Teaching & Learning Blog

As instructors we’ve got a lot on our plate. We need to lecture, prepare digital materials and organize our online courses, provide individual feedback and check-ins, submit forms to our institution throughout the semester, and answer constant emails. On the flipside, our students also have full their plates with family obligations, work and employment to balance, and of course the global pandemic. Getting students to class and having work completed is half the battle, and the other half is justifying grades. Because of the increased educator workload and the mounting pressures on students, what can we do?

What is ungrading?

Many instructors are now exploring the “ungrading” model as a potential solution. Because we still need grades at the end of each semester, there’s still a need to view and evaluate student work. It’s how we evaluate the work that will be different in this model.

In the different models of ungrading, instructors don’t grade every piece of work and award points. They decide whether the piece of work meets their standard or not. If not, the work is sent back to the student for revisions.

This requires some rethinking of the traditional grading workflow. For example, in a chemistry class a student completes a problem set. If it’s missing work, I would give that feedback and return it to the student for revision. Are all of the answers incorrect? Same thing. I refuse to accept the problem set until the work is done to satisfactory standards.

How can you implement ungrading in your classroom? There are a few different models to choose from as a starting point.

Spec grading/portfolios

One type of ungrading is called Spec (for specifications) Grading. Instructors create curricular “bundles” which, when completed, get translated into a grade. These bundles include media, notes, homework assignments and simulations, and ultimately some sort of summative assessment. Each piece of work in the bundle is graded pass/fail only and must minimally meet the teacher’s standards.

Students need a clear understanding of what constitutes passing work prior to engaging in this model. Having exemplars or rubrics which clearly outline the required components of successful work is critical at the beginning of the semester. These don’t need to be super specific. For example, in math this could include

1. Show all work done to arrive at your answer
2. Simplify all answers
3. If asked to “explain your answer,” use full sentences
4. Include units, where needed

At the beginning of the semester you will be spending a lot of time giving feedback to student work that isn’t meeting requirements. Flexibility around work that is deemed “failing” is important, as is the ability for students to revise their work and resubmit. Once your students have a clearer understanding of the expectations, the time devoted to giving feedback will lessen.

Contract grading

In contract grading, the instructor has clearly defined and outlined requirements for each letter grade (A, B, C, etc.). More or deeper work will be required for an A, standard work for a B, and less for each subsequent letter grade down. Students each write a contract which includes which assignments they will do, their due dates, penalties for late work, and a statement of the letter grade they want at the end of the term.

The instructor will keep a log of completed work that is, again, done to the level of work defined by the instructor. If the student fails to meet the requirements of the contract, the instructor has the ability to adjust their grade based on the submitted work.

The unique part of contract grading versus traditional grading is that the focus is on the work, not the “kind of student” in your class. All work is considered to be of equal weight, and meetings with students generally focus on improvement to work quality or opportunities for a deeper dive into the curriculum.

Consultative grading

Allowing the student to determine their grade can be a serious leap of faith, but that’s what consultative grading is. This does not mean that all students receive an “A”. Student have regular check-in meetings with the instructor throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, the student writes a comprehensive reflection and puts together a compilation of their best work.

The student must have data that demonstrates that they deserve the grade they propose. An example of an end-of-the-semester reflection can be found here, as written by Dr. Susan Blum from the University of Notre Dame (Supiano, Becky).

Thought needs to be given to how handle extenuating circumstances on the part of the student. I tend to not make concrete rules on this, as I find that each student’s circumstances are unique.

Conclusion

While I have been thinking about making the switch to ungrading for the last few years, I haven’t made the leap just yet. Besides choosing which model to go with, I still need to identify the following:

• What are you willing to negotiate on with students?
• How will you handle absences?
• How will you be transparent with students throughout the semester, so they know they are on or off target?

I’m looking forward to encouraging my students to improve their work, making grading more transparent, and creating a classroom that is focused on the learning process and not on numerical grades.

Resources

Butler, Ruth. “Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Properties of Evaluation: Effects of Different Feedback Conditions on Motivational Perceptions, Interest, and Performance.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, 1987, psycnet.apa.org/record/1988-21628-001.

Cordell, Ryan. “How I Contract Grade.” Ryan Cordell, 7 Dec. 2019, ryancordell.org/teaching/contract-grading/.

Flaherty, Colleen. Professors’ Reflections on Their Experiences with ‘Ungrading’ Spark Renewed Interest in the Student-Centered Assessment Practice, Inside Higher Ed, 2 Apr. 2019, www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/02/professors-reflections-their-experiences-ungrading-spark-renewed-interest-student.

Hall, Macie. “What Is Specifications Grading and Why Should You Consider Using It?” The Innovative Instructor Blog, 11 Apr. 2018, ii.library.jhu.edu/2018/04/11/what-is-specifications-grading-and-why-should-you-consider-using-it/.

Rosenblatt, Adam. “Committing to Ungrading, in an Emergency and After.” The Chronicle, Duke University, 27 Mar. 2020, www.dukechronicle.com/article/2020/03/duke-university-gradin-coronavirus-covid-19-public-health-crisis-emergency-thinking-ungrading-pass-fail.

Sorensen-Unruh, Clarissa. “Ungrading: What Is It and Why Should We Use It?” Chemical Education Xchange, Chemical Education Xchange, 14 Jan. 2020, www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it.

Stommel, Jesse. “How to Ungrade.” Jesse Stommel, 11 Mar. 2018, www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/.

Supiano, Beckie. “Grades Can Hinder Learning. What Should Professors Use Instead?” Chronicle of Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Ed, 23 July 2020, www.chronicle.com/article/grades-can-hinder-learning-what-should-professors-use-instead/?bc_nonce=f3tifpo2zoqg492u3b2dg&cid=reg_wall_signup.

Have you tried using videos to resolve problems or provide innovative solutions in your online classrooms? Effective video usage can foster both individual student learning and increase a sense of community in an online world.

Teaching via video can be synchronous like a live Webinar or Zoom conference, but there are many other methods, including asynchronous video, to enhance your students’ online learning environment. In these COVID times, with so many instructors new to online teaching and attempting to provide or mimic the face- to-face learning environments, many have turned to the use of synchronous meeting tools.

There is often the feeling students are being deprived by being forced out of the classroom and online. This phenomenal upswing in synchronous online learning has been nicknamed the Zoom Boom. However, research is indicating this synchronous surge is simply not sustainable in the long run. There are issues with different time zones, mobile connectivity, as well as teacher and student screen time burnout.

A deeper dive into asynchronous videos

For these reasons, I’m focusing on asynchronous methods of using video to enhance the online classroom and engage your students more fully. There are four areas or goals where using effective videos can help instructors solve some unique challenges in the online learning platform.

1. Videos can increase student engagement in ways that enhance their understanding of the material.
2. Videos can help you assess the formative stages of their learning. Are they making the progress needed to succeed?
3. Videos can offer you methods of presenting difficult or demanding concepts, requiring students to demonstrate their mastery.
4. Videos can provide feedback to your students on their submissions in timely, meaningful and personal ways.

I have eight suggestions for video activities that enhance the digital learning environment, hitting all four of the goals stated above.

1. Expand on the written content.
2. Personalize the digital experience.
3. Flip your classrooms so they become learning centered rather than teacher centered.
4. Give clear and memorable feedback to students.
5. Demonstrate processes or concepts difficult to convey through written content.
6. Encourage your students’ creativity, demonstrating their mastery of the content.
7. Be informed about students’ formative learning with populated analytics.
8. Using the same type of analytics you can evaluate your students’ engagement.

Introducing micro lectures and more

Here are three suggestions for expanding on the written content through instructor-created, short videos. These activities focus on your specific course, adding to the content for added clarity and depth.

1. Micro lectures
2. Course overviews
3. Chapter or concept overviews

Micro lectures are not long, nor do they attempt to cover the entire chapter. Above all, they are not boring. They should be short and interactive. And they need to chunk content in short management increments. You should capture your students’ attention as well as meet accessibility standards, such as closed captioning.

As a communication professor, I can offer you some production tips for making your movies of these micro lectures.

• Think about covering the difficult single concepts you know students have struggled with in the past. Keep them short (3-5 minutes max).
• Make good eye contact with the camera.
• Be enthusiastic! You want to be a Tigger on film, not an Eeyore.
• Be sure to use good light coming from the front rather than the side or behind.
• Use a headset with microphone for optimal sound quality.
• Make the videos interactive by asking questions, providing questions before and after.
• Provide a transcript.
• Keep your lectures focused with no more than four main points.
• Be sure to use some type of attention getter in the first 15-30 seconds. It might be a question, a brief story, a startling statistic, a striking picture, a piece of music, or any other method that draws the students into the presentation.
• Use far more images than bullet points when using a PowerPoint with your micro lecture.
• New visual material every 10-15 seconds. It keeps listeners’/viewers’ attention.
• Edit or re-record if needed.
• And, be sure to use closed caption so your videos are accessible.

You can apply these same principles when creating walk-through demonstrations for your students of the course overview or a module/chapter overview.

Make a personal connection

Next, let’s look at how videos might personalize both the digital presence of you and your students. These are methods that put “skin” on the computer, that let your students know more than a cyborg is monitoring their progress.

• Provide a video introduction from you to your students on the first day of class.
• Provide course navigation videos from you to the students that are specific to their course, walking them through how to use the online tools.
• Have students create a self-introductory video. You might suggest they share some type of story, like the best thing they’ve ever eaten, or the vacation of their dreams. Do not let them get away with, “My name is Betty Boring. I was born in Borington, and I went to Boring High School.” Really true stories keep us interested, and they’re memorable. It’s why we all understand the phrase, “Tell me another story.”

These introductory videos are powerful ways to create community within the course. We know that emotional connections are one of the most powerful components for student persistence. Any method that increases the connection between instructor and student, and between students increases that emotive piece of the puzzle for decreasing student attrition.

Making class learning centered

Using video assignments can provide information you need to flip your classroom, teaching to the most challenging concepts to that specific group of students. You might use:

• Micro lectures
• Video quizzes
• Student discussion forums

These types of activities vary the way students interact with the content before classes or before the next week. Having students view a micro lecture before class, completing a short online quiz on difficult concepts offers information to you about student engagement and student progress.

Video quizzes can gauge engagement through data such as time on task, as well as information on questions most missed. You can then fill in the gaps with your own teaching strategies. And don’t forget your Learning Management Systems such as Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace by D2L or Moodle provide data, informing instructors about student progress.

Videos can also provide us with the ability to give asynchronous talking feedback in an online environment by:

• offering students recorded individual or group feedback from you.
• recapping the week’s progress using a video message.
• briefly discussing the week’s challenging material and common errors.

I began providing a video on Sunday night when COVID created massive changes in schools in March. My students, already in online classes with me, expressed such appreciation for my new weekly summaries with them about class progress with the material. And, it gave me a chance to speak with them about the challenges they were facing in their personal worlds as well, offering to help students find the support they might need.

Give them the microphone

Videos are the perfect environment for the demonstration of processes, skills, and course navigation. Let students demonstrate their mastery of the skill or concept by tapping into their creativity, engaging them with tools they are already familiar with such as:

• Instagram
• TikTok
• Snap Chat
• Drones
• Video gamification

Harness their inner director and ask them to create videos that demonstrate their proficiency with assignments such as:

• Individual presentations such as speeches
• Group projects presentations
• Demonstrations of a skill or principle
• Peer evaluations

Using the right tools

Once you’re comfortable with some of the tools at your disposal, you can take it to the next level with the many tools offered for video production and presentation. I’m just going to highlight some of the more recognizable tools and what they can do.

Pre-created videos are a great way to start. They are often accessibility compliant and professionally made depending on the site you choose.

• YouTube has the broadest range, but may not be academically sound.
• Publishers often provide clips which adhere to academic standards and are accessibility compliant like Pearson’s Clips, or premade video quizzes.
• TEDx often provides videos that are both compliant and academically sound.

There are tools to help with video mixing, or combining several videos to demonstrate a concept. These can encourage student creativity and a deep understanding of the content of the course. Two of these are:

• Nearpod (creating your own video quizzes)
• And, MediaBreaker (Students can create a mix of videos they locate, encouraging them to find current materials that demonstrate critical thinking about course content in a current real-world application).

Backchanneling is another way to engage your students. This is what we do when we are messaging friends during a less than engaging meeting. Phone messaging and Twitter were the original backchannels. And, while we might view these as distractions from the main event, backchanneling is engaging, community building and maximizes time if directed and focused on the lesson. Tools for this include:

• Twitter. Students are very familiar with Twitter, but this does not provide protected space, nor is it academically designed.
• Backchannel Chat can provide live time streaming commentary on videos students are viewing. Students can also make comments or ask questions.
• Hotseat was designed by Purdue University based on a Twitter model and provides a free backchannel tool in an academic setting.

If you want to create your own movies designed just for your course and your students, there are tools offering you a range of possibilities.

• EdPuzzle allows you to create your own video quizzes with embedded questions rather than a beginning essential question.
• Loom allows you to screen share and create short easy walkthroughs for a class or just one student.
• Camtastia is a robust video tool with many creative possibilities, but it is not free. Snagit allows you to screen share and save computer space as your videos are housed in their cloud.
• TEDEd is a well-used video creation tool allowing you to stand on the shoulders of educators around the world as well as to share your repository of educational video creations with others.

Easy as pie

So, if you’re just beginning to use video in the online environment, or if you are well into your video use, keep it simple and easy as PIE.

Plan what you want the video assignment to solve for you or your students.
Implement the tool that does this for you in the easiest and most effective way.
And then Evaluate not only the students’ performance and engagement, but how well the tool worked for you.

Picture this: Joanna is a busy executive and single mom who works as a senior Project Manager at a large technology firm. Due to COVID-19, she’s been working from home since March, and her company just announced they’re extending work from home orders through at least July 2021.

Although her travel schedule came to an abrupt halt once the pandemic began hit, her 10+ hour days are filled with back-to-back virtual planning meetings, client presentations, and conference calls. In addition to managing her job remotely, Joanna must also oversee her three teenage children who are now engaged in virtual at-home learning, likely through the end of the school year.

Joanna’s daughter is in 8th grade, and is a severely dyslexic learner with an auditory processing disorder. She has online classes from 8:00 a.m. until 3:15 p.m. with 15- minute breaks between in each class. Joanna’s freshman and senior sons are also virtually enrolled in the public school system. Although the boys’ online schedules are less rigorous than their sister’s, they’re simultaneously navigating the expectations of high school learning and the college search process, with varying demands on workload, applications, and standardized testing.

At any given point in the day, at least one of the kids has a question — a math equation here, a grammar exercise there, how to read a passage, what a particular chemistry assignment means, or how to start an essay for English. Their teachers say they’ll answer emails or provide study halls, but many times they aren’t available at the time of need. And even if Joanna can help with the content, she can’t interrupt her full docket of video calls and meetings.

On top of everything else, the house is wreck. Joanna’s mother had typically lent a hand with cooking, cleaning, and helping the kids, but she can longer come to the house due to a weakened immune system. Exasperated & tired, Joanna’s work, her family, and her children’s education are suffering.

Some employers are doing it right

While the scenario above is just an example, corporations understand that this type of situation is becoming all-too familiar. Employees worldwide are newly burdened with pressures of working remotely while juggling distance-learning dependents at home. As such, companies are swiftly rethinking what employee benefits look like and aggressively investing in their workforces.

Corporations spend $164B annually on employee training & education, which can include tutoring services. With the pandemic still creating upheaval for the foreseeable future, that number is likely to rise as employees’ struggles become clearer.

Mental health offerings by employers are already seeing significant increases in recent years — from 34% in 2014 to 75% in 2018. With nearly half of Americans saying their mental health has suffered due to the COVID-19 crisis, this spending trend on well-being services is expected to continue to help workers deal with stress and anxiety.¹

Some larger companies have adopted new programs that offer heavily subsidized school day supervision for students on a part-time basis to help parents deal with the financial and mental stress created by juggling work and their children’s virtual classes. But even in the midst of the pandemic, some of the numbers around employee benefits are alarming. One report by The Society for Human Resource Management showed that only 4% of the member companies it surveyed offered subsidized child-care centers or programs. About 40% didn’t even offer a pretax dependent-care flexible spending account.²

Still, there are bright spots. Minnesota-based food company Hormel recently announced that they’d pay tuition costs to two-year colleges for its employees’ dependent children beginning in the 2021-22 academic year.³ Other companies are providing access through their Employee Assistance Programs to education support services like tutoring, mental health activities to help employees stay physically and mentally healthy at home, and support in the form of free financial planning and credit monitoring.⁴

Give employees academic help

To support corporate employee dependents & family members during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, Pearson offers Smarthinking. With 24/7 online tutoring and writing support available on-demand, Smarthinking can help employees and their families with normal coursework, reskilling, and upskilling, from middle school through college, graduate, professional, and certificate level. This relieves the extreme pressures on parents working remotely by assisting their at-home students with writing and other school work — in real time and asynchronously.

For more than 20 years, we’ve successfully served millions of students through our university partnerships and direct to learner models. And now, when your workers and their families need assistance, we can help you offer the best academic and skills-improving support available.

Sources

¹Erica Sliverman, “Increased spending and COVID-19 impact 2020 benefits landscape,” BenefitsPRO.com, August 17, 2020.
²Jena McGregor, “Big firms offer stressed parents new perks such as subsidized tutoring,” washingtonpost.com, August 20, 2020.
³Madeline St. Amour, “Free Tuition for Children of Employees at Hormel Foods,” Inside Higher Ed, September 1, 2020.
⁴Alan Kohll, “How One Company Is Taking Care Of Employees During COVID-19,” Forbes.com, Apr 6, 2020.

Top tips, techniques, and advice for making the most of online learning

There are so many unanswered questions for families right now. On top of the usual parental concerns, we’re now having to face the reality that our children might be doing some (or all) of their learning from home, often, in front of a screen.

Like most parents I wonder what impact this might have on my daughter. Will it impact her development? I wonder what this might mean for her social skills? What about her future opportunities? I will also admit to worrying that all of this time in isolation might be making her go a little bit wild and feral? But mostly, I think how best can I support her while still maintaining my own sanity?

These, and many more questions, are what so many of us are struggling with right now.

