From Scripts to FAQs Part I: What am I starting with?

Each term I get many of the same questions and have saved a number of these 'scripts' in a folder. They have names like 'Learning Takes Time', 'Missed Class', and 'Extensions'. There are many more that I have versions of in my head, and have yet to save in a digital form. 

With teaching three online courses this summer term I've had to type a number of these scripts and am coming to the conclusion that a FAQ would be in my best interest. This way if a student has a question on the FAQ I can refer them to it. I'm a little unsure how to set it up within Canvas, maybe a package of Pages, a Wiki, or external web pages? I'm a little excited to stretch my HTML/CSS skills as its been a while since I used them extensively. 

The catalyst for this post was a student asking the question "I don't understand this question, can you please help?" This is a great place to start, but without knowing much more I'm unsure of how exactly to help the student. This 'script' wasn't saved just yet so I wrote it down and saved it. Here is what I came up with, and will likely revise it. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated;

Thank you for your question! Really, I'm happy to help, its kind of my job. In order to help I need to know more about what you know, what you've tried, and what you expect the answer to be.

For real, when a student asks "Can you help me with this question?" I do not know what the student needs help with. Is it an algebra thing they're confused about, is it a graphing idea that they may have backwards, or is it something I've never heard of? I could spend a lot of time addressing what I think are the difficult parts of the question, but unless I know for sure, I will likely waste your time in the back and forth of writing things that I think are helpful but actually aren't. If you spend five minutes telling me what you already know, and what specific things you've tried I will be much more able to help you.

From these scripts I would hope to use them as part of the FAQs, mimicking one of my colleague's pages here; https://www.integreat.ca/OL/faqs1.html. I wrote the following last year and saved it under 'Learning as Transferring Knowledge'; 

Yes, I would be happy to answer your questions during office hours.

Your response makes me concerned that you may view the learning in this class as me transferring my knowledge to students. To be clear, the learning in this class happens when students engage with an idea, and try to talk about it. I know this is different than other classes, but I firmly believe that my understanding cannot be your understanding, and that each person understands ideas, concepts, and words when they read, talk, listen, and write about them.

My job in this class is to help students understand the material, answer questions, and create experiences that increase understanding. Note that at the core of each of these tasks is that students are engaged, and actively trying to understand the material in their own way. Learning is not passive, it is active. To be clear I am not upset or mad in any way. I understand that college courses are a shift from high school classes, and that part of my job is to help students acclimate to this new environment. My goal in this is not to be overbearing or mean, but that you understand college-level expectations so you can be successful in all of your future courses. 

Once a student engages with the course material in answering questions on an activity, from the homework, or by doing the reading, I am happy to answer clarifying questions any student has. This means that during office hours I will happily answer any question you have, no matter how 'silly' or 'simple' a student views them. Because questions are the necessary condition for learning they are all important to me.

So yes, please come to office hours on Monday with your questions. We can answer your questions together. 

 

This is from 'Learning Takes Time' which was a response to a student concern about an in-class activity not going quickly enough. Some of the specifics will be changed for a FAQ but I think there are some good things here. 

I want to be clear about my expectations in regards to activities. I do not agree that I give students activities and expect them to figure it out. I expect students to read directions fully, ask questions of their colleagues, cite evidence for what they think, and if the group cannot make progress on a question, then raise your hand for additional assistance. It would be inappropriate for me to hand you an activity, even a finely crafted one that took hundreds of hours to write, and expect you to understand the course material just by completing that activity. That is why we talk, that is why we ask questions. Through my questioning of the pictures you all drew I identified a student misconception (what a percentage represents) and I provided more detail about what a percentage represents through a mini-lecture and by completing a couple questions. My teaching is not the activity, it is not what I say, it is not what I know. My teaching is the process where I present ideas and questions to students (in an activity or verbally), and then we talk about them. This takes time.

This is under 'Missed Class'.

If you are receiving this message it means that you were not in class today. Life happens, and we should make every effort possible to attend class. If you are finding it difficult to make it to class each day, please let me know what barriers there are to your attendance and we can work on a plan for your success.

After missing class, here is what you can do to prepare yourself for the following class;

- Review the course schedule on page 6 of the syllabus for the textbook section we covered. Read through that section, taking note of any topics that seem difficult. 

