halls, “I knew that, but I just couldn’t remember it!”. Though it might sound like an excuse, the empirical data is clear – human memory is incredibly fallible, even under the best of circumstances. Part of our job as educators, then, is to try and design courses that not only communicate information, but to do so in ways that promote retention.

There is no one ‘right’ way to do this; everyone has likely settled on a technique that works for themselves and for their discipline. It may involve overlapping concepts between readings and class work, intentional repetition of important ideas during lectures, or any number of other approaches. The common factor in all of these is that they require navigating something of a tightrope – too little engagement with an idea and it is unlikely to be effectively retained; too much, and students may get bored and tune out.

The incorporation of emerging instructional technologies may offer new routes to navigate this process. For instance, untethered lecture capture (ULC) allows for the recording and immediate dissemination of classroom discussions, which may be particularly helpful for students who may need extra exposure to absorb the details of arguments. Another promising route involves whiteboard animation videos, which simulate the process of freehand drawing accompanied by a detailed narration of relevant ideas. Although the data is admittedly preliminary, some studies have suggested these videos can dramatically improve attention and recall (e.g., Wiseman, 201);

These videos have been commonplace in commercial settings for a number of years, but there has been a recent explosion in interest about adopting them for pedagogical purposes. There are a diverse set of companies competing in this niche, each offering different options and price points, including Sparkol, Animaker, Powtoon, and more.

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Setting boundaries

the ocean and the beach from an overhead perspectiveI recently had an experience that I suspect every instructor can relate to – I was just finishing up office hours and heading home when a student stopped by ‘just to chat’. Nearly an hour (and four or five topics) later, I was finally out the door. In hindsight, it struck me just how much trouble I had wrapping up that conversation, not because of the student, but because of myself.

There was no moment in which I felt that it was right to shut the discussion down. I genuinely like it when students are passionate enough about ideas to want to talk about them, so it felt like part of my duty to be there. I also didn’t have any imminent demands on my time, so it’s not like I had somewhere else I had to be. Even still, it felt like an imposition, like it was just too much.

I realized that the reason it never occurred to me to put a stop to things is that I had never really put much thought into my boundaries with students. Instead of articulating a philosophy or defining my principles, I just approached every interaction on a case-by-case basis. If a student wanted to talk about class, we talked about class. If they wanted professional advice, I could do that too. If I knew them well enough, I might even be able to provide some guidance about everyday problems. Students who would be better served by talking to trained professionals, whether that be in the counseling center or financial aid, would get connected to the appropriate people. But nothing was ever systematic or deliberate, and so everything was – at least potentially – a slippery slope. And my informal conversations with colleagues lead me to believe that I am not alone in my laissez-faire approach.

After some soul- (and a little Google) searching, I found an article that got me thinking about my own boundaries. First, I had to decide the topics of conversation that were and were not appropriate. That decision involved more than just thinking about how much personal disclosure I was comfortable with – it also required that I think about where I could offer expertise and where I could not. Next, I had to think about how much time I could commit to any given conversation. Again, this is more complicated than it might seem at first; busy office hours require a significantly different set of thresholds than unexpected pop-ins, all of which need to be balanced against other (non-student) commitments. Finally, I had to figure out a way to communicate these boundaries to my students. To be honest, this is the step I’m still trying to work out. Obviously, having something in my course syllabi is important, but I’m not yet certain how I would like to frame it. It also seems crucial that students who are not currently in my courses have a sense of this information as well, but the appropriate mechanism for distributing this information is far from obvious.

It is my hope that wrestling with these questions will help me create an environment that is more equitable for both my students and myself. In the process, I hope that it will help me be more focused and engaged in the time that I can actually spend with my students.

Featured Image: Photo by Sacha Styles on Unsplash

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Writing letters of recommendation

small wooden blocks with letters stamped on them sit in a wooden boxThe air is starting to cool. The days are getting shorter. The rain is coming back. It can only mean one thing – letter of rec season has returned (also, pumpkin spice everything).

Most of us have never received any formal training in how to write a letter of recommendation. Rather, we have pieced together a working knowledge of how to do it based on letters we have read, people we have talked to, and a liberal dash of discipline-specific intuition. By now, we are all veterans of many of these letters, which brings with it a sense of confidence and expertise in our writing. It can also lead to complacency: turns of phrase recycled one too many times or accolades that end up sounding so rehearsed that they lose their potency.

If you are concerned that your letters might be getting a little stale, it might be time for a refresher. To that end, I recently came across a wonderful online resource devoted entirely to best practices in writing letters of recommendation. It offers helpful advice on both appropriate content and engaging style (hint: don’t be boring, but no explosions), and includes a number of sample letters that will likely make you feel at least a little bad about your own. The full guide can be found online here.