If you are keeping up with the real time changes in the UK, there is a growing likelihood that online learning will become our reality again in the near future. If you are elsewhere in the world, you might not have left the first phase of the rush to online. Reflecting this, I want to help parents prepare and cope effectively. As both a parent and as Pearson’s Chief Learning Officer, I’ve written these tips with both my heart and my head. Everything I’m sharing is based on research, but most importantly – I hope these insights will help make any future online learning experience a bit more manageable.

Convey calm

Most importantly, encourage your child to talk to you about what they are feeling and respond with empathy and understanding. It’s an uncertain, and often frightening time right now; we need to show our children that we’re here for them. Children are receptive to learning when they feel safe and secure.

Make a plan that helps achieve outcomes

In the world of learning, “outcomes” is a word used quite often; it refers to the learning goals that students are meant to achieve. Whether learning takes place online or face to face, it’s all about students achieving the outcomes that will set them up for success. The outcome might be to understand a topic, develop a skill, or for students to socially develop and connect with peers. Get clear on what these outcomes are for your child, based on what they want to learn, what their teacher’s goals are, and how you as a parent can support. If your child’s learning moves online, make sure you know:

1. What are your child’s learning goals (AKA outcomes)?
2. What other outcomes should your child be focused on, such as improving their critical thinking skills or ability to collaborate with others?
3. What are the expectations of you, as a parent, for helping your child make progress towards these outcomes?

I know many parents have decided to supplement what their school provides through additional online learning experiences. It’s important to keep outcomes in mind if you select learning technology for your child; identify the outcome your child needs to achieve and make sure there is evidence that the product you choose has a positive impact on the outcome you’ve identified.

Create routine

Students usually work best within routines. Work with your child to set the expectations for completing schoolwork and attending classes.

• Ensure you know the expectations that the teacher has for completing their schoolwork from home and how teachers can be reached. Preview lessons, assignments, and don’t miss any live lessons.
• Prepare a schedule of what needs to be completed each day/week. Part of effective scheduling is building breaks into the day and not trying to put too much learning into one block. A general rule of thumb is 30 to 50 minutes of learning and then a break for older students. Learning should take place in smaller chunks for younger pupils.
• If you are working from home, make sure your child knows when you are available and unavailable to help them. Setting clear boundaries is essential for your sanity and for your child’s self-esteem.
• Embrace the fact that online learning does not mean your child only learns in front of a computer. Given educators have to focus on achieving a variety of outcomes, you should expect that activities will adjust based on the best way to achieve each outcome. Activities might range from being given several links to follow at the student’s own pace, being asked to do some practice work, or completing independent work offline.
• Review and reflect on the day by asking your child to show you what they worked on and ask them a few questions about what they learned. This isn’t you “checking” their work; it’s you being curious about what they’ve done.

Help your child believe they can do it

Everyone is going to experience setbacks and frustrations. It’s key to try and see those moments as useful markers on a journey towards learning, rather than signs that it is time to give up. If students struggle with an assignment use statements such as:

• Tell me what you’ve tried so far.
• What else can you try?
• What have you learned so far?

Remember to model this, as much as you can, for your child; if you get frustrated and shut down when something unexpected happens (e.g., the technology doesn’t work like you think it will), your child may think that some things really are just too hard.

Help your child see the value

You may become accustomed to hearing the phrase that teachers have heard millions of times, “Why do I have to learn this?” It’s hard to stay motivated when you don’t see the value of what you are doing. Try to help your child connect what they are learning to things that are important to them. This might mean connecting learning to their interests (e.g., “well, if you understand averages you can follow your favorite footballer’s performance”) or helping them understand ways in which they could use what they are learning to help themselves or their friends and family (e.g., “could you use this lesson on photosynthesis to help us decide where it would be best to put our tomato plant?”). Students who learn to take charge of their own learning are often more successful.

Ensure there is a focus on individual progress and feedback

Every school will have a slightly different approach in terms of how they assess students. This will be even more true as schools grapple with online learning. As a parent, you need to make sure that your child’s knowledge and skills are being tracked in a meaningful and productive way. This should be a depiction of their individual progress (not how they compare to classmates). Ask your child’s school how progress will be shared with your child and with you.

On top of making sure that your child’s school is measuring progress, it’s essential that your child is receiving regular feedback on how they’re doing. No one can improve if we aren’t given regular, immediate information on what we did well and how we can get better. It’s important for you to recognise that feedback doesn’t have to be evaluative or for a grade; it can be as simple as a supportive check-in. Again, make sure you know how regular feedback will be provided to your child.

If you and your child don’t have a good grasp on not only the outcomes your child is meant to achieve, but also how they’re doing on their journey to achieve these outcomes – you should speak with your child’s teacher.

Provide opportunities for developing soft skills and social skills

Whether it’s communication, collaboration, or critical thinking – acquiring and developing these skills is just as important as enhancing knowledge. Much of your child’s time at school is about having fun, connecting with new ideas, and socialising with friends. During online learning, your child’s school will be building skills development into activities (e.g. problem solving, self management, social responsibility, etc.); but you can help make sure that you are fostering skills development outside of what the school is providing.

You can use technology to take virtual field trips to museums or foreign countries, play interactive games, and video call with friends and family. Or you can develop these skills without technology – have siblings work together to solve a problem (e.g. how can you earn enough money to buy that new video game) or have your child plan a new layout of their bedroom to maximise space.

Look after your own wellbeing

This is probably easier said than done, but try not to put too much pressure on yourself. You don’t have to become a professional educator; you are a parent. Communicate with your child, empathise with each other, and try to take some time for yourself. Adjusting to a new way of learning isn’t easy for anyone, but we’ll navigate it together.

If you have questions or want further support, Pearson can help.

Do you want more distance learning support and activity ideas?
For International school parents: https://blog.pearsoninternationalschools.com/category/parents/
For UK parents: https://www.pearson.com/uk/learners.html

Do you want to explore Pearson’s online schools?
For US parents: https://www.connectionsacademy.com/tips
For UK and International school parents: https://www.harrowschoolonline.org/

“Ugh, when am I ever going to use this?” As an educator, how many times have you heard that question? We are living in a time of change. Changes in education, policy, standards and culture are just a few that we’re all struggling through. I enjoy incorporating current news in my lectures and weaving in my students’ everyday life experiences with what I teach. How can we, as educators, help students make new schema and fit it together with their current world view?

It seems now, more than in the past, these news items carry more weight. If you haven’t taken a close look at your curricular choices lately, it’s worth a revisit.

Personally, I don’t care if my students become chemistry majors. What I do care about is creating students who have a wider world view and can approach problems with a critical mind to make the world a better place. Before tackling social justice topics in the classroom, however, I need to ensure the proper foundation is in place.

The foundation

I haven’t seen any state or university standards with social justice topics embedded in them, especially for the physical sciences. This means I’m going to have to pick and choose which topics are relevant to my curriculum, and which are appropriate for discussion in my classroom. Before you get started looking at topics, ask yourself these questions:

1. Which topics do I feel comfortable serving as an impartial moderator?
2. Do I personally have enough background information on this topic to serve as an arbiter of truth?
3. Discussion of some topics inevitably leads to frank discussions of topics like privilege, poverty, and inequity. Am I comfortable discussing this with students?

In addition to choosing the right topics for my students, I also need to create a safe learning environment, so my students feel free to discuss a topic from multiple angles without the fear of retribution or judgement. They need to know that their thoughts are valued. Consider the following:

• When discussing famous scientists (or authors, or explorers, or…) is there only one narrative being presented? In science, the books seem to be dominated by old white men. I enjoy discussing why that is, and who the underrepresented are.
• Ask students questions with no correct answer and let them discuss various viewpoints. For example, why do we learn about the history of the atom? How much radiation exposure is acceptable to the average human?

If you think of a question organically while lecturing, pose it to the class. Let them work out the different sides of the issue and take a stand on which they feel is best. As an instructor, I see my role as asking follow-up and probing questions to challenge my students and move dialogue forward.

Finding a topic

We can’t cover everything, so we need to find topics which lend themselves well to subjects already covered in our curriculum. Here are a few examples I’ve used in the past with my chemistry classes:

Flint Water Crisis

• Solubility
• Oxidation/reduction
• Heavy metal toxicity
• Remediation

Testing for Banned Substances in Sports

• Chemical reactions
• False positive rates and their impact on the lives of athletes
• Natural vs. unnatural levels of normally occurring chemicals in the body and who sets the benchmark for what is deemed “illegal”

5G Safety

• Electromagnetic spectrum
• Wave characteristics
• Energy
• How cell phones work

Nuclear Byproducts at Bikini Atoll, Fukushima, and Chernobyl

• Nuclear fission
• Decay products
• Half-life
• Dosage
• Environmental concerns

Microplastics in the Ocean

• Decomposition
• Remediation
• Separation of matter

Clean Water and Sanitation Issues

• Separation of matter
• Decomposition
• Chemical testing
• Engineering and materials design

Your vision

How do you envision leading your students through the analysis of a multifaceted topic? There are many ways to do this as there are topics. Here are a few I personally enjoy:

Group Discussion or Socratic Seminar

Having students prepare ahead of time is critical for an engaging discussion. I generally have my students write out their ideas and thoughts as a homework assignment prior to the discussion so that they have a position developed which is supported in fact.

Mock Trial

Have student take different roles based on their opinions and desires. Have the different sides to the argument present, and ultimately the jurors (other classmates) will make a decision on who made the most compelling case.

Snowball Discussion

Students will form groups in pairs and discuss the issue. After a set amount of time, the pairs will form groups of four and discuss again. After some time, the groups of four will combine into groups of eight and so on until the entire class is one big group.

Writing Prompt

Most Learning Management Systems have a feature that allows for a question to be asked, without students viewing other student responses until they submit. I like this type of framing because limiting student exposure to other ideas will ensure that what they write is truly their position, without the sway of other ideas.

Laboratory Exercise

For some of the topics I mentioned earlier, students can move their ideas into the laboratory to develop cost-efficient ways to solve real-world problems. For example, students can design a field test for water quality, creation of drainage covers that allow for efficient cleaning and reduction of pollution from run-off, or design methods to turn human waste into fertilizer.

Wrap things up in a bow

Once you are done exploring an issue, there should be some sort of resolution. That does not mean that a side needs to be taken, or that something needs to be called “right” or “wrong.” Students inherently always want to know the answer to a question.

“How many covalent bonds are there in one water molecule?”

But some questions don’t have a concrete or finite answer.

“What does the atom look like?”

It’s those questions that are much more difficult. We have a good approximation, but no definite answer. The same can be said of social justice issues. Encourage your students to look at issues from all sides and do their best to understand the perspectives of others. When there are no correct answers, my best hope for my students is to base their conclusions on concrete data and to take the lead in making the world a better place for all.

There is no doubt that back-to-school plans have been hotly debated as the higher-education world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic. Institutions have whipsawed between resuming on-campus classes or opting for a virtual approach to learning. Students themselves are carefully considering where, when, and how to pursue their college degrees. There are no straightforward answers or “one size fits all” solutions. Despite all the uncertainties and hurdles that have impacted the education industry as a whole, Pearson partner Maryville University has experienced remarkable growth.

Congratulations to Maryville University for making The Chronicle of Higher Education’s fastest-growing colleges list again after record enrollments for the 16th consecutive year. Maryville anticipates this growth trend will continue into the Fall 2020. The proof is in the numbers. Maryville projects overall enrollment increases of 10 percent across traditional on-campus undergraduate students and online undergraduate and graduate students this year. Maryville is welcoming more than 925 new students to campus, including more than 750 incoming Freshmen students enrolled in on-campus classes this fall – representing a 7 percent increase in on campus enrollment. Online class enrollment has grown by more than 17 percent, with more than 7,200 students engaging with Maryville online.

“Students across the country choose Maryville because we offer market relevant, high quality, online programs that provide the flexibility they need to fit education into their busy lives,” said Katherine Louthan, dean of the School of Adult and Online Education. “We are one of the few universities committed to the continual innovation and evolution of the digital learning experience.”

Maryville has long embraced digital learning as the future of higher education and understands the vital role it will play as an element of our “new normal.” Maryville’s decades-long focus on developing robust online programs and providing support for its faculty to deliver high-quality curriculum across all learning environments enabled Maryville to quickly pivot between in-person and virtual learning in response to COVID-19. This flexible and active learning model makes Maryville’s program offerings especially appealing to students eager pursue higher education in the midst of their already busy lives.

Pearson Online Learning Services has partnered with Maryville University since 2012 and we share in their excitement! #SaintStrong

Read the full press release.

“Hey, sorry. I was on mute.” It should be our new national t-shirt.

If you’ve said this recently, you’re in the club. You’re among the millions who have been working at home in the wake of the pandemic.

According to the Physicians Foundation, nearly half of all doctors are using telemedicine appointments. Nearly every teacher in the US this year made the switch to online learning. What do they have in common? The ability to connect emotionally with patients or students is proving to be a struggle.

“New Connections Academy teachers often learn that what makes them a great virtual teacher is their communication skills,” says Mickey Revenaugh, co-founder of Pearson’s Connections Academy, a full-time online school program for grades K-12.

Trying to be human through the lens of webcam may be the next big skills gap, as working from home continues for the foreseeable future. Over 7,000 people in seven countries agree – in Pearson’s Global Learner Survey, 77% of people said that teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me that working remotely requires different skills than working in an office. What are those skills? 89% say that people will need to develop more digital skills, such as virtual collaboration, virtual communication, analyzing data or managing remote team.

Two researchers from Pearson explain.

“Communication and collaboration are two soft skills that become even more important when working virtually,” says Elizabeth Moore, Director, Learning Research & Design. Although these skills have always been important for employees when in the office, they are even more crucial when answering the challenges posed by working solo in front of a computer screen.

“Communication is important but different in a virtual environment,” says Jessica Yarbro, PhD, Senior Research Scientist. “Formal communication has to be more important. You can’t just pop over and have an informal chat.”

But you can teach and learn digital communications. Mickey says that “Connections teachers are specially trained to excel in online teaching, especially how to engage students in an online classroom and use a full spectrum of communications. They understand how and when to reach out to students and their families.”

The norms of how we operate and engage with people at work are gone and being reset by emails, phone calls, texts and video meetings. But something gets lost in these technology-mediated communications. You just can’t read people’s social cues.

Here is what our experts suggest to build more empathy and keep your soft skills sharp while working at home:

1. Make an effort to keep your camera on

“The decision to have your camera on in meetings isn’t something to take lightly. It helps you pick up on someone’s facial expressions and also allows you to show with your own expressions that you are actively listening,” says Moore.

2. Be more direct, not less

Researchers say that while it may feel awkward, you may need to be more direct to get people to engage virtually. The researchers recommend you do more check-ins for what people are thinking and feeling. And use active listening skills – reflecting and summarizing not only what people are saying but their social cues too. Verbal cues like “let me play back what I think I hear you saying” or “I think I hear you saying” are ways to show empathy and make you sure you really understand what others are saying.

3. Practice active collaboration

“Collaboration is about building on each other’s ideas,” says Moore. “So think out loud, virtually, to let your teammates know what you’re thinking and what you mean, so that they can help.”

4. Address conflicts quickly and verbally

But of course, personal conflicts will happen. And if you can’t ask somebody to talk one-to-one over coffee to address an issue, what do you do?

“I think it is even more important to make a space to talk person-to-person, especially if there are conflicts in a virtual environment,” says Yarbro. She says take conversations off email and do a video call.

Some people will find themselves back in the office later in the year, but remote work isn’t going away entirely. There is no escape from needing develop your digital skills in this new world of work.

“This change has been really hard. But, we’re learning,” says Moore. “We will come out of this with a new and more flexible digital working skillset. There’ll be a more of an expectation that you’ll be polished and skilled in doing anything virtually.”

Have you heard of the KonMari method? If not, here’s a quick summary: it’s named after a Japanese author who encourages tidying by category — starting with clothes, then books, papers, komonos (miscellaneous items), and, finally, sentimental items. If you are “cleaning out,” you should keep only things that are useful and speak to the heart, and discard items that no longer “spark joy.” As the faculty advisors in this pandemic era, we figured out you can use the KonMari method in your classroom. 🙂

How exactly do you KonMari a course? Why would we even think of that? Well, for starters, there are many different features in learning management systems and in our Pearson products. Frankly, we often find faculty are so overwhelmed that they don’t know where to start.

Roughly 70% of faculty had never taught online prior to the pandemic. Even if they did, many aren’t sure what really is best for their course and students. At the heart of the KonMari program is organization, but it’s also a means to simplifying and making things less cluttered.

Where do we start?

Always begin with the end in mind

The first step in developing great content is to know what and why students are learning and how you are going to assess them. Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many faculty who start building content without thinking about this. Ensuring that your content is aligned with your objectives and assessment is much easier if you create a plan from the beginning.

Julie Dirksen, author of Design for How People Learn, talks about “design patterns” which document best thinking around solving different types of problems. This means there are lots of ways to tackle the design of the course, and it’s great to have a conceptual idea with best practices to help you make decisions. This is one of the places where faculty advisors play a key role!

Clean house & declutter regularly

By getting rid of old material, you will create space for new, better-serving material and ideas. Many of us make a standalone copy of our course, so as we find things we want to change, we do it immediately. At the end of the semester, we have a new course ready to go. It helps to constantly refine and choose what works better and eliminate what doesn’t.

Organize your course tools

Ask yourself, “Does a resource serve a clear need?” If not, delete it. I know my students have enough to keep track of without loading more things to my course that they may not need. If I do add new materials, I try to maintain a simplistic structure so they know where things are.

Be an (unofficial) instructional designer

Instructional design (ID) tips dovetail nicely here. You might argue that you were never taught or trained in these principles, and yet somehow we are all expected to “know” these things. Here are a few tips that are pretty standard across the ID field.

Keep it simple

First, and foremost, keep your menu easy to navigate and concise. Use 6-8 key menu items or so. A best practice in course design is to abide by this in each “module” in your course. Try to limit yourself such that you fall somewhere in this range.

Use meaningful images

Vision trumps all other senses. Remember that some users may have visual impairments, so make sure to include rich descriptive text as applicable. We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%. Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us.

Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time. So, reduce text and add images that support the text. This is why using consistent icons across instructional programs is so important. Students can process the meaning of the icon in a second. Use color wisely, and again, remember that those with visual impairments find things like tiny white or yellow font on a dark blue background virtually unreadable. So do many of the rest of us!