- Complete the activity for that section. You can always find copies of recent activities on Canvas. 

- Try some of the homework from that section, also found on Canvas. Bring questions to the next class session, and ask them at the start of class when Mr. Weston offers to answer any homework questions. 

- Once you have tried the activity and homework, if you have further issues, go to the STEM Tutoring Center to get in-depth help or go to Mr. Weston's Office Hours. 

This article has a few good suggestions on what to do if you miss class; https://www.thoughtco.com/you-missed-class-what-do-you-do-1686471

This was in a saved announcement for a class and has some good stuff in it too. I've been saving my weekly announcements (start, mid, and end of week) for a while now, but have yet to find a consistent set of messages to send each week. 

• Procrastination is easy to do, but is detrimental to our long term goals. A question I sometimes ask if I get a little off task is "What are you doing? Is this going to help you become a better educator?" If the answer is no, then I know I probably shouldn't be doing it. You could ask yourself "Is this going to help me become a small business owner?" or "Is this going to help me become a financial planner?"
• Keeping a consistent study schedule is really difficult. One way you may want to try developing a study schedule is to open up a calendar application (Google, iCloud, Outlook, etc.) and create ten 1-hour appointment with the name 'Math Studying'. Enter in your other commitments, classes, work hours, childcare time, etc. Then try to fit these 1-hour appointments around your current obligations. Try to fit no more than three a day, and preferably no more than two in a row. Spreading out your study time will help you retain the information, keep your mind fresh between study sessions, and allow you to build your understanding slowly and consistently. Later Check-Ins will talk more about how to study.
• While I appreciate that we all have busy schedules, there is a time commitment in taking this class. From past experience I feel that some students may not understand what 10 hours of outside class studying really looks like. We will be talking about the quality of studying we are doing in the Check-Ins this week and next, but we have to budget for the quantity too. If you are concerned about balancing your commitments (as I think we all are) please complete the activity in the previous bullet. It will really help.
• Some students worry about over-complicating word problems. That can happen if we read too much into a question and think it should be harder than it is. One way to combat this impulse is to trust yourself and try reframing the question in ways that make sense to you. If you read "The amount of profits Apple made was half that of Verizon's." it isn't so clear how to write an equation about these two quantities. However if you use some random numbers, it may make the relationship concrete. "If Apple makes $100 then Verizon will have made $200." From here we can say A = (1/2)V. We will talk about more strategies on how to reframe questions in ways that make sense.

Do you type out the same responses term after term? If not, how do you manage these responses to reuse later? 

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.

Notes on 'POGIL Best Practices in an Asynchronous Environement'

Here are my notes from my later viewing of the POGIL Best Practices in an Asynchronous Environment webinar by Claire Major and Kevin Forgard.

