Want to give someone a shout-out? Email academicinnovation@uscupstate.edu!
Even before COVID-19 forced us all online, Chris Bender, Associate Professor of Chemistry, was already rethinking his Chemistry 111 course in Spring 2020. The Smith Building was being closed for renovations and CHEM U111 had a long history of high withdrawal rates. With building renovations forcing courses to become hybrid due to space limitations, would the withdrawal rate climb even higher? To prepare for a transition to a hybrid course in Fall 2020 (at least what was supposed to be in Fall 2020), Dr. Bender applied to the inaugural Engaged Pedagogy and Hybrid Course Design Institute with CAIFS in Summer 2020. After a few months of training and course planning to implement a flipped classroom with active learning, the course went live in Fall 2020…and has remained flipped, active, and collaborative ever since.
Dr. Bender presented findings from the new CHEM 101 course at the Fall Course Showcase. Watch the 15-minute video below to find out what happened to the W rate after the transition and to learn about students really think about those 6-minute videos!
Grading consumes much of our time and effort as faculty members, and it’s the place where our feedback can make a great difference in students’ ability to learn and succeed. The Grading and Growth Mindset workshop features Dr. Lex Lancaster, assistant professor of Art History, sharing their research and experiences with contract grading/specifications grading.
Contract grading offers an alternative to traditional grading by focusing attention on effort, outcomes, standards, feedback, revision, and growth. By offering a transparent map to success, courses with contract grading often see the quality of students’ work improve while students build their metacognitive skills and become better learners across all their courses.
When teaching in online and hybrid courses, you may find it helpful to think through the framework of Encounter, Engage, and Reflect. How will your students encounter the information you are presenting? How will your students engage with the information they need to learn? How will you have students reflect on their learning?
Encounter
In online and hybrid courses, students may encounter information through outside videos, short instructor-created lectures, readings from the textbook, articles, or case studies. Students could listen to podcasts, complete lab work and experiments, read or create a project, play games or participate in simulations, or read a blog.
Engage
Students could engage with content by participating in a group read on Perusall, completing discussion board or VoiceThread activities, and applying course topics to real-world examples and case studies. Students could have debates in small groups on VoiceThread with assigned perspectives. They could record themselves working out a math or chemistry problem and talking through how they found their solution. Students could create a concept map to show connections between course content or draw pictures to show a process. Maybe you have students working collaboratively on Office 365 documents to brainstorm ideas or topics or create a glossary of terms for the course.
Reflect
How are students going to gauge what they have learned BEFORE the major assignment, test, or essay? How will students reflect on what they have learned and need to work on more before that summative assignment? What formative assignments are you providing in your course?
Are you including end of lecture questions? Are you using exit tickets or end-of-module reflection questions? Could you include a Muddiest Point or a one-minute paper? If you were writing a quiz for this topic or module, what 2 questions would you include? How did ____ go? What can you do to improve next time?
If you would like to learn more about how to use educational technology in your classes, teaching strategies, or course design, contact academicinnovation@uscupstate.edu or book an appointment with a CAIFS team member.