Design a distraction-free template

Again, tied to the idea of 6-8 tabs or similar, keep it simple. Sure, there are lots of cutesy graphics available, but it tends to distract and overwhelm many students. Ensure that there is enough “white space” both on course pages as well as in course work time. In other words, try to allow time for reflection.

Break up the content in small chunks

Don’t display all the assignments at once. Have them released by unit / dates. Instead of one weekly assignment with 90 questions, offer three smaller ones. And maintain consistency in the design. We see a lot of courses where we’d be easily confused.

Ensure that your learners stay focused and engaged

Check out John Medina’s website and book Brain Rules or Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel). Use tools like low-stakes quizzing, interleaving, and retrieval practice. Think about tools like Learning Catalytics or Live Response. Use the wikis and discussion boards to provide forums for students to interact, share, and reflect.

Reduce cognitive load

Cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory the brain can process. Working memory can typically only hold a few bits of information at a time and lasts around ten seconds. Therefore, your job as a “content developer” is to reduce and/or remove any information that a student doesn’t need to process.

Just how do we do this? Implement simple, clear navigation, that is intuitive and requires no thinking. Use a consistent icon bank across courses — means one less thing a student has to process. Minimize scrolling and create smaller chunks of content. Share Powerpoints or PDFs with the most important points highlighted.

Students can KonMari, too

Here are some KonMari tips for students. Because the KonMari method is all about being organized, I usually share things like the following.

Have a dedicated space

As simple as it sounds, I always tell my students to identify a study space. While online education is flexible, it’s still important to designate a specific place to complete your work. Find one that’s free of distractions, where you can focus and with little to no background noise.

For some, it’s a home office; for others it’s a desk in their bedroom, the kitchen table or a break room at work. Make sure your wireless internet connection is strong or you are hardwired. Find what works best for you and stick to it.

Commit to a structured schedule, as much as possible

Online courses are a significant commitment, and managing time is important. I tell my students to designate specific time frames to complete schoolwork each day or week, and block off their calendar accordingly. If they work a job during the week, consider using a day during the weekend to finish.

Keep an eye on deadlines

It could also help to have a calendar in the study space so course obligations are all in one place and top of mind. Keep an eye on assignment due dates. Even though online courses are often considered self-paced, set assignment deadlines still exist. Because many online students also have jobs, it may be helpful to sync work and school calendars so students can prepare for each day accordingly.

Find and nurture a support system

Earning a degree — especially online — is not easy. Surrounding yourself with family, friends and peers who motivate and encourage you can make a difference. Make sure those close to you understand the time you have committed to earning your degree so they remain respectful and understand when you’re unavailable. Consider providing them with an overview of your school schedule at the beginning of the term to remain transparent and help ensure you receive the support you need.

Connect with your professors early

Establishing a relationship with your professor early on will help you build trust and understanding throughout the term, especially since you may not be able to meet in person. It’s important to connect before the course begins or shortly after to clear up any questions you have about the syllabus or requirements. This will show you have a vested interest in the course and are committed to successfully completing it regardless of your other obligations.

Remember, one of the basic principles of the KonMari method is that you envision the “ideal” before you start.

I envision successful students. 🙂

Two years ago, when COVID-19 drove many colleges and universities to offer online instruction, Kate McKinnon’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit seemed ruefully accurate to some: “You will now pay full price for your college experience at a University of Phoenix Online without the tech support!” Some students were indeed thrust into a version of remote teaching that, while developed with the best intentions, was more emergency triage than true online learning.

Fortunately, however, even as the pandemic accelerated the transition to online learning, a closer look revealed some very distinguished online programs that are comparable to traditional face-to-face programs, or even better. These online programs often delivered greater flexibility and accessibility, sometimes with clear evidence of superior outcomes.

Duquesne University School of Nursing delivers several of those high quality online programs. In partnership with Pearson, the university is applying best practices in teaching and learning and is continually updating those practices to reflect the latest best practices in online learning. Duquesne was the first online nursing program in the United States, offering its online PhD program in 1997, and has since made the conscious decision to offer all graduate nursing programs online.

Online education expands access to those who would otherwise be unable to further their education. At Duquesne, many students are working nurses, often juggling shift work, family responsibilities, and caregiving. COVID’s demands made it nearly impossible for students to access on-campus programs in many parts of the country, Even now, with most on-campus programs reopened, some healthcare professionals face greater challenges in managing work/life balance, and/or time associated with school related travel, that make it harder to attend classes on campus.

Duquesne’s PhD graduates are deans, faculty, and Chief Nursing Officers — most of whom would not have been able to follow their dreams and earn their doctorates in a traditional, on-campus program. This was my own experience. I graduated from Duquesne with my PhD in 2002, transferring after I broke my ankle and was unable to complete my coursework on my personal timeline.

I found the faculty to be knowledgeable, supportive, skilled teachers with their own bodies of research and much to offer students. I attended a doctoral immersion residency and achieved all the other milestones of doctoral students. After graduation, I continued to work and succeed in academe. I achieved tenure and promotion to full professor at a university with very high research activity, always feeling well prepared and comparable in knowledge and productivity to my faculty colleagues. I became a leader of the nursing programs I studied in, and I recently assumed wider leadership responsibilities for research throughout the university.

Along the way, I have learned that outstanding online learning involves much more than providing technology infrastructure for remote teaching. It requires purposefully designed, and often increased, interactions with students. Professors hold one-on-one virtual office hours and many check-ins outside of regular hours. Clinical disciplines benefit from real-time virtual patient rounds, clinical case studies, and recitations. In addition, those who are new to teaching online may need to evolve how they approach assessment, technology, and time management. Duquesne and other high-quality online programs utilize research-based strategies like these to help train faculty to effectively prepare for teaching in a virtual environment.

The pandemic was not the first event to influence public perceptions that quality changes when we move from a lecture hall to a virtual classroom. Over a decade ago, the introduction of large, often free, online courses created an image of an impersonal, dehumanized experience that lacked the support students need to succeed. In addition, the early surge of several for-profit universities created a negative impression that was hard to overcome. However, those early impressions are far removed from the quality and student success we have seen at Duquesne.

Universities with quality, successful programs consider the development of students and the discovery of knowledge as integral to their mission, and that does not change if education is offered online. In many instances, due to the use of various technologies, virtual simulations, virtual proctors, and other exam security measures, online learning is no less costly than face-to-face programs but far more convenient. The same highly qualified faculty teach in our virtual classrooms.

Now that many institutions’ abrupt, disruptive transition to remote teaching is receding into history, it is my hope that thoughtfully planned, quality online programs become even more universal. These programs offer our society much that it urgently needs, and likely can’t get any other way.

Now more than ever schools are turning to online learning, so why not utilize online learning platforms to help your program with accreditation?

NACEP accreditation recognizes programs that have consistently met or exceeded rigorous, peer-reviewed standards in six areas: Partnership, Curriculum, Faculty, Students, Assessment, and Program Evaluation. These program standards create a quality framework to ensure that students are taking authentic college courses for transcripted college credit while in high school. Becoming a NACEP accredited program requires the submission of a variety of evidence documenting practice, policy, and procedures that meet or exceed NACEP’s Standards. Online learning platforms, like those offered by Pearson, can be an important ally in working towards accreditation.

Alignment via online learning platforms

An accredited program ensures that college courses offered by high school teachers are as rigorous as courses offered on the college campus. Coordinating online platforms between the college and the high school keeps assignments aligned and curriculum tight. By having identical content, the programs are meeting equivalency standards and comparison criteria (exams, homework, lab exercises, essays, etc.). Grading policies and rubrics can be the same within digital platforms to ensure continuity (number of tries, points deducted per wrong answer, extra credit, rubrics provided within the platforms, etc.) which helps programs demonstrate alignment with NACEP’s Assessment and Curriculum Standards.

Embedded professional development

Providing the depth and breadth of professional development needed to keep dual enrollment faculty up-to-date can be a challenge. Pearson offers weekly, discipline-specific, live and on-demand webinars for MyLab® and Mastering® that cover registration, assignment creation, testing, best practices, and other topics that help meet training criteria. Plus, you have access to training documents like how-to videos and planning toolkits. These resources can assist with documenting faculty professional development to meet NACEP’s Faculty Standards.

Downloadable assessment data

Programs need fast access to accurate data reports that highlight key course performance metrics including student pass/fail rates, content mastery, assignment completion, and formative assessment scores. With online platforms, course data can easily be downloaded and exported to Microsoft® Excel files for detailed analysis, allowing programs to make data-driven decisions and laying the foundation for program evaluation.

Viable alternative to in-person labs and hands-on experiences

Online platforms offer alternative learning experiences for students, especially during COVID-19 when the flexibility of online learning is essential and budgets are being stretched. Pearson’s Mastering platform is one example of a versatile tool, providing virtual laboratory exercises and dissections that engage students as if they were in the physical lab space. Struggling to offer content because the high school laboratory lacks necessary equipment? Mastering can help bridge the gap so that all students have equivalent laboratory experiences.

In addition to science offerings in Mastering, MyLab provides less expensive, virtual experiences for other “hands-on” Career and Technical Education fields, including automotive technology, culinary science, carpentry, and more. Creating real options for hands-on exercises provides your program maximum flexibility in instruction to help students continue to thrive despite COVID disruption. MyLab and Mastering present dual enrollment programs with an opportunity to document the ways they ensure equivalent content, even in the midst of a rapid shift to online coursework.

Pearson: your accreditation ally

Our MyLab and Mastering online learning platforms offer all these important benefits to help you document your activities in preparation for NACEP accreditation, while also improving the student and teacher experience. In addition, instructors have maximum control over their course, offering the flexibility to easily create courses to fit program needs. Courses can be shared with colleagues and adjuncts, copied for next semester, linked to an LMS, and more.

With the uncertainty of COVID-19 weighing heavily on instructors and programs, a solid back-up plan is needed for online and remote learning that has academics integrated with realistic experiences. By partnering with Pearson for your dual enrollment program, you can get:

• award-winning digital learning platforms that can be personalized for each student
• online homework and tutorial services that engage students and improve results
• preparation, intervention, and assessment diagnostics that gauge student readiness
• technology and services to provide in-depth data and analytics for your program
• college and career readiness tools that promote personal and social skills

Want to know more?

Watch this Pearson & NACEP on-demand webinar to learn more about how online platforms facilitate NACEP accreditation

Explore MyLab & Mastering features for educators.

Learn more about NACEP and accreditation.

We were team-teaching Intro Psychology in March when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US and suddenly shut down everything, including our campus. As we shifted to remote instruction, we stumbled upon a format that seemed to work well for our class. We started each recorded lecture with a quick check-in, asking each other simple questions like, “Are you doing OK with all this?” and “How are you coping?”

This wasn’t part of some grand pedagogical plan. Rather, it was invention born from necessity. It was an instinctual human reaction to unprecedented circumstances. Our students kept emailing to say they really appreciated these informal and personal moments, which humanized the lectures, normalized their own responses to the crisis, and helped bridge the newfound physical distance between them and us. It seemed to be what they needed at that point in time. And we soon came to realize that we probably needed it as much as they did.

Elizabeth Redden’s July 13 article outlines the mental health costs and needs of college students during the crisis. Over the past several months, we’ve seen a lot of this firsthand with our classes (admittedly via email and Zoom). And, while neither of us are trained as clinicians, we do believe that the psychological science that we teach has lessons to offer our students in their daily efforts to navigate this crisis.

That was our motivation in putting together a new course this summer (to be repeated this fall), titled The Science of Coping. In the course, we’re combining discussion, guest speakers, and mini-lectures to cover a range of topics including:

• using critical thinking to assess new research findings and public health recommendations
• how stress affects the body and how mindfulness can help
• the importance of social connection
• how sleep, nutrition, and exercise influence the immune system
• the psychology of conspiracy theories
• control and emotional regulation
• how to use social norms to change health attitudes and behaviors
• the effectiveness of telehealth and remote therapy
• bias and prejudice during times of threat
• strategies for remote learning and managing distractions

The major assignment of the semester requires students to keep a coping journal. Each week they have to select one potential coping strategy, implement it, and then take a critical look back at what worked and what didn’t. Our hope is that the course provides students with academic and intellectual insight into the scientific literature on these topics, but also that it provides them with some concrete strategies that they can take for a test run and possibly incorporate into their daily lives moving forward.

There’s a selfish component in all of this for us as well. Instructors also need something good to focus on during a crisis. Has preparing a new course this summer been stressful? Absolutely. But it has also been a welcome distraction and something productive to focus on while much of the ground we all stand on becomes increasingly unstable.

Professors Lisa Shin and Samuel Sommers are coauthors of Invitation to Psychology, 7th Edition and Psychology, 13th Edition. They participated in the Unwritten video series regarding Covid-19 and Psychology earlier this year.

This past spring was not something we expected. We’d all agree about that. For some, it was significantly more stressful than others. Throughout all my pandemic related research, I’ve heard several different statistics. Most recently, I read that nearly 70% of faculty in the country had never taught online before!

From a coach’s perspective

As you can imagine (or know personally!) those of us who support faculty have been quite busy, addressing many common themes. Faculty members ask us for insight into their course design; we notice things like excessive numbers of assignments; or, we see a long list of assignments—like showing the entire course at once.

Maybe there’s a lack of organization in the LMS. Perhaps the instructor was unclear about the student workflow, or there’s insufficient feedback for student work. Maybe the professor was not familiar with and then underutilized communication tools. We’ve had many discussions about selecting and delivering quality subject matter content; ways to deter and eliminate cheating; and the importance of having your course materials clearly set up and easy to navigate.

Extra points for balance and flexibility

The topic we haven’t had as many conversations about is the emotional side of an online course. Because of the urgency, many professors hadn’t had the chance to really reflect upon course design and effective tools to support students. Just how on earth do you create an online environment with that in mind? If we want students to stay enrolled and engaged, we need to strive to find a cognitive-emotional balance in your course.

We’ve got to be flexible.

Perhaps this might include reflecting about things like growth mindset, embedding study tips, or sharing best practices for students for online courses. Although we might acknowledge the importance of these in theory, their significance is frequently buried under a mountain of other concerns about accessibility, the content, tracking of student progress, and data reporting…

Let’s talk about the assignments first. There is a mind-numbing list of possibilities. What strategies do work? You can read more in The Learning Scientists, but they boil down to this:

1. Utilize concrete examples: illustrate ideas with examples that students can easily grasp.
2. Be a coder: a dual coder: integrate words with images.
3. Utilize elaborative questions: ask questions that help students connect new learning with prior learning.
4. Practice retrieval: have students practice with test questions on what they remember.
5. Interleave the practice: mix practice test questions from a variety of lessons.
6. Space the practice: delay interval periods between practice tests.

Ah, you ask, what happens when we really check these out? Read a recent article about student performance. In this study, note the role of student ability and the finding that spacing particularly increased quiz performance for low ability students.

Here’s a mental note: we should think about the amount of material we release at one time—that can be overwhelming. Instead of having the entire list of assignments show, many of us share only a unit or chapter at a time.

We know, however, that it’s not just content we need to think about.

Wowing the judges

Next, let’s quickly review the importance of communication! My team has heard complaints from professors recently that online learning means dumbing-down material. That’s not the case. It does mean, however, that your course material—as well as the ways your students engage with it and learn from it—will look different.

Many online courses become primarily asynchronous, for example, while others may preserve an element of synchronicity via video-conferencing tools. I find it helpful to have live “review” sessions and make use of tools like Live Response for engagement and practice.

How about some other things to do? Try weaving some of these into your discussion boards, orientation assignments, etc.

Introduce your students to mindset. Have them take a self quiz and watch a video or two, then share their reflections on the discussion board.

Do your students think about metacognition? “Metacognition is a superpower that helps elite students separate themselves from their peers.” Check this out, too; learn more about self regulated learning in this post.

Do students need strategies for time management?

How about helping your students choose the best way to study?

Need writing tips? Check these out.

Nailing the landing

Have you seen the “Keep Teaching” community hosted by Katie Linder, executive director for program development at Kansas State University, and her colleagues at the university’s Global Campus? You can “follow” several groups within the community, including a faculty group that is already a lively exchange of ideas and support.

Don’t forget—if your institution has a teaching-and-learning center, that should be your first stop as you begin to transition your course.

Obviously, the ways in which a course can be moved from an in-person to an online experience are virtually limitless. I want to encourage you to reflect and choose wisely. 🙂 Think of this as a smorgasbord—you cannot eat it all! I tell faculty—no one uses all the features. No one has every single thing in the course shell covered. You have to choose what works for you; you’ll have some combination of your own pedagogy, choices, experiences, and skillset. If we feel overloaded, imagine how our students feel.

We all need to strive to find the balance.

As painful as the decision was to close campuses and force virtual learning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators must make new, perhaps more difficult, decisions about how to resume classes in the fall. Many schools are asking: can learning happen both digitally and in lecture halls?

The hybrid model of teaching and learning uses both online and in-person options in a purposeful way. Not only does this model give you the flexibility to craft your course to reduce the risk of exposing you or your students to the virus, but it also gives students more ownership over their learning.

Here are our top tips taken from a review of existing research on how to make it work for you.

1. Build around what you want students to learn

Successful hybrid courses fully integrate online and face-to-face instruction, planning interactions based on good teaching practice. That means starting off on the right foot:

• Don’t think of your hybrid course as your normal course directly translated to be online, or your normal course with added online components. One meta-analysis cited that many blended courses were not successful because they were “a course and a half”.
• Do build your hybrid course starting with the learning objectives listed in your syllabus. Then, as you’re building your course, select and align the delivery method, technology, and assignments that will best help students learn the objectives and content.

Consider what is best done:

• in person versus online
• in real-time versus giving students flexibility
• facilitated by the instructor versus facilitated by the learning resources

For example, few students reported being satisfied with their institutions creating a sense of belonging during the pandemic. Since it can feel more difficult to build relationships online, take advantage of in-person opportunities.

Online learning resources have advantages that enhance learning, such as immediate feedback and progress monitoring. In fact, across many studies, research shows that on average, blending online and in-person learning is slightly more effective than face-to-face learning.

There are two things to consider when selecting how to approach the online parts of your hybrid course:

• Is there educational technology that can help solve any problems you have? For example, students may focus on getting through learning activities as quickly as possible, rather than engaging deeply. Adaptive learning technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated at detecting when students are engaging productively and when they are not, and can react to keep students’ attention.
• Are you at risk of using digital technology solely for its own sake? Purely replicating an analog experience with digital technology can add complexity without bringing any benefits.

