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February 7, 2021 By Jeffrey White

Practicing What You Teach

The power of peer educators to help your students practice

We worked hard to become experts in our fields. We faculty work hard to plan and teach our classes. And now a pandemic has us working hard to continue and refine the shift to remote teaching. As professionals in teaching within higher education during trying times, we can leverage the Learning Commons’ peer educators to facilitate students’ practicing what we teach. Here’s both why we should make the benefits of trained peers helping peers visible to students and how we can best connect them with the Learning Commons’ highly trained peer staff.

The value of practice

Durable learning requires practice. In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel explain how the practice of mentally retrieving information supports durable learning. Deliberate practice involves effort, failure, and renewed attempts; it is necessary for acquiring, understanding, and applying new knowledge. Varying and spacing out practice also support learning, recall, and the ability to discriminate between different problems and techniques for solving them.

The Learning Commons offers opportunities for practicing a variety of tasks and content associated with classes that most faculty teach. Our trained peer educators tutor math, natural sciences, languages, and  a variety of business, economics, and nursing courses. Our peer-assisted learning (PAL) facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for specific courses in math, nursing, and physics. For faculty who teach courses that require written papers and oral presentations, our Writing Center and the Speech and Presentation Lab provide opportunities to practice writing and presenting. We also support students who want to develop more effective study strategies. Many faculty use group projects to support learning. The Group Work Lab offers students the opportunity to practice how to work well in a group to enhance learning and performance.

As students connect with our trained peer educators, they enter a relationship that involves practice with content, problem solving, and the written and oral communication of new knowledge. Our peer staff have been trained in deploying processes that involve initial assessment of student needs and abilities, the demonstration of strategies, and ample time to practice that is capped off with summative assessment and planning for success in both learning and presenting new material and big ideas. Students also experience and identify with a more knowledgeable peer who can listen and respond to their needs.

Image from Zoom training on community building with PAL facilitators
PAL facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for historically difficult courses.

When you leverage the Learning Commons to support student learning in your courses, you are also supporting yourself as a teaching faculty. Students who practice the material you teach will be better prepared to process actively the learning that you are working hard to facilitate. They will be more likely to retrieve concepts and problem solving approaches and with greater accuracy. Initial data from our PAL facilitation program reveals that students who participate in weekly PAL collaborative learning sessions are more likely to receive A and B grades and less likely to receive C and D grades or withdraw.

Attitudinally, students will likely be more confident and motivated to learn in your class, if they utilize our trained tutors and PAL facilitators. Our surveys of students using Learning Commons’ programs show that overwhelming majorities feel more confident with the tutored material (between 93% and 95% depending on the program) and more motivated to continue learning it (between 84% and 92%). Between 84 and 86% of respondents attribute improvements in course grades to their work with our peer educators. Based on our Writing Center surveys, 98% of respondents report feeling more confident with the writing assignment, 95% report feeling more confident with writing in general due to their work with writing assistants, and 91% report feeling more motivated to complete the assignment.

How you can support students practicing what you teach

A class culture develops in every course we teach, and we faculty can weave practicing with the Learning Commons’ peer educators into that culture. Means of doing so include:

  • Normalizing practice of the taught material and the use of peer educators as facilitators of learning and practice by promoting the Learning Commons and its programs that are relevant to your course;
  • Including a link to the Learning Commons on your Moodle page and with all or specific assignments;
  • Adding links to our Bookings Scheduler and our Writing Center Scheduler to your assignments, your Moodle page, or in your Zoom chat window during synchronous online sessions.
  • Inviting to your class a writing assistant or tutor who can explain how easy it is to connect with our peer educators. Use our visit request form to invite one of our peer staff to visit your class virtually;
  • Verbally encouraging students to use the Learning Commons. You can do this during class, when working with breakout groups, or during office hours;
  • Actively directing students to the Learning Commons’ information that is available in the most current syllabus statement.

There are many ways to connect your students to the Learning Commons’ peer educators. Most importantly, explaining how deliberate practice supports learning (and grades) along with your repeated encouragement and endorsement of continued practice with our trained writing assistants, tutors, PAL facilitators, and peer consultants will go a long way toward helping students reach higher levels of performance, confidence, and motivation. Now, as we are still in the early weeks of a new semester, is a good time to start encouraging practice as a learning strategy and the use of the Learning Commons as a place where trained peers can support your students’ deliberate practice of the material you teach.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons at UP, where he collaborates with others to supervise and support over 60 tutors, writing assistants, and PAL facilitators. He also teaches courses in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the immediate past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: helping students, learning, learning commons, mental health, moodle, teaching, tutoring

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

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

February 24, 2017 By Benjamin Kahn

TlC Toolkit: Managing Digital Files for Student Presentations

a young woman stands before a white screen with text projected onto it. she is pointing at a line of text and smiling.Presentations are a valuable learning activity – giving students the opportunity to practice speech and communication skills, to collaborate with others, and to develop digital, design, or storytelling literacies. However, when attempting to cycle through many individual or group presentations in limited class time, there can often be unneccesary stress and frustration as students take precious minutes with the need to login-in and out of various web services, search for and download files they’ve emailed to themselves, or even realize that they’ve left their flash drive at home and can’t access their files at all.

If this sounds familiar, you may find this toolkit on Managing Student Digital Files in the Classroom handy. Toolkits are a great resource for faculty courtesy of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative and available on the Teaching and Learning website.

TLC Toolkit: Managing Digital Files for Student Presentations

The Toolkit on managing files offers tips on using several tech tools available to any UP faculty that can be used to collect and manage student files easily. You can save precious time in the classroom and model preparedness and digital savviness for your students at the same time.

If you find this Toolkit useful, make sure to explore the Teaching and Learning website for more handy resources, and subscribe to the Teaching and Learning Blog for ongoing support, tips and suggestions from your fellow faculty and those who support instruction at UP.

Featured Image: Summit High School Presentation by Tom Sulcer via CC-SA-BY 3.0
I
mage remixed by Ben Kahn and published via CC-SA-BY 3.0

Filed Under: Featured, Teaching Tips Tagged With: collaboration, files, moodle, onedrive, presentations, tlc toolkits

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