It also concludes with some prescriptive ‘commandments’ about writing letters. Most will be familiar to anyone who has thought carefully about the function of such letters, but one in particular resonated with me: “We write letters as a professional courtesy and because others wrote them for us”. I am certainly guilty of thinking about letters in a more transactional way, as a debt that I owe to my students in exchange for their hard work in my courses. That may seem benign, but it I cannot help but think it colors my evaluations. If I agreed to write a letter for a student, then said student must have been great, or I wouldn’t have agreed to write the letter, right? It is my hope that a little reminder about the nature of the process can serve as a corrective to my own biases.

/** Featured Image: Letters by Davide Vizzinni used via CC 2.0  **/

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Flipping the classroom

Nothing seems to polarize my students more than their opinion of ‘flipped classrooms’, in which course content is consumed primarily outside the classroom, with instructional time devoted to application or mastery of the material. Though the term is often used loosely, a flipped classroom should have four key components (via Brame, 2013):

  1. Exposure to the material outside of the classroom, typically in the form of lectures, readings, or discussions.
  2. Some mechanism that creates accountability for completion of that material, whether from quizzes, assignments, or in-class discussions.
  3. Feedback supplied to students assessing their understanding of the material, possible coupled with targeted help to for problematic concepts.
  4. An emphasis on deep engagement with the material during class time, often involving the application of knowledge (rather than pure recitation of content).

In my experience, students who endorse the flipped structure often do so because they prefer the ability to move through content at their own pace or find it particularly helpful to talk through ideas as they work on assignments. Those who dislike it frequently report having trouble staying engaged with the material or prefer to do their work in a more controlled and private environment. The experience of students at other schools seems relatively similar.

The efficacy of the flipped approach in promoting student learning is still very much an open question; in the past three years alone, hundreds of empirical studies have examined outcomes associated flipped courses with a wide range of conclusions. Ultimately, it may be the case that some topics allow for greater success in flipping than others, or that particular flipped structures are more effective in for some fields than others.

Even in the absence of more definitive data about student outcomes, I decided to flip both of my research methods courses. In part, this was to relieve the significant time pressure of teaching a laboratory class that did not actually have a lab section associated with it, but mostly because it allows me a chance to spend substantially more time with each student. In a course with 25 or 30 people, that extra contact is invaluable; by the end of the semester, I have a much more nuanced understanding of the strengths and abilities of each student than I would in a more traditional class.

Later this semester, the TLC will be hosting a panel discussion about flipped classrooms. The goal is to both highlight the individual experiences of instructors who have flipped their courses and to develop a set of recommendations and best practices for faculty who might be considering flipping in the future. Stay tuned to the TLC website for more details.

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Rethinking How Office Hours Are Kept

Once a year. Maybe twice. I have always viewed my office hours as the product of an implicit contract to be there for my students, so I am loath to miss them for any reason. But my preferences have recently been overridden by the arrival of my son; his mucous membranes have introduced a level of uncertainty into my schedule that would have reduced pre-child me into a quivering mass of anxiety. Canceling office hours to take care of a sick kid feels like a pretty good excuse, but I still cannot help but feel like I am in violation of that contract.

Rather than face such a choice, I have been exploring the possibility of holding “virtual” office hours on days that I cannot be on campus. To be a serviceable proxy for the real thing, these office hours would have to provide students with a sense of immediacy and intimacy not offered by the chat options built-in to Moodle and also be able to accommodate students who stop by spontaneously. Some type of video conferencing would seem to be the obvious solution, but very few platforms are designed specifically to meet these needs.

One promising option is appear.in, a browser-based chatroom that allows anyone with access to the URL to drop in without requiring the creation of an account. Instructors first set up a “room”, which is then associated with a static URL. This URL (which could be posted on a course webpage or even an office door) is all that is necessary for students to log in. As long as the room is used at least once every few months, the URL will remain functional. Further, the administrative privileges for the room can be transferred to multiple people, allowing for shared office hours or use by a teaching assistant. Here is one instructor’s account of setting up her room for office hours.

Though it may be superior to consumer-focused options (such as Google Hangouts or Skype), appear.in is not without its own idiosyncrasies. For instance, it does not allow for queuing of students; you either admit them to the room when they “knock”, or they are denied access indefinitely. While it is relatively easy to work around these limitations, they highlight the absence of a truly specialized platform designed to mimic the features of traditional face-to-face office hours.