For more resources, this paper is designed as a starting point for thinking about how to use technology in your class.

Generally, a hybrid course is balanced to have more online, technology-facilitated work and fewer in-person meetings. For example, one model many schools are considering to encourage social distancing is to hold a large lecture online with small, in-person discussion sections.

Here are just a few examples of how others have blended online and face-to-face learning:

• This course was delivered via a blended learning format in a flipped model, with online lectures followed by a two-hour face-to-face workshop tutorial each week.
• This class met both in person and online. They used a flipped learning approach where students were expected to complete assigned activities before coming to a four-hour face-to-face class.
• This hybrid course met once a week for three hours in a computer lab with the remainder of the course activities completed online.

2. Plan effective interactions

After you’ve identified your objectives, think about what interactions you’ll use to facilitate learning. Hybrid learning gives you a lot of flexibility in how to interact. These different types of interaction fall into the following three categories.

Learner–instructor interactions

Learner–instructor interactions, like emails, announcements, and discussions. Instructor interaction is a major driver of successful learning, but feels more difficult online. You can make a point of fostering connections by using students’ names and humor.

Learner–learner interactions

Learner–learner interactions, like discussions, collaborative group work, and peer review activities. These can either happen at the same time in person, or online and outside of class. Each mode has its pros and cons:

• • face-to-face, synchronous interactions are good for creating a sense of spontaneity and connection, but not as good at fostering participation or giving flexibility.
  • online, asynchronous interactions encourage participation, depth of reflection, and flexibility, but they can lack spontaneity and connection and may let students procrastinate.

Learner–content interactions

Learner–content interactions include activities, like reading content, watching a video, or working through a problem set.

3. Integrate the experiences

You can design the online and in-person interactions in such a way that they support each other, rather than feeling disjointed. For example, assign challenging and engaging online learning activities and then discuss them in person, inviting questions. If you’re encouraging online discussions, reference them in class to confirm their value.

4. Craft a learner-centered approach to learning

In a hybrid model, encourage your students to take control of their learning. Start by enabling students to choose how they engage with the content. Then encourage them to monitor and reflect on their learning.
By using technology with progress monitoring functionality, you can also help them stay on track. Professor Manda Williamson has over 700 students every semester and uses the dashboard in her online course material to give students ownership over their learning. She talks more about it in this guide.

5. Support student success

In hybrid learning, students must be more self-driven. Set clear expectations and build in support for self-directed learning, such as encouraging students to plan, check their understanding, study more as needed, and reflect on their learning.

To further support their success, help them use the tools by holding a technology “onboarding” session on how to use the tech and where to go for help.

This approach can not only help keep students motivated, it also builds an important lifelong skill: self-management. If you’re interested in learning more about how to teach self-management, this paper goes into detail.

6. Assess learning online

Since you won’t be in the room with the students when they are taking the test, clearly communicate the rules and instructions before the exam. The rules may include how many opportunities students have to complete the exam, if they can save and come back later to finish, if they need to put away all mobile devices, and whether it is an open or closed book exam.

Technology can help you reduce the opportunities for cheating:

• • • password protect your exam and limit students to one login attempt.
    • require students to complete a statement of honesty before beginning the exam
    • open and close access to your exam session within a predetermined time period
    • shuffle items or create multiple versions of the exam to randomly assign to students
    • create a pool or item bank to pull random questions from, a function built into many learning management systems
      ask students to justify or explain their answers by adding an open response field after each selected-response question
    • if you don’t have these capabilities, use more open-ended question types instead of true/false or multiple choice questions

This blog post gives more advice on crafting quality assessments online.

7. Continuously improve

Keep your approach simple at first and aim for continuous improvement, not perfection. We encourage you to try something, get feedback from your students, and keep improving your course. And you’re not alone: your colleagues may have advice too. You can build an informal or formal learning network to learn from each other.

This fall will be a learning experience for everyone. When faced with the unknown, as researchers we first look to what others have studied and the lessons they’ve learned. These seven tips, which are based on findings from over a decade of implementing hybrid teaching, can give you direction on how to bring together the best of in-person and online learning. For even more detail and research on hybrid teaching and learning, check out this paper.

Partnering for solutions

Pearson Faculty Advisors have become educational first responders during this COVID-19 crisis; diving in to help professors use online tools effectively. We are teachers partnering together to share, learn, and pave the way in this brave new world of internet instruction.

Teaching online is nothing new to us. We’ve logged many years of working online with tools, instructional designs, and various learning management systems. But, watching every teacher in the United States move online in a matter of a few days, regardless of their comfort with distance learning, has been eye-opening. It’s challenged attitudes about online learning environments and the role of a college professor.

So many instructors are struggling with old ways and new challenges, trying to pound traditional classrooms to fit into bits and bytes. I’ve begun to recognize a clear dichotomy in instructional methods: restorative vs punitive. Looking to the experts for ideas, I discovered abundant pedagogical literature on this, making it far from being an original idea. The research is often directed at classroom management and changing student behaviors, but the principles apply to the consequences associated with our assessments, and whether they dish out “punishment” or increase learning.

Liberating learners vs. catching cheaters

There is much consternation amongst “instantaneous” online higher education teachers struggling to hold on to teaching methods that may not be functional for online classes. In brick and mortar classrooms, student mastery was often assessed through paper tests distributed with time limits, monitored by the roaming instructor to reduce cheating, and collected and graded by the teacher.

I’ve seen much hand wringing about how online environments simply cannot police students the way the classroom teacher could. And while the sudden shift to all things digital may revert to traditional classrooms, there may be lessons to be learned. These may be applicable for teaching anywhere and at any time. These atypical days are giving us time to reassess and find new ways to view classroom strategies or policies.

I’ve listened as teachers have listed the many ways they’ve discovered students can cheat by sharing information, invalidating their final scores. I’ve watched frustrated teachers try to create duplicate online classes that were once face-to-face, missing opportunities to increase student success. They are often missing the chance to use digital methods effectively, teaching the same principles in a different manner.

After hearing so much anxiety, I want to share some thoughts about how to be the rock star content expert, maintain your teaching rigor, and remain true to your unique personality with online learning. This may even transform that physical classroom in a return to the old normal.

What do I want from them?

There are so many disciplines and courses in higher education; it’s impossible to cover how every discipline should assess their student’s success. The following suggestions can be generalized and customized to meet the needs of specific courses and content.

“What should my students know by the end of my class?” should be the first question we ask when determining how to assess student progress. Much, or most, of class energy is spent acquiring information to pass the final assessments demonstrating mastery. Whether the course is psychology, speech, statistics, advertising, marketing, biology, or nursing, the time spent acquiring content is the formative stage of learning. Instructors are responsible for providing tools during these acquisition stages to help students “learn” the material in order to critically think through how to apply the new information in real world settings.

What do they need from me?

We are the facilitators of formative activities that help increase our students’ metacognition; helping them to know what they don’t know, and how to acquire the unknown information so they can apply it when required (tested). While formative activities will vary widely, their purpose remains the same.

These classroom techniques are meant for student learning, not assessing mastery by the instructor. I like to ask myself when selecting formative activities, “Is this something I can get out of the way of my students’ learning and let them be the captains of their own ship?”

Low stakes assessment of student progress includes activities that encourage students to reflect, collaborate, teach others, review, apply, or create. Incentivizing with points is vital for full participation. However, exams designed in anxiety producing high stakes testing environments seldom produce the long-term retention that incremental low stakes self-assessments do.

Consider formative activities such as group projects, encourage collaboration through discussion forums, offer opportunities for reflection through journaling, or ask opened ended questions on short, low-stakes quizzes.

Get out of the way and let them learn!

If you like auto-graded, time-saving multiple choice quizzes, leave them for student self-assessments. They can be great tools to let the student know what they don’t know yet, encouraging them to go back and review. But they tell us little about what students are retaining long-term and are rife with possibilities for easy “cheating.”

If quizzes are low stakes, there is little reason to spend the energy to cheat. I would ask, “If the student Googles the answer in a low stakes self-assessment, who cares?” It matters little whether they learned the information from reviewing the content I provided or from Google. If they spend the energy to look up the answer, they most likely will remember the question for some time to come. My passion for teaching is to produce life-long learners who seek information from every source available.

How do I know they got it?

There is a time for all instructors to summarize the total progress their students have made, or are making, during the term. Again, these “summative” assessments will take many forms depending on your specific course. I encourage instructors to think about limiting the number of these high-stakes assessments.

Keep in mind most of class time is spent in acquiring information or forming a new knowledge base. Students need enough time to get comfortable with the content before they really show you their critical thinking skills and applying their new information to unique and practical situations.

A personal example

Here’s a scenario that shows moving from formative to summative student assessment techniques:

• Weeks are spent training psychology students through low stakes assignments to write in correct APA style.
• The formative assessments are 250-word discussion forums in proper APA, encouraging students to review classmates’ work, compare their thoughts, and make comments on each other.
• There are usually 8-10 short, shared essays.
• By the end of the term, students demonstrate their mastery of both content and APA writing style through a summative research paper.

All assessments, both formative and summative, provided little chance or incentive to cheat as the essays and paper are submitted for originality checks. Students are ENCOURAGED to collaborate with each other, asking classmates’ input before submitting their final research paper.

Becoming a Titan

We all are challenged to keep teaching fresh and alive, to stay abreast of what is changing in our world, our students’ lives, our students’ learning, and our own wants and needs. I don’t want to create a classroom made for my needs. Rather, it should be one to help the maximum number of my students achieve their goals, persisting toward their degrees. As you think through how to provide formative steps toward knowledge acquisition that summarizes student progress, ask these questions:

In each segment/chapter/module/increment of learning, what should my students remember?

• How can I help them submit that information to their long-term memory? See this source for some ideas on retrieval practice.

How can my students demonstrate they have mastered the concepts I feel they need from my course?

• What kinds of assessments can I use that limit cheating and demonstrate real learning? See this resource for ideas about summative assessments.

Rock stars, every one

This may seem radical, but I want my students to share questions and answers, learn from each other, and become co-intelligent. I want to teach them that life is a group, not a proctored exam. Life is about solving large problems as a community, not being checked in isolation to see if we know everything about anything on one big exam. I want to be a learning facilitator. It’s all about my students’ learning, not about my need to perform. I may not be the rock star from your past. You may not remember my name. But if the tunes I taught you long ago hum in your head when you see a problem needing a solution, I’ve earned the title “Teacher”.

This spring, thousands of institutions rushed to deliver instruction online at scale. Many were new to online learning, and no two institutions or instructors approached it exactly the same way. But most recognized that it’ll play an important role going forward, and most saw room for improvement. In this blog post, we’ll share five key considerations for your institution to deliver richer, more successful online learning experiences.

1. Develop more compelling online courses and curricula

Translating your faculty’s expertise online requires new techniques and mindsets. Instructional design must be integrated with user experience engineering, technology, visual design, writing, accessibility, web development, quality assurance, project management, and more.

2. Focus on helping faculty succeed

Support faculty all the way to success, with course development help and training that reflects their needs and respects their expertise. The right course development experts can help faculty optimize their own content and course structures for online learning environments, integrate more engaging media and learning modalities, and foreground real-world relevance. The right training ensures that technology serves faculty instead of the other way around.

3. Improve student support to improve outcomes

Online students require seamless support from first contact through graduation. This requires institutions to break down silos, collaborate creatively, and sometimes change culture. Consider: how do students tell you if they’re encountering serious life challenges? How do you respond? Can programs and faculty work more closely with tutors to anticipate student needs? Can each student turn to a specific individual for timely, relevant help that orchestrates all your resources?

4. Choose resources with a track record of success

For each online learning function, whether internal or external, expect a track record of success. Have they met their commitments? Have they built the types of programs you want? Can they do it at scale? Do they understand how technologies and students are changing? Are they agile and collaborative? Will they act as agents of change, recommend and execute on innovations, and help you deliver on your institution’s online strategy?

5. To sustain enrollments, get the marketing right, too

You need to get your marketing strategy right, and yesterday’s strategy may not be right anymore. Today, you’re competing with gap years and dropping out indefinitely, not just other institutions. You have to rethink how you demonstrate your value to students — and that may require objective, outside assistance.

We can help

Our white paper offers more insights in all five areas. And we’re available to discuss your unique online learning challenges. See how we can help you and your students succeed — no matter what comes next.

Get the white paper

Caroline Naser

Caroline is a Pennsylvania middle school student who loves science, sailing, reading fantasy novels, and participating in extracurricular clubs. In her previous school, she wished she had more time to pursue those interests and include them more centrally in her education. Reach Cyber Charter School (Reach Cyber) has given her the ability to pursue her interests while also focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in online school.

“I was part of my family’s decision-making to join Reach Cyber. I started in February 2017 after going to a private, parochial school,” said Caroline. “But I wanted to stay at home more, do STEM activities, and hands-on projects. My schoolwork at Reach Cyber lets me do that, and that’s one of the things I like the most. I love the idea of flexibility and being able to choose the order in which I do my lessons.

“At first, I thought that I would have to sit at home for hours and do nothing but schoolwork all day, but I soon realized that the teachers make it fun for me. My teachers care about if I know the material, and they’re not just like, ‘Get it done.’ They give fun assignments and work. I like LiveLesson® sessions because we get to go on the webcam.”

And Caroline did not have to give up friendships or connecting with other students through clubs and activities. “I like Reach Cyber because of the flexibility of the lessons and the fact that even though I am in a virtual school, I still have friends. We have a ‘secret agent chat’ group of friends who talk a lot. We all met through LiveLesson sessions or field trips. I have Connections Academy® friends in Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, Texas, California, and even Spain. I like all the clubs I’ve joined because they are STEM focused, and the teachers are excellent. I am in a Raspberry Pi and coding class, which helps me learn coding and computer science. I want to study computer science in college, and this will help me. I get to explore things that interest me more. Independent study is fun because I can get credit for doing fun projects that I pick.

“I take breaks to practice my musical instruments, attend lessons, and participate in performance opportunities. I can take piano lessons earlier in the day when most other kids my age are in school. I am in a marching band in my school district. I am also in my community’s junior philharmonic, and I take private piano lessons. I play piano, flute, piccolo, clarinet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, and oboe.

“I volunteer as a deckhand on the historical schooner Lettie G. Howard and help out with our local maritime museum. I actually get to volunteer as part of the crew for “school sails,” where students from the local brick-and-mortar schools come on the ship for a field trip, and do evening and weekend sails as well. In the winter, I participate in the sail training and maintenance program. Because I’m a Connections Academy student, I can crew on sails during the school day, and I have even taken time off from school to go on longer sails on the Atlantic Ocean and through the Great Lakes.

“Reach Cyber is helping me reach my goals. I am taking steps toward a STEM career through my courses, talks with a scientist, clubs, and contests. I’m learning a lot, but it is way more fun than having to sit around in a classroom all day. Reach Cyber has been perfect for me.”

Leigh Anne Kraemer-Naser, Parent

Leigh Anne Kraemer-Naser is a Learning Coach to her two daughters, Caroline and Charlotte, who both attend Reach Cyber Charter School (Reach Cyber). Her family began looking into alternatives to traditional schooling options when bullying issues began to surface. Leigh Anne enrolled her daughters in Reach Cyber in the 2017–2018 school year and is loving the empowering flexibility that online school has provided.

“Our previous school was wonderful when we started out; however, as my daughter got older, the bullying got worse. The teachers saw Caroline’s quirkiness and her interest in fantasy novels and engineering as distractions instead of passions. She withdrew into isolation and misery. It finally became too much for our family to bear, and we began the search for other options. As an educator and school consultant throughout Pennsylvania, I knew that any school in our city either was not academically a good fit or was going to be more of the same social and emotional torment. I needed an environment where Caroline’s individual needs as a student and a person would be supported, encouraged, and celebrated. I knew that the local brick-and-mortar schools couldn’t provide both the social and academic setting to meet all of her needs.

“The Pennsylvania Department of Education site had a list of cyber schools, and I started my due diligence. When I began looking at Reach Cyber, it seemed too good to be true—a flexible approach to the school day, an award-winning curriculum, and the cherry on top was a focus on STEM. I attended the parent information sessions online and loved what I was hearing. A phone call with a Connections Academy® coordinator was enough to seal the deal. My younger daughter, thrilled at the idea of school in her pajamas, joined in her sister’s excitement.

“For everyone who asks, ‘What about social skills?’ I can tell you that there is socialization going on. I’m pretty sure every sixth grade student knows our guinea pig, Patronus, just as well as my daughter Caroline does. Our teachers know the children’s interests, and instead of telling them to put down the fantasy novels, they encourage them! We’ve gone to STEM day camps, and it was fun to meet the teachers in ‘real life.’”

And Leigh Anne gives high marks to the teachers at Reach Cyber. “I never thought I’d encounter so many professionals who truly are able to see where each child is and raise them to new heights. The STEM team at Reach Cyber and the Talent Networks/ Leadership team at Connections Academy have given my child her confidence back and let her believe that she is in control of what she learns, what she does, and how she succeeds. Caroline loves STEM, and she has built robots, websites, apps, and microcomputers with the support of teachers who have let her design her own learning path.

“I cannot say how much we love this school. The flexibility in scheduling has allowed our children to join my husband and me on business trips, but the structure of Connexus® and the planner keeps our learning on track. It’s a perfect balance that allows our family more time together. This is the way education should be: learning is relevant, focused, and outcome driven, with the support of caring teachers who celebrate my children’s passions and uniqueness. Our family is closer than ever, and my children are excited to be empowered in their education.”

I like a good deal. Getting something for less than what you expected to pay is rewarding. However, if that item doesn’t work like you thought, or even breaks soon after you get it, it may not be such a good deal after all. I think we’d all agree quality matters. The developers of a set of instructional guidance felt the same and even named it, “Quality Matters”. Let’s take a closer look at this tool whose namesake is what most professors and course designers strive for every day.

What exactly is Quality Matters?

Quality Matters (QM) is a tool used to assess the quality of a course. With increased emphasis on online courses and the need to design materials with accreditation in mind, the best way to design a course is with QM built in from the start. As a result, it’s helpful for all of us to keep these types of recommendations in mind when talking with customers and assisting them with curricular materials.

Where did this all get started?

