Summer 2020 Thoughts - College Trigonometry

For various reasons I am teaching three classes this summer, and because of the coronavirus pandemic I'm teaching them all online through Canvas. Having taught online courses off and on since 2012 I'm comfortable teaching in this modality, but as is my nature, I'm looking to improve the student experience and their ability to learn the course material. I'm writing down the following thoughts so I can look back on my rationale for making certain decisions, to share them with others, and to backtrack on any coding ideas I'd like to follow up on.

Homework

I've taught College Trigonometry a number of times before and have a well developed set of homework questions through WAMAP, which I'll use again. I would like to align homework assignments and questions to course outcomes, and WAMAP has a way to track this so I may give it a shot this term. My goal here would be to give students specific feedback on the areas they need to work on, and to give me a dashboard of where students are doing well, and need help with.

Discussion Forums

I also created a number of group-based active learning discussion forums last term in the switch to remote learning. Below is an example.

I really like having having a first post where students explore an idea or concept through simple exploratory questions. This is in keeping with the POGIL activity writing framework, and works well to get students started thinking about these ideas. I also like that students must share their first post without seeing the work other's did to get a sense of what others are thinking, and to show that incorrect answers are completely normal. What didn't work so well last term was getting students to discuss their answers to these questions. I believe this was partially because their second post was to answer a number of questions in a longer activity, with many students seeing this activity as a 'worksheet' to complete like an additional homework assignment.

Over time my directions to both of these two initial posts changed, making sure to indicate that saying "I don't know." is a perfectly fine answer, but then students would just write that and not go back to the discussion forums. There were situations where students did have engaging discussions starting from these activities, but the students who had these discussions usually had very high affective motivation. The groups that I struggled most with were students who either had low affective motivation, or those who had a very solutions oriented view of mathematics. I will likely need to make explicit the purpose of these discussion forums, and to model what a good discussion forum looks like.

Subsequent replies were supposed to be completed with the following directions;

The above roles were a slight modification of my face-to-face roles, and after the last term it seems clear that I need to make a few changes;

• Roles need to be tied into a deliverable, some 'thing' students do or say at the end of the discussion that shows that they fulfilled the role. For Presenters this could be a group answer or solution to a question where students have to use what they learned in the activity (a POGIL application question), for Reflectors this could be a deeper reflection on the group's work together, for Quality Controller this could be a series of questions about the quality of the group's work, and for Managers this could be a set of questions about who worked well in the group and what students could do to improve. 
• At the end of each week last term I had students complete a group reflection by Thursday so I could post answers to any questions on Friday. For the summer term I think I could have students answer role-based reflection quizzes.
• I assigned roles at the start of each week in a 'Meet your group' discussion forum, but wonder if there are more automatic ways of doing this? I would also really like some kind of notification or color to be the background of discussion forums where they need to post in their roles. CSS maybe?

With multiple deadlines of posts students found it difficult to know when to post. To address this I added reminders in the course calendar of when to post. The reminders are just text, but I figured out you can add links to the assignments themselves. Here is what it looked like in the Canvas calendar;

In playing with the Canvas API I did find a way to create calendar events, and may play with that over the term.

Closer to the end of the course, once groups were well established I included Group Help Discussion Forums, like the following;

This format was borrowed from one of my colleagues Kayoko Barnhill, and is a really nice low effort way to get students talking. For the summer term I may alternate the discussion forums between one to two group-based activity discussion forums, and one of these group help discussion forums. There may be more cognitive load in following different sets of directions at first, but I think students may appreciate the reduced time commitment.

Quizzes

Each week I had a quiz over the course material with five questions and spent the plurality of my time each week grading them and providing feedback. This term I'll be doing similar quizzes, but only providing detailed feedback on two of them. Here are the directions I ended the term with and plan on using this term;

Directions

Submit your work for the quiz. Note the following;

• Your work submission should be the work you did in getting your answers to quiz.
• You will earn partial credit by showing your work, step by step.
• You will not earn any additional credit for submitting the incorrect answers in the quiz and submitting the correct answer in your work.
• You will not earn credit for questions that you answered correctly with no work.
• You will not earn credit for solutions that utilize technology (graphing calculators, WolframAlpha, Desmos, etc.) unless specified to in the question.

I will review all of their questions this term for showing work, but will only grade two of their questions in detail.

Final Assessment

I had a final assessment consisting of twenty questions, ten True or False, and ten similar to the homework. A few of my colleagues had questions about the efficacy of True or False questions in a final assessment, pointing out that they should be fairly easy to determine by students. I agreed, but argued that we believe they are easy to determine if the statement is correct or not, and that is not that purpose of these questions. The purpose is to determine if students know how to determine if the statement is correct or not. Below are three questions and their results;

While all students were able to answer the last question above correctly, a number had difficulty with the first two. This suggests to me that students don't have a developed understanding of either inverse functions, or what cos(-x) means. If that is the case then I would be very concerned about their ability to do well in calculus, and subsequently by not answering this question (and others) incorrectly their chances of passing this class decrease. And really, what is the point of a final assessment in a math class other than to determine if a student is ready for the next class?

I did have students write down their work and submit it to me, and overall the quality and work was consistent with their quiz work submissions. Reviewing all of their work took quite a bit of time, but it was made easier by WAMAP's ability to review individual questions, even though I randomized the order the questions students were given. I did not provide as detailed feedback, but did award partial credit where warranted. 

I did not use proctoring software, and actually gave students a few days to take the final with a time limit of 2 hours 30 minutes. They were required to complete an academic affidavit (below) before accessing the final, which was to automatically release after signing the affidavit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the final assessment from last term, and will likely keep the format, change some of the questions, and ask for online proctoring if available. 

Weekly Overviews

Each week I also wrote a weekly overview page that included student-friendly learning objectives, their course tasks, additional resources, and how to get help. I may keep these, making sure to include them in student's To-Do list (a feature in Canvas that adds content pages to their course calendars), but may also include some of this information in a Monday email or at least summarize it. I've read over the fall term plans of faculty at other institutions and they seem to like multiple communication methods, or at least find that students respond to them differently. 

In writing down the above I've come to a few tasks for myself;

• Rework the discussion forums to include one to two group activities, and one group help discussion forum each week.
• Reformat reflections to be role-based, possibly sharing the results anonymously with students to further our conversations about group work, what high quality work looks like, and to reflect on our experiences. 
• Try to complete the course outcomes in WAMAP.
• Find a way to automate discussion forum reminders. I'm still learning the ins-and-outs of the Canvas API and of Python, so this may be a goal through the term.
• Update Weekly Overviews and include them in a Monday Week-in-Preview email. On second thought I'm not sure I like having separate ways of communicating with students, I'd rather have everything done through Canvas. Sure, students can opt to get information sent to their email or text, Canvas has pretty robust notification settings. At the same time I've had to deal with multiple communication methods in work place settings, and it can be bewildering to figure out where something came from. It generally seems to run counter to Quality Matters, and the best practices I have seen for online education. I could try it... I'll have to mull it over more. 

Writing this out has given me a good idea of what I need to do today, and I'll try to write something similar for my other two classes this summer Finite Mathematics and Business Math, and Business Calculus. I've already decided I'll be doing something less involved for these two classes, and have quite a few materials already developed.

As always I appreciate any feedback, suggestions, questions, ideas, recommendations for books or articles, accusations, or anything else you'd like to share.