• Focus is on asynchronous environments, using POGIL principles, not necessarily 'How to do POGIL online.'
• Planning online courses;
• (Claire) Backwards design is a good start (learning objectives, assessments, processes, etc.) Our own experiences (and lack of) in online learning makes teaching online more difficult. 
• (Kevin) Purposeful course design is one thing we have to do for all courses, but online there is much more planning, how to organize learners, how are we going to communicate, more front loading of assignments and materials, etc. 
• (K) If given a course and asked to 'plug-and-play' that can be difficult for some instructors. 
• (K) In thinking about group work and POGIL principles, how are we going to plan to be in the discussion forums, roles, management, etc. What about online skill sets of individuals? (First time online learner, etc.)
• What about blended, hybrid, hy-flex models?
• How can we make an engaged online experience?
• (K) Community of Inquiry Framework - Cognitive presence, teaching presence, social presence. Online courses is not taking face-to-face courses and putting them online, need to adapt. Need to think about formative assessments and how that informs your next steps/JiTT.
• (K) The use of videos doesn't have to be high production. As an example, a finance instructor took a short video in front of a bank and discussed what are banks, why we need them, whats the purpose of them. What about students creating videos?
• (K) Communicating systems beyond emails and discussion boards, Slack and Teams given a more flexible way, less formal to communicate that isn't open to the internet. You as the faculty member are modeling what it means to communicate, and really leading the course. 
• (C) Engagement - the cognitive part (deep thinking, intellectual effort) and the affective part (feeling, sensing). How can we motivate students to learn, wanting to learn, valuing the task, etc. If we don't have that part the course really isn't going to happen. There are things we can do to provide motivation; creating authentic tasks, students create professional products, etc. Make the material deep, meaningful, connected to their personal lives, relevant, etc. 
• (C) We also need to plan for their cognitive engagement. Is it that some students don't try very hard, or don't know how to try very hard? Do students know how to perform deep learning vs. shallow learning. In thinking about our tasks we have to think about how do we move them from lower levels of intellectual engagement to higher levels. We can do that regardless of the task. Passive learning isn't a thing, even in lectures where you have to listen actively. 
• (C) If tasks are 'low level' then they could be moved up Bloom's Taxonomy by developing meta-cognition and/or analysis of these skills. (Ex Solving equations, moving from solving to determining when/how to improve on solving them.) We can create tasks that move students from low-level to high-level cognition. 
• How do we create this engaging environment online? We can do this ad-hoc in our class rooms, but online this is more difficult. 
• (C) Scaffolding! Ex. videos that convey information, we could use scaffolded guided notes. At the start of the term the notes may be fuller, contain more questions, etc. and later on in the term contain less. 
• How to scaffold the group work assignments?
• (K) By the end of the course we want there to be a metacognitive learning development, almost like a secondary learning objective. To get them there we have to scaffold the process. 
• (K) At the start of the term we could have very well defined roles, points for following those roles, etc. As the term goes on we could remove those scaffolds so by the end of the term, students are able to work on their own w/o our micromanaging. This could work for many levels of students.
• (K) Build your discussions with these external motivators (sticks and carrots, grades) in mind, and removing them over the course of the term. We know we've succeeded because there is a natural dialog that happens. It really is about planning. 
• "What's the end goal in mind?" POGIL Process Skills are part of the course and building them in. Let's talk about one of these and how we would build it into an online course. 
• (K) We want students to develop these higher order thinking skills. What about critical thinking? Are the learning outcomes aligned to those critical thinking skills? Can we have students take these ideas to the next level? (Project-based learning. Padlet) Critical thinking is really about getting students to develop mental models and externalize them, what are the schemas, how do they express that? Critical thinking is about creating that evidence, their rational, etc.
• How do we do that online?
• (K) Collaborative tools online. Ex. Google doc creating a common assignment. Using communication tools. Many of us think about the LMS as a delivery tool, but we can also use it to have students create tools. What about a lesson where we ask students to write a lesson, which turns into an electronic artefact? It could be added to a student's portfolio, 
• What about metacognition?
• (C) Structure and build over the term. Start out with short tasks and build up to bigger reflections. If I'm lecturing or in videos, pencutate it with a question "What are you doing right now? Write it down on a piece of paper." Students are surprised by how they lose focus. In videos there may be a question of "Is this now on 1.5x speed?" Create awareness of what their brains are doing?
• (C) Reflect on what students have done and learned. "What is the most important thing you learned?" 
• (C) In online courses have used 'ungrading assignments', where a certain portion of the grade is determined by students and how they want to be graded. Through the term ask a series of T/F questions on how they did. Ex. "I read all the assignments.", "I tried as much as I could have." etc.
• (C) Later on in the course ask students to do self-reflection, how they did as learners, how their preferences for learning helped them, extraneous things prevented them from course work.
• (C) "So what?" or "What now?" reflection assignments where you ask students "So you learned this material, what are you going to do with it?" or "Now that you've learned this material, what are you going to do with it?"