Quality Matters began with a small group of colleagues in the MarylandOnline, Inc. (MOL) consortium trying to solve a common problem among institutions: how do we measure and guarantee the quality of a course? At the time, I was teaching at a university. Later, I taught at a community college, and the discussions about online courses were extensive at both places. Yes, we wanted to meet the needs of our students, provide flexible scheduling options, etc., and we wanted to offer these courses everywhere because geography would no longer be a constraint for enrollment.

We were also, like many other institutions, simultaneously updating transfer agreements. Administrators and educators across the country needed a way to ensure course quality for their students, regardless of where the course originated. Ideally, courses would be equivalent. Otherwise, transfer agreements would be impacted. In 2003, the consortium outlined how the Quality Matters program could create a scalable process for course quality assurance, and applied for a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The FIPSE grant enabled QM to develop a rubric of course design standards and create a replicable peer-review process that would:

• Train and empower faculty to evaluate courses against these standards
• Provide guidance for improving the quality of courses
• Certify the quality of online and blended college courses across institutions

The QM commitment

Today Quality Matters is a nonprofit organization comprised of dedicated staff from all over the United States who work together virtually to support everyone’s quality assurance goals. To truly achieve their mission of defining and maintaining quality assurance in online learning, the QM staff rely on a much larger community of QM coordinators, workshop facilitators, peer reviewers, program reviewers, conference presenters, and all other individuals and groups who champion QM. Some of Pearson’s faculty advisors participated in QM training in the past and became reviewers with this program.

QM’s mission

QM’s mission is to promote and improve the quality of online education and student learning nationally and internationally through the following: development of current, research-supported, and practice-based quality standards and appropriate evaluation tools and procedures.

• Recognition of expertise in online education quality assurance and evaluation.
• Fostering a culture of continuous improvement by integrating QM Standards and processes into organizational plans to improve the quality of online education.
• Providing professional development in the use of rubrics, tools and practices to improve the quality of online education.
• Peer review and certification of quality in online education.

A well-designed course is more likely to engage learners and positively affect their performance. Using the QM Rubric and relevant review tools as a guide, faculty and their colleagues, or a team of QM-trained, experienced online instructors can evaluate the design of an online or blended course and ensure it meets QM Standards. When professors are ready to put a course through the review process, they can receive fresh ideas from colleagues who are interested in the course. These QM-trained peers can offer specific feedback in a positive tone that will help improve the quality of the course and create a more active learning experience for students.

So what are the QM standards?

Chances are, if you’ve worked with a faculty advisor, you’ve heard references to these or something very similar. These are also familiar if you’ve looked at the teaching online toolkit and other resources from our Learning Design team.

The eight General Standards of this Rubric are:

1. Course Overview and Introduction
2. Learning Objectives (Competencies)
3. Assessment and Measurement
4. Instructional Materials
5. Learning Activities and Learner Interaction
6. Course Technology
7. Learner Support
8. Accessibility and Usability

Don’t let the short list above fool you into thinking it won’t take long to work through. In fact, there are many resources for each one of these. Here, for example, is a rubric which can be helpful for faculty to refer to as they develop a course.

What if a faculty member is trying to “retrofit” or “overhaul” or redesign a course? QM has an article with suggestions to help you improve existing courses. Again, you’ve heard things like this from our team.

And if you’re looking for a webinar to share in addition to the Pearson webinar offerings this summer, you can direct people here.

If you’re still wondering whether it’s worth it or not…

“Hinds Community College eLearning has been using Quality Matters as the basis for our instructional integrity initiatives for many years now, probably since around 2015. We want our students to feel that they are getting a quality course…when they take a Hinds Community College eLearning course. We know that begins with Course Design and alignment. We ask a LOT of our Hinds eLearning faculty. They dig deep to give us what we ask for. The QM General Standards and course alignment of the critical course components are incorporated into our Hinds eLearning courses through thorough training and course evaluation. All of our pedagogical trainings and evaluations are related to a QM general standard directly or indirectly.

So, why QM? I like the quote by Malcolm X that says ‘If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.’ That is why we look to Quality Matters…the research-based, GOLD standard of online course evaluation for the framework of our Hinds Community College eLearning courses.”

-Katherine Puckett, District Dean of Instructional Technology and eLearning, Hinds Community College

Quality does matter!

No matter their major, university, or year in school, most students can agree on one thing: buying textbooks is one of the more frustrating experiences that college has to offer. But the recent unexpected shift to online learning and digital course materials is making this less of an obstacle. Four students from across the nation shared their experiences with their textbooks and course materials — and told us why access to digital has changed the way they view studying.

One of the most common complaints students have about their course materials is the actual process of acquiring them. Sarah F., a political science student at the University of Missouri, dreaded having to visit the bookstore at the beginning of each term.

“The only way you can avoid the bookstore is ordering your books online, but there’s a waiting period, so sometimes you don’t even get your books in time for those first couple of homework assignments. I hate having to organize all of that — it’s probably one of the worst things I have to do in college.”

The recent shift to online learning has already led to a shift in course materials in most cases. As faculty look forward with uncertainty, they know that comprehensive, flexible, and cost-effective solutions are key to a successful course, no matter the future of their course delivery. The College Board estimates that a year’s worth of textbooks and supplies can cost the average student a staggering $1,240.¹ Zach D., a marketing student at the University of Iowa, has found that, while the cost of textbooks can be frustrating, there’s something even worse — the cost of books that go unused.

“I spent $200 on this book and will only get $20 at the end of the semester for it, when I didn’t even need it in the first place.”

In his experience, the digital course materials he’s been assigned have actually been utilized in class and have helped him keep up on his own time, while physical materials have often gone untouched.

For all four students, digital course materials have been more affordable than physical materials (Zach estimates they’ve saved him several hundred dollars this year alone.) And they all agreed that digital materials were more useful to them.

Rachel H., a business administration major at the University of Colorado Boulder, has discovered a whole host of game-changing benefits to using digital materials. “It saves time in the first place because you get your book on the very first day and can start studying right away, instead of waiting to get the book in the mail. And if you’re trying to search a textbook for something, you can literally do it with your keyboard. Also, a lot of the Inclusive Access that I have has additional online study materials in it, like flashcards and practice tests. It’s extra studying my professor doesn’t give me, but is still a part of the textbook, so I can go in and study in different ways that they provide…it’s definitely had a positive impact on my grades.”

Digital materials also help students by allowing them to learn when, where, and how it works best for them, especially during these unprecedented times. Jesus H., a business management student at California State University Fresno, found that, because of their flexible nature, the digital materials he had access to sometimes contributed even more to his success than attending lectures did.

“For an accounting class I took, I learned a lot through MyLab™ Accounting. It prepared me a lot for my exams, and I passed because of the digital materials. It was convenient, it allowed me to save time, and I could study anywhere. It was very beneficial, and because of that I’m now trying to stay with classes I know will be using digital materials instead of print books.”

Through the Covid-19 lockdown and institutional shift to distance learning, technology is what has kept us together. As almost every aspect of students’ lives becomes digitized, it’s no wonder that pairing technology and education works so well for them. The benefits of digital products and course materials were clear even before the recent disruption to education, and have become even more apparent with the widespread shift to online and HyFlex learning models.

A study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation even found that when students take courses that engage digitally and in-person, content mastery can occur twice as quickly, and pass rates for at-risk students can increase by 33%.² Sarah is certain that she’s enjoyed those benefits throughout her college experience, thanks to digital course materials.

“I’m kind of able to be successful either way, but it’s about making it easier for me to be successful. It’s about putting everything in one place and keeping me organized — letting me search through and study the materials I need to, and giving me assignments that I can complete online that are more interactive than they would be otherwise. The culmination of all those things make it easier for me to succeed. Students can still succeed when they’re using paper materials, but I think having the digital materials gives us even more advantages and helps us be just that much more successful.”

During this historic time, faculty around the country in all disciplines are adopting digital solutions to support delivery of their courses and help improve affordability and student success.

Sources
¹ “Average estimated undergraduate budgets by sector, 2019-20,” College Board
² “Student Success: Digital Learning,” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Your faculty meeting starts, and one of the key items on the agenda is a focused discussion about cultural diversity and inclusion in online courses. Of course, you must also consider curricular content, pedagogy, accessibility and universal design, and their impacts on education. All of these affect your students’ learning, motivation, and satisfaction in a course. Where do we even begin with this discussion?

Why explore diversity in our courses?

Researchers agree it can promote student growth and reflection. In our increasingly globalized world, it can help students begin to foster a sense of empathy for others and bring about open-mindedness. Supporting tolerance is critical: allowing students to feel unique while still being part of the group helps them prepare for the twenty-first century workplace.

As professors, we are committed to ensuring an inclusive environment for all of our students. This includes people of all abilities, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, nationalities, religious traditions, socioeconomic classes, and ages. We could discuss these for a long time; however, most instructors are not afforded the liberty of a lot of time to consider these and design a course. How can we take current research and utilize it to deliver a course that meets these needs?

Communication

A profoundly critical aspect of any online course is communication; research in sociology, psychology, and cognition supports this. Consider also the importance of student viewpoints towards power structures in the classroom (for example, the role of the instructor versus the role of the student), how information is processed, and subject matter content.

One of the most predominant differences between online and traditional courses lies in how students and faculty interact in the classroom. Not only does the online classroom remove the physical, synchronous presence from the learning community, it regularly shifts the bulk of communications to written exchanges.

Often, the instructor is the one who facilitates the emails and discussion forums. Instructors typically provide feedback in writing, using embedded course tools for grading notes and comments. In addition to the Learning Management System (e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace by D2L, or Moodle), the faculty and students can engage outside of the classroom via social media and other tools. Again, these environments are normally driven by text, with varying emphasis on live or verbal exchanges.

Tools such as Zoom and Blackboard Collaborate can be useful; however, it’s frequently difficult to find times that everyone can meet virtually. More often, the meetings are recorded and shared so all can access the material. Live chats, video conferencing, Wikis, and blogs are all tools that are available to you to engage your students.

Interpretation awareness

Emphasis on the written word, regardless of platform, can create potential issues related to the interpretation of content, particularly for students whose first language is not English. Students, particularly English as a Second Language (ESL) students, may look for hidden messages in feedback and/or decipher feedback differently.

Consider the potential (mis)interpretation of written forums or feedback and the impact on student performance and attitude. Be clear and thorough. We find it helpful to create samples of frequent errors with detailed notes that we can easily share with any student. Making mini lessons with apps like Educreations is useful, too. These are useful for all students.

Keep in mind that students do not necessarily have to be English language learners for their culture to influence their interpretation or understanding of the meaning of written text within a course. Culture can impact the dynamics of the exchanges as well. Cultural norms — the common beliefs, expectations, and practices of a society — may impact how and when students respond to questions.

For example, students from Western cultures may be more apt to view the instructor as a facilitator, rather than non-Western students. In some cultures, the instructor is viewed authoritative in nature. You’ve probably had a student or two who argued that you should just “tell them what to do” instead of asking them to “guess.”

Tips for better communication

Use icebreakers and “getting to know you” activities on your discussion boards. Share the expectations for student comments/behavior before the course even begins. Consider disciplinary content in a global context as you post questions and problems of the week. Think and share about your own identity.

Some faculty create affinity groups and note that their students love knowing their peers are dealing with some of the same issues, life events, challenges, and so forth.

Course design with diversity in mind

First and foremost, consider universal design principles in your course design. It may be as simple as paying attention to color and size of fonts, the volume of material on any given page, the embedding of objectives and directives for the learners, etc. You already know it’s critical to use only captioned videos, images with alt text, etc, but do you know how people tend to scan/read web pages? Are you designing your course with that in mind?

Explore more about accessibility for Pearson products by visiting the product websites. We also have more detailed training resources for many products such as MyLab (Math, Business, etc.), MyLab IT, and Mastering.

The aesthetics of a course are important. How will your course users see and interpret images, art, photography, movies, and so on? What is the reading level of the material chosen? Is the material engaging? Does the media reflect diversity?

Universal design principles help educators consider how to reach every learner by providing flexible instructional materials, techniques, and strategies. It promotes the engagement of each learner by making learning more accessible. A guiding principle of universal design is that we need to provide multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement for students.

Acknowledging and understanding cultural differences

It’s important to note that it is very difficult to identify and address every critical area in a course. Countless articles, some very extensive ones, cover the concept of inclusion and diversity. This short blog is only intended to get you thinking about key components of designing an online course with diversity in mind.

If we acknowledge that diversity influences learning, then we may be able to create discussions that result in examples that are culturally relevant. Your work as an instructor sets the tone for a safe space in the classroom where students can share their experiences and perspectives.

For those of us who are “accidental” instructional designers or instructional designers for real, we might want to consider learning more about things like wisdom communities that offer a framework for orienting and engaging students.

How do we promote diversity in our classes?

1. We strive to understand our students.
2. We utilize different teaching strategies and materials.
3. We structure the course to provide equal opportunities to all students.
4. We celebrate diversity. We keep this in mind when designing discussion posts or sharing articles, for example.
5. We encourage differing perspectives. We ask students to share their views and substantiate why they feel/think that way.
6. We seek to include diverse learning materials.

Conclusion

Understanding the unique differences in traditional and online learning environments and how culture plays a role, can help shape a positive educational experience for students and their faculty. With increasing emphasis on online learning, we need to have more conversations about understanding and supporting students from diverse cultures. It’s helpful to reflect on your own experiences, because our personal cultural influences or teaching styles might guide our choices in course design.

Listen to a short webinar about making your teaching more inclusive.

Enjoy an article from earlier this year about culturally responsive teaching.

Explore Cornell’s open course about diversity in the classroom.

Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education
This is a text by Sonia Nieto, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Emerita) and Patty Bode, Tufts University in Affiliation with The Amherst Regional Public Schools.
Effective multicultural education must consider not just schooling, but also the larger social, economic, and political factors that affect students’ success or failure in the classroom. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education helps readers understand these pervasive influences by presenting extensive research and data on the sociopolitical nature of schools and society, information about different sociocultural groups, and a conceptual framework for examining multicultural education. Real-life cases and teaching stories dominate in this book that offers a first-hand look into the lives of students and educators from a variety of backgrounds. Additionally, tips for classroom activities and community actions offer aspiring teachers concrete suggestions to provide high-quality, inclusive education in spite of obstacles they may face.

When you read the title of this blog, you might have thought of sand right away. Blue skies, fluffy clouds, ocean waves….a cooler with sandwiches, a good book… Well, beach time IS a wonderful thing, but it’s not what I’m referring to here. Nor are we going to discuss the beach towels that shake off sand the best (again, a good thing!).

For today, we aren’t thinking of sand as our grit. Instead, our definition of grit is “courage and resolve; strength of character.” Or, it’s the ability to “stick it out” and persevere. In education, there’s a lot of current research about students’ “grittiness” and ability to succeed. There’s even a special GRIT gauge which uses the mnemonic for Growth, Resilience, Instinct, and Tenacity.

I think we’d agree that those are attributes we’d all like to have. I like to hike and to read about those who explore the Appalachian Trail. That requires determination and stick-to-it-ness. Many of us might say there’s no way we could ever do that. And yet, we all know someone who, despite all sorts of roadblocks, setbacks, and crises, still manages to marshal unseen capacity to keep going.

Call it “resilience” or “grit” or “perseverance” or “strong emotional intelligence skills”; even the ability to “delay gratification.” It’s through that “something” where we see tangible results when someone is able to keep going, reaching for some goal or prize.

The stress factor

Whether in a pandemic or just everyday life, our bodies regulate stress by using a combination of chemical signals from our pituitary and adrenal glands, hypothalamus, and so forth. We easily recognize some of these responses; our heart rate increases, we sweat, our stomach has butterflies, we can’t sleep, our brain races. Other effects are not as apparent but equally important; the “fight or flight” mode activates a rise in glucose levels, inflammatory proteins surge through the blood, and neurotransmitters are on overdrive.

After all of this, being ‘stressed out’ becomes our norm. Modern humans don’t typically have to deal with a predator chasing them. We instead deal with mental attacks; we worry about things. The body’s reaction to stress causes wear and tear. The part of the brain most affected by early stress, the prefrontal cortex, is critical for self-management of emotions and cognition. Think about it. It’s not just little kids that have a hard time sitting still and focusing when they are stressed out. Children aren’t the only ones who get overwhelmed with negative feelings and find it hard to rebound from defeat.

So what exactly is going on in the minds of those who manage to persevere despite that stress and impaired cognition? How do they override the “fight or flight” responses and continue to perform despite all odds? Are there some sort of super-human skills the rest of us are lacking?

A special blend

In her New York Times bestseller Grit, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows for anyone striving to succeed, be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people, that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.” She has found that grit is the hallmark of high achievers in every domain. She’s also identified scientific evidence that grit can grow. You can learn more about her research here. In a recent blog, she wrote,

“Do think critically about the pros and cons of any form of assessment. And if we believe, as Maslow did, that there is a basic human motive to work hard for the benefit of others, we can encourage and support young people in those endeavors.”

What does Alia Crum, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Mind & Body Lab, say about stress? She points out that we have to acknowledge, own, and use our stress to make something new. She recently wrote about her experience with COVID-19 and summarized her thoughts neatly in five words: adversity can make you stronger.

Growing grit

So how do you help your students redirect their attention? Like the Cookie Monster, we have to sometimes wait for our cookies. What can you share with your students to help them get gritty? Persevere? Stick-to-it? One of the insights in psychology that intrigues me is this: what we pay attention to becomes our (subjective) reality. So helping our students recognize their mindset and then begin to apply growth mindset principles can help.

How about habits? At least half of what we do each day is habitual. Did you ever find yourself driving home and then thinking you might not have noticed a light or a turn? Research shows us with practice, even little mini-changes can become good habits. Making small changes in study skills can have a gigantic impact on student performance. For some students, just learning about other study tips and tricks is a great start.

Often we don’t know what we don’t know until someone points it out to us. For example, quizzing yourself rather than just rereading notes produces far greater long-term learning gains. The Learning Scientists blog for students is a great site to share with students. They can learn more about good note-taking strategies and techniques such as spacing of review and methods for retrieval practice.

Even talking about grit and providing examples can be helpful. Modeling metacognitive practices is useful, and providing opportunities for exploring vocations and career tools early in college can increase students’ perseverance toward degree completion.

In other words, students who go through programs designed to help them shape their personal values into rewarding careers are more likely to persist; they have a measurable goal and resources to use to achieve it. Tools like the Conley Readiness Index help students begin to explore how they think and what drives them. The results give them practice applications to help work on areas they struggle with.

Lead by example

“Supporting Students’ College Success: The Role of Assessment of Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Competencies” was released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and commissioned by the National Science Foundation.

Fred Oswald, a professor of psychology at Rice co-authored the report, which was based on a review of 49 articles targeting 61 experimental studies. The authors examined interventions to improve educational attainment.

Across these studies, three competencies most frequently showed evidence of supporting students’ college persistence and success, as measured by grades, retention and graduation:

• A sense of belonging, meaning that all college students feel that they belong in college and are socially integrated into college culture and life.
• A growth mindset, referring to college students’ beliefs that their own intelligence is not a fixed entity, but rather a malleable quality that life experiences and direct instruction can help improve.
• Personal goals and values that college students perceive to be directly linked to the achievement of their future dreams.

And one of the most important keys to all of these?

Caring and compassionate faculty and staff who establish strong connections with students and communicate effectively.

So all that time you spend designing your course materials, communicating with students, establishing a presence in the digital classroom, responding to emails…The time you spend reading professional journals or listening to podcasts to support your own professional development? You actually have been giving your students the tools they need to begin to explore the concept of “grit.” For that kind of dedication, you deserve a relaxing day at the beach, but watch out for the sand; it’s a little gritty!

In April, Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research surveyed 187 presidents at colleges and universities to see how their priorities have evolved after one month into their COVID-19 response. A similar survey was conducted in March.

Top concerns

In the survey, presidents were asked about their level of concern with potential short-term and long-term issues at their institution in regard to COVID-19. Below are the top 5 issues about which they were very or somewhat concerned.

Top 5 short-term issues

1. Mental health of students (91%)
2. Disproportionate impact on students from low-income backgrounds (87%)
3. Accelerated rates of student attrition (84%)
4. Short-term unbudgeted financial costs (86%)
5. Mental health of students (87%)

Top 5 long-term issues

1. Decline in overall future student enrollment (90%)
2. Inequitable impact on underrepresented students (90%)
3. Overall financial stability (88%)
4. Ability to afford to employ staff & faculty (81%)
5. Decline in alumni/donor giving rates (56%)

Challenges with remote learning

The survey found that over the course of a month, presidents were having fewer challenges at their institutions ensuring academics standards remained high, having technology support available, and training faculty less familiar with digital delivery.

You can download a copy of the report, Responding to the COVID-19 Crisis, Part II: A New Survey of College and University Presidents, here.

Additionally, the editors of Inside Higher Ed held a webcast discussion about the survey’s results. You can view the recording here.

To say that people are stressed during the COVID-19 pandemic would be an understatement. The accepted social norms and values, like shaking hands or visiting the elderly, have gone out the window in an effort to stop the spread of disease.

We’re navigating according to new rules, and as a result, decisions about how we behave and the choices we make have become more complex. Understandably, other’s actions are sparking strong emotions and reactions, sometimes referred to as “cancel culture,” making it difficult to talk about at home or in the classroom.

As researchers, we turn to research to help guide our behavior and thinking. Social responsibility helps us be thoughtful about our actions, particularly our actions in relation to other people. We published a framework for social responsibility, based on the body of existing research, that can be used as a lens to understand human behavior in a complex situation.

The dimensions of the framework can be used to spark an emphatic, non-judgemental discussion about making choices during a pandemic. We offer a suggestion for how to initiate a discussion with learners for each of the four dimensions:

1. Multicultural

Multicultural: Is knowledgeable about different cultural identities and sensitive toward cultural differences.

Example of how to engage: Present a set of different choices someone could make during the current pandemic (i.e., decisions related to social distancing). For each choice, discuss how a person’s perspective or prior experiences might influence their decision to make a specific choice.

2. Ethical

Ethical: Demonstrates knowledge and awareness of ethical standards and issues and applies ethical reasoning and standards to make decisions in ethically ambiguous situations.

Example of how to engage: Present a set of different choices someone could make during the current pandemic (i.e. decisions related to social distancing). For each choice, discuss how a person’s values could have influenced their decision to make a specific choice.

3. Civic

Civic: Is an informed and active citizen at the local, national, and global level and understands and acts on issues of local, national, and global significance.

Example of how to engage: Have learners explore the role that the local, state, and/or federal government is playing in managing the pandemic (it can be in their own context or a new context). Learners could also discuss strengths and weaknesses for having a certain level of government managing response to the pandemic.

4. Environmental

Environmental: Is knowledgeable about current issues of environmental significance and is concerned about the wellbeing of the planet and engages in sustainable behaviors.

Example of how to engage: Have learners explore how the COVID-19 pandemic, and human responses to the pandemic, could impact environmental and sustainability endeavors.

If you want to learn more about how to teach social responsibility, a Pearson colleague discusses it in detail in this webinar.

By taking time to teach socially responsible thinking and decision-making, you’re also helping your students develop a life skill that will help them navigate challenging situations in the future, whether daily decisions about climate change or even what career path to take.

It is also a skill that is considered to be important for employees to demonstrate. Regarding hiring decisions, 81 percent of employers rated “ethical judgment and decision-making” as very important, but only 30 percent thought recent college graduates were well prepared in this area (this source and more listed here).

For these reasons listed above and more, that’s why we have listed it in our framework for what makes someone employable and are working to embed how to teach social responsibility into our products to enable classroom conversations during normal, less stressful times.

Strolling with her toddler in the suburb of a large city impacted by the pandemic, a professor friend reminisced about ‘normal’ life for herself and her daughter. She missed her days at the college, and for her child, the nurturing day care center. For at both places, they found connections, meaning, and comfort.

My friend longed for her office, her classroom, and the physical presence of her students. She missed the mental challenge of being asked pointed and intelligent questions where she needed to be on top of her academic game to answer. She felt nostalgic for the smell of the library, the sight of the sun shining on her desk and papers in the early morning hours as she reviewed notes for upcoming lectures.

She missed that slight thrill she got just as she rounded the corner going into her classroom. These images were so opposite to her sad thought that the quiet and deserted streets she walked felt like the end of the world, and she was surprised that it had ended so quietly.

If the effects of the pandemic can feel so terminal to a young, gifted academic with everything in front of her, what must our students who are suddenly forced into online learning environments feel?

We once stood in front of them, guaranteeing the protection of freedom of expression, if respect to all was upheld in our classes. We built a sacred space, created by mutual respect, open mindedness, and acceptance. Classrooms were a safe place to be vulnerable enough to listen to new information, consider it and expand the size of our boxes.

Students had their own sacred spaces too: at the coffee shop to share class notes and ideas, or at a study group in library meeting rooms. Our students are emotionally invested in the places they learn. This ‘new world’ of higher education during a pandemic is very unlike what they imagined college life to be.

While their teachers work heroically to provide virtual course content, the students miss the sensual stimulation of smells, sounds, and the touch of a physical environment. Many of us are missing that emotional connection to those physical places and the people there. While we professors are experienced enough to grasp the magnitude of this event and anticipate a hopeful new normal, our students often lack the life experience to rise above feelings of permanent loss.

Our students may be dealing with family members sharing increasingly cramped quarters, challenged with internet connectivity, stressed from reduced incomes, and isolated from friends. They’re now exclusively using mobile devices or computers to continue expensive investments in college.

These feelings of loss and helplessness are things that we can help reduce. Here are some suggestions from college professors and online sources to decrease the distance between our students and create virtual sacred spaces to help them reconnect with us in new, potentially more intimate and meaningful ways.

Email your students often

Reach out about more than content instructions. Tell them you understand how stressful lives have become and that you are there for support, not to add stress.

Your learning management system lets you send videos through email. At least once a week, I send a video message to my students, sharing my own challenges and telling them how proud I am of their persistence and grit. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t had a haircut for more than a month, or that my husband may forget and walk behind my camera.

In fact, my students have shared how much they appreciate “being in my home with me.” Now, as if never before, it is important to find ways to emotionally connect with others through these virtual social interactions.

And, while we can’t offer smell-a-vison, or taste TV, we can provide a more relaxed communication channel with our students to help them know we are real and very much invested in their success.

Be flexible

Now isn’t the time to be punitive or judgmental. While assessing performance requires that we judge the progress students are making, we need to rethink how we do it. Are we assessing progress towards mastery, or penalizing for missing deadlines, or not adhering to classroom policies, which may not even apply in a virtual classroom?

Assignment deadlines may become low priority in a home where young children need access to the only home computer to finish their homework, and the lack of income means a lack of food in the home. While some of us complain about the “COVID 15” pounds we are gaining, many of our students are struggling to find enough to eat.

Relaxed due dates have been received by my students with immense gratitude. They tell me know how much it has meant to them to know I really want them to succeed.

Find balance

Being supportive does not mean throwing rigor out the window. It does require careful evaluation, sometimes on a case-by-case basis, of the emotional and physical needs of our students in context of the crisis and realistic expectations of academic standards.

Many are concerned about online cheating. Consider this instead: what is the desired learning outcome, and can it be assessed in a different manner other than typical high stakes exams? Can you assess your student’s mastery with an essay or open-book timed exam? Might a group project offer a final evaluation of the course content?

Be a positive influencer

Use language that lets your students know you are expecting a new normal. While education as we’ve known it has changed, it can be better. Remind students of their advantage of their social media proficiency. Ask for their input on ways for your classes to be virtually connected.

I’ve learned about super useful free conferencing tools from students who’ve been group gaming with them for years. Who knew? Give them the lead and let them show you how creative they can be. You will help them focus on what they can do increasing their self-efficacy.

Share resources

You need to be on your game for resource referral. Where can your students find WIFI? Computers? Tutoring? Counseling? Many of your colleges already have policies and solutions to these questions.

For example, our college is creating a parking area where students can stay in their cars and gypsy off the college wireless internet to complete assignments. Drive-in WIFI! And, Student Services offers virtual counseling sessions at no cost to our students.

Many internet providers are offering home service at no cost during the pandemic, and some colleges are loaning laptops to students to finish their college terms online. There are many new and innovative solutions being created on the fly to help students.

If you need ideas, just Google the need; you’ll be surprised to discover the commitment and innovation of educators and professionals nationwide.

Some may be asking, “How can I afford a new digital tool when I already paid for a book?” Pearson is working hard to provide students with access to digital learning environments at no cost while they adjust to a new normal of distance learning.

Please remember, you are also essential workers and first line protectors. You can create new sacred learning spaces for your students, and discover your own well of creativity and innovation. Write to them, support them, be flexible with rigor and show compassion tempered with the desire for them to learn. Be a voice of hope for their futures. Need some inspiration? Give this shout out to your students to encourage self-care. Feel free to borrow:

Students,

I will close as I began. You are not alone. We are in this together. I know we will get to the other side and we will have discovered so much about the depth of our strengths, creativity, persistence, and compassion.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities to move to remote learning environments, many universities lacked preexisting contingency plans or infrastructures for running not just some of their classes but all of them online. Suddenly, many professors were working on short notice to implement online course management tools and facing numerous logistical hurdles along the way.

Download and personalize our digital postcard to express your thanks to the educator who’s inspired your love of learning. Taking the time to write a note about how they’ve helped you grow or see things differently can go a long way in making them feel appreciated.

Instructions:
Step 1: Click to download the postcard
Step 2: Upon opening the file, type your message in the editable fields on the back of the card
Step 3: Export as a PDF under the name of your choice
Step 4: Open the newly saved file to ensure your text has been embedded into the document
Step 5: Attach to an email and share with your teacher

Download the postcard

Do graduating seniors and incoming college freshmen know what career path they should choose, and do they have the necessary skills to be successful? Many educators and employers agree this is an area where students could use more resources.

Pearson Career Success (PCS), an online preparation platform, provides access to a roadmap that helps students explore and understand where they want to go, how they’re going to get there, and what they need to do to stand out from the crowd. Instruction and learning experiences are also provided to help students acquire the skills and capabilities they need to be successful.

PCS provides the bridge between academic readiness and career readiness. Academic Success Modules such as Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Test Taking Skills give students opportunities to engage in learning and scenarios to apply the necessary skills for success. Educators can choose curriculum relevant modules for students to work on.

Also, PCS provides Career Success Modules such as Building an Academic Plan, a Career Portfolio, and developing networking skills. Guided instruction and practice equip students with real life skills necessary to be successful in a chosen career. The modules are not just assignments, but self-discovery tools provided to students as they mature through their academic journey.

Pearson is committed to understanding and identifying the needs of employers hiring new college graduates, and serving the needs of institutions preparing students for college or the workforce. The broad suite of assessments and instructions within the PCS platform is built upon decades of cumulative research by prominent leaders in this field.

Finally, PCS provides state-of-the-art coaching and tools for “presenting” themselves to employers as desirable employees. Engaging students in opportunities to develop career readiness skills can assist them in career success for life.

The recent disruption to education extends well beyond those trying to keep up with normal coursework. Senior year has also been interrupted for thousands of students whose focus has shifted toward internships, career preparation, and employment. With campuses and career centers closed across the country, online tutoring is a valuable tool to support all students as they prepare for the end of the term.

Improving engagement with targeted help

Once education transitioned to full-time virtual environments, many students lost the face-to-face interactions that made up the core of their classroom support. Online tutoring can provide the help students need, right when they need it, helping to avoid the possibility of them giving up when they hit a roadblock. And these one-on-one sessions can bolster a student’s confidence, giving them more freedom to ask questions and delve into discussion that they might never approach in a full-class setting.

In addition, Smarthinking can help faculty identify at-risk students using alerts and session mapping to drill down to specific concepts where they’re seeking assistance. Instructors can see whether students are keeping pace with course requirements, and recommend supplemental help from an online tutor to get them back on track.

Helping students prep for careers

For this year’s seniors, going virtual is affecting much more than just classes. Many who were in the midst of completing career programs and solidifying internships when career centers and university-provided services closed down are left asking, “Now what?”

The spring term is always a busy time for those in programs focused on preparing for the workforce. Smarthinking online tutors have emerged as a go-to resource for live interview coaching and assistance honing presentation skills. In fact, for those students who may be introverts or just plain nervous to get up in front of a classroom, an audience of one can be a much more comfortable environment in which to practice these skills than a class full of their peers.

Resume and career writing help is also in high demand among this year’s graduates. Smarthinking supports students with 24/7 resume and cover letter help, personal branding consultation, and business writing reviews. Tutors are trained and monitored to ensure they do not proofread or edit student papers; instead, their writing review centers on leading students to a broader comprehension of the fundamentals of writing (both higher-order issues as well as lower-order skills) and key strategies for revision.

Insider advice

“Employers and recruiters in 2020 are looking beyond applicants who simply have the required educational experience. Employers want new hires who can think creatively and who are fluid in the use of technology and adept at writing well. Smarthinking tutors can help students develop effective career materials for this new world of work, whether that be a strategically-focused cover letter or eye-catching details to polish a LinkedIn profile.” — Michael Goodfellow, Sr. Lead Writing Tutor

How else can online tutoring support your virtual classroom?

Get the infographic and explore three other ways online tutoring can empower your students to succeed, no matter where they are.

Why is effective practice an important part of the online learning process?

In this module, teachers explore a variety of strategies to implement meaningful and effective practice that provides students with opportunities to learn through reteaching, and opportunities to demonstrate learning without negative consequences.

Bibliography

• Barr, Corbett. “Deliberate Practice: What It Is and Why You Need It.” Expert Enough. Expert Enough, n.d.
• Block, Joshua. “Designing Learning That Matters.” Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation, 20 Oct. 2015.
• Block, Joshua. “Embracing Messy Learning.” Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation, 07 Jan. 2014.
• Everding, Gerry. “Students Learn More If They’ll Need to Teach Others.” Futurity. Washington University in St. Louis, 12 Aug. 2014.
• Lenz, Bob. “Failure Is Essential to Learning.” Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation, 08 Apr. 2015.
• Marzano, Robert J. “Art and Science of Teaching / Reviving Reteaching.” Educational Leadership: Interventions That Work: Reviving Reteaching. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Oct. 2010.
• Thomas, Alice. “Understanding The Learning Process To Effectively Differentiate Instruction. “Center for Development and Learning. N.p., 26 Oct. 2010.

As educators, we know what student engagement looks like in the classroom. Students are focused on their work in front of them, they are collaborating with their peers, they are asking good questions, creativity is flowing… But now that things have moved online, what does engagement look like? Let’s start by asking ourselves what makes something engaging, and then explore some tools we can use in a digital classroom.

What makes something engaging?

A lot of research has been done around student engagement. Primarily, engagement revolves around student ownership of the material being presented. I know what you’re thinking. “I have a curriculum with standards I have to follow! There’s no room for student choice!” While you may be partially right, there are places in every course that allow for more student choice and input.

In an informal survey of my students, the feedback regarding what makes a class engaging is varied; however, there are a lot of commonalities. Students want to be able to pursue their own interests, feel heard and included, and know that they are supported when taking risks. They want teachers who are not too strict but are fair in their handling of the classroom. Even when the material doesn’t resonate with a student’s interest, teacher enthusiasm can change a mundane course into a potential major.

Daniel Pink, the author of the book Drive¹, states that three conditions need to be met to trigger engagement.

1. Autonomy: Give students choice to work on a project that relates to the curriculum but is also interesting on a personal level for the student.
2. Mastery: The task itself can’t be too challenging or too easy. One creates frustration and the other boredom. The task should be somewhere in what is commonly referred to as the “Goldilocks Zone,” where the difficulty is just right for the learner.
3. Purpose: The student has to be able to link what they are doing to the wider world. Why should they know what you are teaching? Make the material relevant and you will get more student buy-in.

Instructional methods to increase engagement

Now that we know what student engagement looks like, let’s look at a few instructional methods that can improve our curriculum and retention. While creating your course, don’t worry about including all these options. Just choose a few to start and then ask for student feedback regarding what they liked and what they want to see changed next time.

Real-world examples

In each lab report I assign, I ask that students relate the concept or technique to a real-world example. The identification of an unknown salt would be helpful in cases with contaminated water and is a critical skill to master. Here is an example of a student response from a lab where they determined the density of an element by graphical interpolation.

Example
“Although this particular lab did not yield extremely accurate results, there are still definite real-world applications for using interpolation, such as to find the density or other measurable qualities of elements. It would be especially useful for finding properties (such as density) of the man-made elements which have too short of a half-life to be effectively examined or measured for mass and volume.”