• (C) Create a personal learning environment through a concept map of how to learn the material after the term. 
• (C) Start with small things and build to bigger things to help them think about their learning, and how to think about themselves as learners. 
• What about student-to-student learning? What do I need to do online to create a format that can help that happen? What can I do as an instructor to promote group work?
• (K) Humanizing the experience. Creating a culture in the online course. What is the tone? Humor? Pathos or ethos? How do you model it? Students look to us. 
• (K) POGIL Roles, Reflector Roles, the opportunity to say "What happens in the group?" This is more about reflecting back on the group not instructors.
• (K) Make sure to have a good icebreaker discussion. "What is your gif?" Each week have a 'fun' discussion. At first it should be modeled, but over time it could be 
• (K) Want discussion boards to not be very formal, really want the comment sections on social media, YouTube, etc. Ex. a video of painting a ceiling with comments. How do we get students to do what they do out in the open internet in our classrooms with our learning objectives. 
• (C) Students are going to be communicating with each other. There will be 'back channel' discussion. How to put discussions into productive use?
• (C) Short informal videos. First is introducing themselves and really basic. Need to establish rapport. 
• (C) Build in group-work to ensure communication. Student work is done independently and is then contributed to the group so everyone has something to add. Don't want communication to become a problem.
• (C) In discussion boards have been difficult; wanting to replicate the in-class experience and it becomes really stilted. Discussions are very important, but they have to be structured differently. Weekly create for students that are shared out with students. Must be intentional with how discussion forums are structured to support communication centered on the learning outcomes. Communication for communication's sake isn't very helpful. 
• What about the asynchronous component? Social media is asynchronous communication. Are there timing hints we should build into the course. 
• (C) For me its about inclusiveness. Some students may not be on a laptop with a high-speed internet connection. They may be on a phone. No synchronous sessions. Assume students are not going to have not great internet access.
• (C) To get around this students have used Twitter, use videos for online discussions, but try to use low bandwidth tools and low communication tools.
• Last term we did things because we had to. What advice would you give faculty who are planning for fall. Could by hybrid, online, etc. What should instructors think about now for their fall classes?
• (K) Plan for the fact that students are taking online courses who may not have the resources or tools. Ask students at the beginning what their situation is. Have a survey over your needs and how you can adjust your needs. We want to meet the needs of students, and try to get them the resources they need. 
• (K) Plan on things messing up, so have some contingency plans in place. Mistakes happen.
• (C) Have taught hyflex with online course materials, with f2f sessions that included students Zooming in. Having contingency plans is critical. Be ready to pivot asynchronously. 
• (C) Even if nothing happens, there will be some students who can't come. How will we help those students?
• The biggest frustration of faculty is "How can I be ready for everyone, AND create an active learning environment that achieves my learning objectives, AND has all the high goals I want for students?" Nothing is as it is expected. 
• The traditional POGIL approach would suggest a concurrent synchronous environment (Zoom breakout rooms) but include students/groups who can't meet during that time working through the activities. How can an instructor constructively help them move forward? POGIL facilitators can do that f2f, but how do we do that online in a discussion board? We want students to learn and own the material, but not answer the question for them?
• (C) It is really hard. Refer students to each other, ask students to respond to each other. Give them a way to respond. For example, there is a format for them to follow. Possibly a compliment, ask a question, make a connection, make a comment, etc. There are many formats for guiding responses. (ED: Scaffold the experience!)
• (K) The purpose of these activities and our presence is that we're providing feedback. The feedback should be aligned to our goals for the activity. If the groups are behaving in the same way in a copy/paste, provide individualized content-specific feedback. If students may not have energy for a group activity, provide the feedback 'Step it up.' What is your relationship with students?
• Deadlines. How strict should we be with deadlines?
• (C) For weekly modules there is a routine; watch a video, read, application exercise, study guide, quiz, discuss, and then build towards a final product. The same kinds of activities are due on the same day of the week. Structure and repitition is really helpful. 
• (C) Send an email each week that lays out what they need to be doing. Don't use announcements very much, unsure if students view them. 
• (C) Send a text via GroupMe and students really liked it. Use student tools. Use reminders. 
• (C) Not super strict by an hour or a day. 
• Recommended to read over the following POGIL page; https://pogil.org/teaching-online-during-the-covid-19-crisis
• On the hyflex course, is it like teaching two courses?
• (C) While there is a lot of work that goes into building a good online course, I do think of it as one course. There is an efficiency in having everything online. From now on face-to-face courses will likely have a strong online course site. 
• (K) When you create course material for hyflex, you create a learning artefact. We want to create course materials that can be reused over and over.
• (C) We're creating an interactive online text. 
• Last thoughts. 
• (K) We're in a strange place, and running into a big experiment of how online learning works and can work. We should think about taking ideas in POGIL and expand it online. We will make mistakes. 
• (C) Situation the pedagogy first, and use the technology to support the pedagogy. How will the tech let me do this? Let the pedagogy lead!