Project-based learning

Project-based learning (PBL) is where students complete a long-term assignment to solve a problem or answer a question. For more information about PBL, click here.

In my lab class, I try to make this an authentic question that students will need to make a recommendation on. As shown in the example to the left, here is the introduction to a basic percent composition of a mixture lab.

Example
We are Minuteman Wallboard Co. and we have a severe problem. As you know, the inside layer of wallboard is made from magnesium sulfate heptahydrate. Our feeder company inadvertently gave us an unknown amount of calcium sulfate dihydrate in one of its shipments and this was mixed in with the magnesium sulfate heptahydrate before processing it.

Our advisory board has said that there is no reaction between the two compounds, however if the wallboard has 15% by mass or greater of calcium sulfate dihydrate in the initial mix before processing, the strength and durability of the wallboard will be compromised.

We have already made over $450,000 worth of wallboard stock from this suspected material. We do not want to give this to any of our retailers until we know if the mix had less than 15.0% by mass of calcium sulfate dihydrate. We are supplying you with a sample of the original mix before processing and would appreciate it if your company will help us solve our problem.

Thick skin in junior english class

Matthew Ventura, Ph.D., recalls a high school English teacher who taught him a hard but important lesson.

“Mr. Davidson was really tough,” he says. “He felt no shame ripping apart our essays.”

“Despite the criticism, he spent so much time giving us detailed feedback,” Matthew says. “It really affected me.”

“Not only did I become a better writer,” he says, “I realized that a Mr. Davidson-like level of feedback can help improve critical thinking skills like few other things.”

Important skills, better teaching

Matthew went on to study and develop new ways to teach and assess 21st century skills like critical thinking.

An early collaboration, the Physics Playground, was a digital game that walked students through complex physics concepts with outcomes and processes that mimicked real-world experiences.

It was a breakthrough.

“These kinds of natural, playful simulations,” Matthew says, “help students strategize their way through tough subjects—and provide an opportunity for teachers to provide feedback based on where each student is in the learning process.”

“Imagine a class of 400 students,” he says. “How can a teacher be like Mr. Davidson and provide such granular, one-on-one feedback to everybody?”

Innovative digital platforms, he says, provide a trifecta of benefits:

They teach effectively. They lead to one-on-one feedback for students. And they’re scalable.

The need for problem-solvers

“It was an opportunity to explore some basic questions about critical thinking,” Matthew says. “What do we mean by ‘critical thinking? How can we improve it?”

It’s part of a conversation, he says, that’s been batted around by academics for decades.

“More and more employers want to hire good problem-solvers,” Matthew says.

Good problem-solvers, he says, can spot opportunities for innovation thanks to critical thinking skills—”so these questions were important to try to answer,” he says.

Critical thinking in specific disciplines

“Skills for Today” reviews the history of definitions around critical thinking. It summarizes leading research on the various methods of teaching and assessing critical thinking.

The paper also takes the discussion about critical thinking in a new direction.

“There is so much talk about broad critical thinking skills,” he says. “What we want to start exploring is: How can we improve critical thinking in particular disciplines?”

A speech class might employ new critical thinking teaching methods in debate exercises, he says.

An IT course might show students how to find bugs in computer code.

A business or economics class might guide students to weigh issue pros and cons in order to make tough decisions.

“We want to provide an actionable framework for educators in this new approach,” Matthew says, “so we can reach more learners and prepare them for tomorrow’s workforce.”

Next-generation teaching tools

Matthew emphasizes that critical thinking skills are skills—and that they are only improved with practice.

He hopes his paper can be a part of making this practice more effective.

“We hope this research helps us develop new learning tools that benefit learners,” he says, “and, at the same time, guides teachers to bring new teaching approaches into their classrooms.”

Many students are learning virtually for the first time, which means they’ll need to find new ways to get additional help outside of regular lessons, like online tutoring. Students often think that since a tutor isn’t the professor, they won’t be able to help with understanding course materials. And as an instructor, maybe you’ve had the same thoughts. But the truth is, many online tutors, especially Smarthinking tutors, are experts in their field. They could even be your peers from down the hall. The right online tutors work with you to make sure students are mastering the right skills.

Our tutors are fellow experts

We have more than 1,500 highly qualified, professional tutors and educators, 90% of whom hold a master’s degree or PhD in their discipline of expertise. Plus, our tutors average 12 years of experience working directly with students: they’re expert teachers as well as subject experts. It’s no wonder Smarthinking has served thousands of higher education institutions around the world.

Smarthinking tutors are trained, monitored, and evaluated on their ability to employ a Socratic method to engage students by asking questions, making students show their own work, and encouraging them to demonstrate overall mastery of the concept or problem.

Tutors are available in more than 150 subject areas, at all levels from developmental through graduate and professional school. Plus, we offer ESL-specialist tutoring, including math in Spanish. No matter the course, we’ve got you covered. And since each tutor is an expert in their field, students can get 24×7 help in the subjects they need, even if that means they need math help one day and then chemistry help the next.

Problem-solving strategies that lead to success

Online tutoring asks students to demonstrate mastery of skill after learning in the classroom. With Smarthinking, faculty can easily share assignment goals, writing prompts, and other course details so tutors can contextualize their instructional assistance with learner outcomes in mind.

Online tutors don’t “hand out answers” but instead teach problem-solving strategies so that students learn to engage with content, break down problems, and build the skills to succeed on their own on future assignments. Tutors teach just the way you would.

One-on-one instruction

Online tutoring encourages learners to ask for help when they need it and raises their confidence to do so. In a classroom setting, some students feel shy or don’t ask questions due to peer pressure. One-on-one tutoring takes this out of the equation, making students feel comfortable enough to ask even what they may feel is a silly question.¹

“We recognize that students most in need of academic tutoring often find it difficult to ask for help out of shyness or because of a perceived stigma or simply because it’s new and unfamiliar,” Dr. Cheryl Cephus-Vickers of Gadsden State Community College explains. “We also know that students who form a habit early in their college career of accessing resources/services perform better and feel a greater sense of belonging and ownership of their learning. These outcomes lead directly to higher rates of persistence and completion.”²

There even when students can’t take advantage of on-campus help, Smarthinking tutoring extends your resources, improving achievement, completion and graduation rates, and workplace success.

Insider advice

“As a tutor and a writing instructor, I encourage my students to utilize the tutoring services the college offers. I remind my students that we are all facing this tough time together, and that there is absolutely no shame in needing some help completing assignments. I am transparent with my students: I let them know I am an online tutor myself, and just one session can make a difference in their writing.” – Lauren Williams Magaw, Writing Lead Tutor

How else can online tutoring support your virtual classroom?

Get the infographic and explore three other ways online tutoring can empower your students to succeed, no matter where they are.

Sources
¹White, Kimberly. “8 Reasons Why One-on-One Instruction Benefits Students,” CMASAS Blog, May 9.
²Gill, Lauren. “Gadsden State Community College assesses the impact of Smarthinking online tutoring on student success and completion,” Pearson.

In The Road to Dual Enrollment (Part I), I discussed a few of the challenges experienced by dual enrollment programs, including lengthy accreditation processes and access to professional development opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the obstacles instructors face after they become accredited, including standardization, access, and the affordability of materials. See how online learning resources can help tackle these problems.

Developing a collegiate-level course with minimal resources

After receiving my accreditation and transitioning from high school teacher to dual enrollment instructor for Lee College in Baytown, Texas, I was given a college textbook and a sample syllabus from my department mentor. Within around two weeks I was expected to develop the learning objectives, scope, depth, breadth, and rigor for an entire course, Biology I for Science Majors. The curriculum of this course needed to match the scope and rigor of a collegiate curriculum.

I spent days reading through an entire textbook that I hadn’t previously used in my Advanced Placement® courses and brainstorming appropriate labs for the equipment that I had. I didn’t have a single test, assignment, or lab manual to follow. While my mentor gave me some of his most successful labs, I needed to make sure they didn’t use materials my school didn’t have in stock or couldn’t afford. The scope of the task seemed almost insurmountable.

The impact of online resources

Finally, after making little progress, I reached out to the department chair and department secretary to see what online resources were available. I was provided with an educator account for the associated digital learning platform for my text and was overwhelmed with the quality and quantity of material available to me.

Digital access to platforms such as MyLab™ and Mastering™ are imperative to dual enrollment teachers who are often starting from scratch. The pre-built assignments, test banks, online laboratory simulations, and study modules would have taken years of collaboration and effort to develop. Delivering course materials with such a platform provides instantaneous access to collegiate-level resources.

They also let instructors create coordinator courses. In these instances, college professors can actually create and maintain a set of nested courses for dual enrollment classes at various high schools — pushing the same assignments, tests, and content from the college to the high schools.

Digital learning platforms address affordability

30% of respondents to our surveys at the national and regional NACEP conferences indicated that funding and affordability of materials is one of their greatest program pain points. An additional benefit to using online learning platforms is the affordability for the high school partners.

During my first years as an instructor for Lee College, I would drive 50 minutes each way after school to run student samples on equipment such as PCR machines or high-speed centrifuges because my high school couldn’t afford the $10,000 investment for this equipment. But if a high school has access to the laboratory simulations found in Mastering Biology, they can provide engaging, application-based experiences that can replace thousands of dollars of equipment.

Online learning platforms also provide additional affordability through eTexts. These platforms often contain eTexts so students can avoid the separate cost of purchasing a print textbook.

We’ll continue to explore additional challenges faced by dual enrollment programs in subsequent blogs. Read part I of this blog series and stay tuned for future posts centered around high school student readiness and preparation tools for college courses.

This article was originally posted on June 26,2017

E-babies by the hundreds

This fall, in college classrooms across the country, hundreds of students studying psychology will say goodbye to traditional textbooks and hello to a virtual child.

These new parents won’t raise their children in their dorm rooms, but rather on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

This unique “parenting” experience is made possible by a brand-new digital learning product called The Dynamic Child.

Students raise their child from birth to age 18 and see how their parenting choices affect the child over time.

A big idea, and a joint effort

“The Dynamic Child” is the invention of Dr. Frank Manis, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California.

After years of teaching child development courses with traditional textbooks, he began to brainstorm ways to make the material more engaging to students, most of whom had never been parents.

It took dozens of educators and researchers more than five years to develop “The Dynamic Child.”

Amber, an Executive Editor in Psychology, works with higher education professors to create the learning materials used to teach psychology courses nationwide.

“Our shared goal is to create and promote materials that help educators teach child development and other subjects in the most innovative, exciting ways possible.”

Erin is an expert in what’s called “learning design.”

“The course material is important, but the learner’s experience is equally significant. I’m there to make sure it’s always top-of-mind.”

A chicken-and-the-egg predicament

One of the biggest challenges along the way, Amber says, was deciding if students should read the online course material and then raise their virtual child, or vice versa.

“Raise first or read first? It was a true chicken-and-the-egg moment for me,” she says.

“It may sound like a little thing, but the way you sequence learning objectives for a course can have a huge impact on how much and how deeply the students learn.”

Thankfully, Amber says, she knew exactly who could help her answer her question: Erin.

“I introduced Amber to the research concept of ‘anchored instruction,’” Erin says.

“It tells us that there are cognitive benefits of having an experience first and then learning the theories and research that support it afterward.”

“In this case, the research suggests that ‘anchoring’ the course material in the real-world experience of raising a virtual child was the way to go.”

How it happens

For students using “The Dynamic Child,” the parenting process starts with a personality questionnaire.

It has 25 questions and takes about 30 minutes to complete, Amber says.

Students are asked things like, “What were your favorite subjects in elementary school?” and “In high school, did you prefer to socialize in small or large groups?”

All that data is used to create a unique personality profile for the student’s virtual child, Amber says.

Students can pre-select physical characteristics for their child, but the gender is determined randomly by the program.

After the child is “born,” students give him or her a name, Amber says.

“That helps the student develop an emotional bond with their child,” adds Erin.

“Research says that such an emotional investment leads to better learning outcomes.”

Making decisions as a parent

For the duration of the parenting experience, an avatar of the growing child takes up the right half of the student’s screen.

On the left side, students are presented with dozens of realistic parenting scenarios related to their child’s physical, mental, and social growth.

“Topics include sleep training, dealing with shyness, and overcoming adversity in academic, musical, and sporting endeavors.

“Students select from four different courses of action at each decision point, so there are an infinite number of eventual personality outcomes, and no two students will have identical children,” Amber says.

Over the course of the semester, the virtual children grow from birth to age 18.

The effects of a student’s parenting style can be seen in the child’s behavior over time, Amber says.

“The child is responding to the parent and vice versa.”

“It’s bi-directional—a two-way street—just like a parent-child relationship is in real life.”

A full launch this fall

This fall, more than 60 college professors across the country will teach child development courses exclusively via the “The Dynamic Child” product.

Pearson will host the learning experiences through its Revel platform.

Students can access the “Dynamic Child” portal from any device.

“In addition to getting to learn course material in an innovative and engaging way,” Amber says, ‘The Dynamic Child’ costs just $80—significantly less than most traditional psychology textbooks.”

Erin and Amber say they have high hopes for The Dynamic Child.

“We love the product,” Amber says, “and we think students and professors will, too.”

“We spent months and months reviewing the research on anchored learning and incorporating it into the final product design,” Erin says.

“We think it’s the type of homework students will truly be excited to do.”

Today’s students are digital natives, so whether they‘re face-to-face with tutors online or in-person, they’re savvy at getting the help they need. So, support their success with online tutoring. Data shows that online tutoring can help increase student confidence, engagement, and outcomes.

Tear down the roadblocks to engagement

As a student, getting stuck on a concept or problem and not knowing how to move forward can feel like coming up against a brick wall — and no one likes running into a brick wall. Lend students a hand by helping them overcome their learning obstacles. With online tutoring students can get help when and where they need it, rather than giving up in frustration. Online tutoring services, like Smarthinking, let students access live and asynchronous tutoring help at the point of need, so students can get immediate support to overcome academic roadblocks and continue on their learning paths.

A bird’s eye view for precise instruction

Don’t guess at what your students are struggling with when you have the data to guide you. Smarthinking “Taxonomy Reports” highlight the specific concepts that students have sought help for in their classes. This information is categorized and logged by Smarthinking tutors after each tutoring session so instructors can easily pinpoint what their students are having trouble understanding. Instructors know what students are struggling with before exams and can address the issues beforehand. The data and reports can also help instructors plan their programs, curriculums, and activities better.

Early intervention to stop problems at their roots

It’s not always easy to see when a student needs additional academic intervention, but Smarthinking Alerts can help. These alerts were designed to flag students who may be at risk. After a tutoring session, tutors can record alerts that will then display in the reporting dashboard. Instructors and administrators can clearly see sessions that were flagged and find out the exact issues the student is struggling with. This lets instructors respond quickly to emerging issues and improve learning outcomes.

Success and satisfaction with Smarthinking

The vast majority of students who use Smarthinking tutoring services would recommend them to a friend. We’ve also repeatedly shown significant improvements in key student success metrics such as course completion. Here are some of our results from recent studies:

• 83% of students indicated they had more confidence in their academic skills after working with Smarthinking tutors
• 100% of students surveyed said they intended to keep using Smarthinking tutoring services
• Students accessing Smarthinking tutoring services averaged a 2.82 GPA compared to a 2.26 for all students surveyed
• Students enrolled in a pilot program with Smarthinking online writing tutors were 8x more likely to complete courses than non-users

Insider advice

“As each of us learns to manage our time and responsibilities in this ever-changing world, it’s important that we use all the resources available. The LMS offers a variety of tools to make virtual learning engaging and flexible, a win-win for both students and ourselves. The LMS also offers many resources for faculty by providing the tools to manage the class virtually, such as checklists, various communication options, and ease of grading.” — Kathy Adams McIntosh, Business Tutoring Coordinator

How else can online tutoring support your virtual classroom?

Get the infographic and explore three other ways online tutoring can empower your students to succeed, no matter where they are.

Questions?

Learn more about Smarthinking and how it can help deliver actionable results for you and your students.

“Without Access To Education, You’re Depriving People Of Freedom.”

A NOTE FROM PEARSON CEO JOHN FALLON: President Trump is considering rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in the US. Started in 2012, this program allowed 800,000 young people, who came to the US without documentation as children, the basic opportunity to work and study without the threat of deportation. About 200,000 of these DREAMers, like Ricardo, are currently enrolled in higher education.

Like many others, you’re going through the experience of having your home become your office and classroom. Your students are facing just as much — if not more — of an abrupt transition. That’s why it’s important to talk to them about getting the course support they need during this disruption to their education. In addition, learning to seek out support is a valuable skill in and of itself, and can help students succeed in both college and their careers.

Searching for a new normal

Since mid-March, service providers and instructors around the world have been in emergency mode, establishing workable course delivery and an educational presence online for all classes in response to the coronavirus.

Now that we’re solidly in the midst of this large-scale transition to remote teaching and learning, we’re looking ahead in search of a new normal. Summer and fall sessions seem likely to introduce an entirely new set of considerations rather than a return to the educational practices we were recently forced to abandon. Quite apart from merely delivering courses online, schools must be ready to provide a quick transition to online courses that offer reliable course navigation, equitable access, support for learners with disabilities, and academic integrity.

The one constant is that students will need support as education, by necessity, becomes increasingly nimble and remote. We only need to look back 15 years for a parallel of our current challenge.

The lessons we’ve learned

In 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, approximately 100,000 students were displaced from their colleges and universities. Many never returned to their campuses. Today we’re facing the same type of disruption, albeit on a much grander scale.

Andre Perry, fellow at the Brookings Institution, was a professor at the University of New Orleans during Katrina. He urges repeated, proactive contact with students — especially in the early stages of such a disruption to their education — and stresses the obligation of faculty to maintain the student-teacher connection.

Research shows that a key role in students’ retention is their relationships with professors. Perry fears that if those relationships weaken or lapse during this disruption, “we may collectively lose thousands of students across the country.”

One valuable tip for supporting students during a transition to remote learning is that educators provide an asynchronous approach to classes. While the routine of a regularly scheduled class might seem to offer consistency and a semblance of normalcy for learners, there are clear challenges. Many have work and/or family obligations, inadequate technology and internet access, and time zone considerations that put them at a disadvantage.

For schools that require a synchronous approach, educators should accommodate students who can’t join the session as scheduled. Recorded lectures are recommended so that they have the same opportunity to listen, and then participate in discussion in the classes they can attend.

According to Christopher Heard, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Pepperdine University, “The key is to keep students feeling like a class, rather than scattered individuals.”

Insider advice

“Although challenging, it’s important that students don’t see this period as a gap in their education or as an impossible obstacle in their studies. Pearson employees and Smarthinking tutors are familiar with using technology to support students digitally, and they’re willing and able to help students who may find the new, online-only environment challenging or intimidating.” — Michael Goodfellow, Sr. Lead Writing Tutor

How else can online tutoring support your virtual classroom?

Get the infographic and explore three other ways online tutoring can empower your students to succeed, no matter where they are.

Sources
Phil Hill, “Revised Outlook for Higher Ed’s Online Response to COVID-19,” Phil on EdTech, March 30, 2020.

Kelly Field, “10 Tips to Support Students in a Stressful Shift to Online Learning,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2020.

Beth McMurtrie, “How to Help Struggling Students Succeed Online,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2020.

How can teachers engage students in online learning?

In this module, teachers explore a variety of strategies to motivate and engage students in their learning. Activities include tips for fostering academic ownership, providing relevant and meaningful feedback, and other student engagement strategies, such as:

• Alternative ending: Create alternate endings to literature using digital storytelling software or website tools. Share endings by sending participants to the website.
• Come in character: Turn on your Webcam and talk to your students as a character. Make it humorous with a funny pair of glasses, hat, or an accent. Make it related to your content area by dressing as a particular character or historical figure.
• Picture of the day: Prior to the session, students can submit a favorite photo or drawing. Choose one to share at the beginning of the session.

Get the full list

Bibliography
“Engaging Students in Learning.” Center for Teaching and Learning. University of Washington, 2017.

Hurst, Stacy. “Seven Ways to Increase Student Engagement in the Classroom.” Seven Ways to Increase Student Engagement in the Classroom – Reading Horizons. Reading Horizons, 18 Sept. 2013.

Palloff, Rena M., and Keith Pratt. The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development. N.p.: Jossey-Bass, 2011.

Papaioannou, Eugenia. “Psychological Aspects That Affect the Learning Process.” Edutopia. Edutopia, 3 Sept. 2016.

I’ve been working remotely for almost six years, so I have some sense of what it generally takes to be successful working from home. But then the social distancing orders went into place in March. Now, I’ve gone from focusing on work, alone, in my home office, to sharing my workspace with my wife (who has started working from home too), while we provide around-the-clock primary care for our two young children. Working from home has become less about working and more about home.

Recent surveys from Pearson indicate that others are experiencing challenges as well. In March, 81% of Americans agreed that remote work is just as good as office work, but that number is down 16 percentage points in the April survey. Satisfaction levels have also gone down as the pandemic stretches on: in March 93% reported being satisfied with their work from home experience, but that dropped to 82% reporting satisfaction in April.

In my state the shelter-in-place restrictions aren’t likely to be lifted any time soon. Since I’m a researcher, I’ve turned to the body of evidence for motivation and self-management for advice on how to get through this.

Here are five tips for how to stay motivated when working remotely based on that research and my own experiences.

1. Update your mindset

Many of us are trying to juggle two full-time jobs at the same time: caring for and being a teacher to our children while also doing the job that pays the bills. But you can not physically do both at the same time. Repeat that to yourself if you need to (I know I have!).

As such, I’ve had to reset my expectations so I’m not setting myself up for failure. My recommendation is that you try to be realistic in order to keep from getting demoralized. These are difficult times and you can not be as productive as before.

2. Set realistic goals

Now that you’ve updated your mindset, write down what is most important for you at home and for work. This will help you not only prioritize your work when time is limited, but also enable you to be satisfied that you’re still focusing on what matters. Then celebrate the small wins to help you stay motivated.

For example, I’ve become less worried about how much time my kids are spending with the tablet, and been explicit to myself that my goal is for my children to be healthy, safe, and as happy as they can be right now. And, I’ve talked with my boss to prioritize projects and push out some deadlines.

3. Create a new routine

Working from home gives you more flexibility than ever before. However, this freedom can be a double-edged sword. Work can bleed into family time and vice versa.

To counteract this, I’ve established some habits to help me transition from “morning with the kids” to “working day.” In particular, I’ll go and get changed, make myself a cup of coffee, bring it to my desk, and start on whatever task I told myself I’d pick up first thing the next day. In addition, my wife and I split up days so we can each make sure to carve out enough time to get our jobs done.

I recommend keeping to a healthy routine, blocking off working hours (as much as you can), and maintaining a dedicated “work zone” in your home, even if it is temporary, to stay focused.

4. Help yourself stay on track

To make the most of the time you have, it can help to get specific about how you will deal with obstacles in your way. Spend some time thinking about things that might make it difficult to stick to your goals, and then come up with some concrete plans for how you will deal with those (e.g., “If I see a notification news story about COVID-19 that I want to read, instead I will turn off notifications for the next hour and go back to working.”)

Planning these “if → then” kinds of rules ahead of time has been found to be really effective for helping people stick to their goals.

5. Stay connected

Working from home can often feel isolating and motivation can easily wane, so efforts to feel like part of a community at work can help. Turn your camera on during meetings. And, make an effort to recreate that watercooler talk via chat or by scheduling catch ups with your colleagues. Everyone who I’ve talked with has been in a similar challenging situation and it has made me feel better that I’m not alone.

I also really look forward to virtual calls with family and friends. Knowing that I have a happy hour with my favorite people coming up has made getting through the day a little less painful.

In the same surveys I mentioned earlier, in April, 65% of Americans say they intend to continue to work remotely after the pandemic subsides. If you do continue to work from home, I can tell you it will get easier when life returns to normal!

A Famous Face

If you’ve ever watched the DIY Network on television, Kayleen McCabe’s is a face you may recognize.

She is the host and star of “Rescue Renovation,” a show that helps homeowners who are in over their heads. Renovation projects turn from disastrous “befores” into jaw-dropping “afters.”

When Kayleen is not in front of the camera, she’s traveling the country telling students the story of how her long-time construction hobby turned into a successful career.

Growing up different

“As a little girl, I was always building stuff with my hands,” Kayleen says.

“My dad was a welder by trade, so I learned a lot of what I know from him.”

“We did repairs around the house, built fences, and worked on cars together.”

“I didn’t realize how unique that was until high school,” Kayleen says.

Kayleen says most of her classmates had no idea what they wanted to do after graduation.

Kayleen was different.

“I knew, even then, that I wanted to work in the construction trades,” she says.

Trusting her instincts

Although knew she wanted a career in construction, Kayleen didn’t enroll in trade school after high school.

“I made good grades,” she says, “and I felt pressure to do what the other ‘good students’ did: go to college.”

One year and two schools (Red Rocks Community College and Colorado State University) later, Kayleen called her parents with some news that ultimately wasn’t a surprise to them: college wasn’t for her.

“I could’ve saved a lot of tuition money by following that instinct earlier,” Kayleen says.

“I am so grateful that when I eventually did, my parents were supportive.”

The first foray into television

Shortly after graduating from high school, Kayleen says, her cousin called her with a proposition.

“She was a producer on the TV show ‘Trading Spaces.’”

“She knew I liked working with my hands, and she said she could help me get a production assistant job.”

From her very first day on the set, Kayleen says she was hooked.

“I would bounce of out of bed at 5 am, vibrating with excitement about whatever we got to build next.”

“It was the first time I fell in love.”

The mentor of all mentors

On the set of “Trading Spaces,” Kayleen met a master craftsman named Frank.

“He was this grumpy-looking older guy with a big bushy mustache that was permanently stained from tobacco,” Kayleen says.

“But he taught me more than I could ever explain.”

“I could ask him anything, and he encouraged me to learn, to try, and most importantly, to fail,” Kayleen says.

“Being in an environment where I felt so safe to do that was the best gift I ever received.”

“Learning the way that I did—on the job—was more of an education than I could ever have gotten from going to college.”

“Rescue Renovation”

“Rescue Renovation” is currently in its fifth season on TV.

Kayleen says she is immensely grateful for her continued success—especially in a field that is traditionally dominated by men.

“When the show first started, I was one of the only female hosts on our channel—or any other one.”

“It’s different now, and I cannot wait for that to keep changing.”

When she travels for her show, Kayleen says, she is often able to help drive that change.

“I like to leverage a plane ticket as much as possible.”

“I’ll find out what schools are close to the airport and call them up. I say, ‘Hi, I’m a woman in the trades, can I come talk to your kids about career opportunities in my field?’”

“To the best of my ability,” Kayleen says, “I will continue to leverage what fame I’ve garnered to help recruit more and more young women into the construction trades.”

Connecting with audiences on smaller screens, too

In her spare time, Kayleen produces short, instructional videos for her followers and fans. She hosts them on her personal web page.

Topics range from cabinet building, to clamps and fasteners, to drill skills.

“I want to get them into the hands of middle and high school teachers so they can show their kids what working in the trades is really like.”

“Growing up, my teachers had nothing like that. In terms of recruitment, I think it could be game-changing.”

Something to strive for

Kayleen says she is constantly thinking about the future—for herself and for construction trades overall.

“I want to double the number of students I talk to every year … until that becomes impossible.”

Already this year, Kayleen has made incredible progress towards her goal. She has trips planned to Indiana, Ontario, Nebraska, Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, Abu Dhabi, and Mississippi—all in the next few months.

“Someday, I hope I am able to travel full-time, speaking to students and giving them scholarships to study the trades.”

“I want to be the Bill Gates of power tools,” Kayleen says.

“And my passport has a lot of room in it.”

What role does building a community of learners play in the learning process?

In this module, teachers explore how to create a welcoming online learning environment that fosters personalized learning and communication to create a sense of community.

Activities include how teachers can develop teacher-student and student-student relationships, along with strategies for building connections both synchronously and asynchronously within an online learning environment.

Bibliography
“Culture of Learning.” Learning and the Adolescent Mind. The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas as Austin and Agile Mind, Inc.

Garrett, Amy, Aimee Whiteside, and Somer Lewis. “Get Present: Build Community and Connectedness Online.” Learning & Leading with Technology 40.2 (2012): 22-25.

Martin, Florence, and Michele A. Parker. “Use on Synchronous Virtual Classrooms: Why, Who, and How?” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 10.2 (2014): 192-210.

Premuzic, Tomas. “What Your Email Style Reveals About Your Personality.” Fast Company. Fast Company, 06 June 2014.

A big deal at the time

In the early 1990s, Bill Clements highlighted students in his college classes at Norwich University on websites he built from scratch.

“I’d post a ‘Student of the Week’ and the students really got a kick out of it,” he says. “They’d call home to their families and say ‘hey, Mom, my picture is on the Internet!’”

It was a big deal at the time, Bill says.

That was more than 20 years ago. Now, Bill is Vice President and Dean of the College of Graduate and Continuing Studies at Norwich, overseeing the learning of the approximately 1,800 students enrolled in online programs.

A history of service

Founded in 1819, Norwich University is the oldest private military college in the United States and is considered the birthplace of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). With a student body of approximately two-thirds in the Corps of Cadets, the school’s online population also serves a high proportion of military students.

“Overall, I’d say the online-only degrees are 40% military students,” Bill says.

Several of Norwich’s online programs are designed to serve military students. The Master of Arts in Diplomacy and Master of Arts in Military History, in particular, have high enrollments of military officers.

“We get a lot of students who are military officers preparing for promotions or additional leadership roles and are looking to our online programs to bolster their professional capabilities,” Bill says.

The university recently conducted a Gallup survey of its alumni and the results confirm what Bill has always known to be true.

“We’ve heard from our students and alumni—military and civilian—that our online programs made it easier to earn a degree,” he says. “They graduate and get good jobs with good salaries.”

“There’s been a positive impact on their lives as a result of their education.”

Higher ed 3.0

Thirty years ago this month, Bill was teaching at Temple University and finishing his doctoral degree.

“It was a big week for me,” he recalls. “I had just signed my contract at Norwich, had a birthday, my second daughter was born, and I was defending my dissertation.”

Bill recalls talking to a colleague also on the verge of completing his doctorate about where they might be in 30 years.

 “We knew we wanted to be in leadership positions that would allow us to be a part of the changes we knew were coming,” he says. “We didn’t know what those changes would look like, exactly, but we were eager to begin our careers.”

That colleague went on to have a successful career in higher education and together, Bill says, they’ve seen the evolution of “higher ed 2.0.”

“When we went through school, higher education was still ‘version 1.0.’ It was lecture halls and slides full of notes,” he explains. “Throughout my career, I’ve seen the evolution of ‘version 2.0,’ where we took that physical classroom and moved it online with little change.”

But now, Bill says, he’s looking forward to the next 30 years and the evolution of higher ed 3.0.

“That next version has to move beyond just replicating lectures,” he says. “We have to ask how can we make learning more effective, how do we make it more engaged, how do we make it more affordable?”

He also believes higher education is a lifelong process.

“You can’t just get a degree and get a job and never go to school again in today’s economy,” he says. “How is higher education going to adapt to that?”

Gemma Weir launched a non-profit when she was just nine years old.

Yes, you read that correctly: nine years old.

She started Fluffy Love, an organization that collects and donates new stuffed animals to children who could use a cuddly companion.

Most of the toys are donated to a children’s hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.

Gemma also donates stuffed buddies to tornado victims and local shelters.

To date, Gemma has collected and donated more than 3,000 stuffed animals.

A small start

Fluffy Love began a long way from those 3,000 stuffed animals.

“At first, we got the word out through church groups,” says Gemma.

Soon the stuffed animals came pouring in – and not just from her community in Grand Prairie, Texas.

A Facebook page helped spread the word.

“That got an incredible response,” says Gemma’s mom, Heather. “We also received hundreds of toys from friends and family in Scotland!”

Gemma says it’s been amazing to watch Fluffy Love spread joy in her community.

Recently, a little boy came up to Gemma at church. He was holding a stuffed animal in his arms.

“He told me that he had broken his arm and wound up in the hospital,” Gemma says.

“A nurse gave him the stuffed animal. He said it brought him so much comfort as he went through something scary,” she says.

The toy had been donated by Fluffy Love. 

Learning along the way 

Gemma is now enrolled at Texas Connections Academy, a virtual public school that gives her the flexibility she needs to pursue her work with Fluffy Love.

“I can get ahead on schoolwork a few days a week, then focus on Fluffy Love,” she says. “I’ve really learned the importance of time management!”

Two schools recently invited Gemma to speak to students about her project.

“I was nervous, but it was amazing experience,” Gemma says. “The students at both schools were super receptive.”

One school was so inspired by Gemma’s story that students decided to have a toy drive for Fluffy Love.

Encouraging kids to dream big

Watching Gemma find her passion has been one of Heather Weir’s greatest joys as a parent.

“Gemma was very shy and quiet growing up,” Heather says. “It’s been incredible to watch her grow with Fluffy Love.”

When it comes to supporting their kids, Heather has one simple but powerful piece of advice for parents: encourage ideas.

“Parents should always get behind their kids,” Heather says. “It can help them find what they love and flourish.”

Inspiring others

Gemma is now in ninth grade – and Fluffy Love has grown alongside her.

Last year, the organization officially became a 501(C)(3)-certified non-profit.

As she looks toward the future, Gemma sees plenty more opportunities for Fluffy Love to inspire positive action.

The mayor of Grand Prairie, Texas proclaimed December 12^th as Gemma Weir Day in recognition of her service to the community.

“I hope it’s a day that inspires everyone to follow their passions and think about how to make a positive difference in other people’s lives,” Gemma says.

Inspiration from experience

Debbie Goldammer remembers spending a lot of time in the hallway as a fourth-grade student.

“Every day, my teacher would tell us to copy our spelling or math from the board at the front of the room and every day I asked where it was and got sent to sit in the hall,” she recalls.

Debbie couldn’t see the board well enough to read the writing.

“For me, as a young kid, being sent to the hall made me feel like I was bad. I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong.”

Eventually, Debbie’s father noticed her poor eyesight and she got her first pair of glasses. After that, her trips to the hallway stopped.

“My teacher never took the time to see that I couldn’t see,” Debbie says.

That experience as a young child inspired Debbie to become a teacher herself.

“I became a teacher because I wanted to watch for those things,” she says. “If kids couldn’t see or couldn’t hear, I wanted to watch for that and help them.”

Debbie spent the last 40 years doing just that; she recently retired from a career teaching.

Getting started

Despite getting glasses and making the decision to become a teacher, Debbie didn’t always excel at school.

“I never really tried and focused in school,” Debbie says. “It was mainly my mom going ‘get your homework done, get your homework done.’”

It wasn’t until Debbie’s seventh-grade math teacher held her to a higher standard that she realized she could do more. When she moved into eighth grade without being placed in the advanced class, the teacher demanded a reason.

“She said, ‘you were my top student last year, you…belong in the top class,’” Debbie says.

Debbie moved to the advanced math class and experienced her second learning epiphany.

“That’s when education became important to me,” she says. “I saw it could get me someplace if I worked.”

The right emphasis

Debbie always planned to teach fourth grade—the same grade she spent so much time in the hallway—and chose elementary education for her college major.

One trip to her academic advisor’s office changed those plans—she was only a few credits from earning a minor in math.

She spent her early years teaching math to sixth-eighth graders before moving back to her hometown to teach eighth-grade math in the same classroom for the next 32 years.

“I really liked junior high kids,” she says. “They’re their own little beast—they still respect you but want to try you…there’s a lot of change happening in a short time.”

Returning home

Spending the majority of her career teaching in the community where she grew up was special, Debbie says, particularly when it came to teaching the children of former students.

“I have 100 percent of the support [of my former students],” she says. “Former students who are now parents know what I will do for my students.”

Including adding a new class to her teaching schedule.

Not long before her retirement, Debbie took over teaching a dual-credit college algebra class, allowing students to earn college math credit while in high school.

“My principal asked me three times to teach the class and I said no three times,” Debbie recalls, saying she didn’t feel qualified even though she was certified.

“The fourth time, he said, ‘You’re the only one certified to do this, this is for the kids,’ and I couldn’t say no to that.”

Debbie says she can’t count the hours she spent preparing and studying so she would be ready to teach the class. She even turned to YouTube for refreshers.

“I wanted to make sure I could teach the kids as best as possible,” she says.

Moving forward

Debbie spent the first few weeks of her retirement cleaning out her classroom, getting it ready for its next occupant. But not everything had to change: a Goldammer will still be teaching eighth-grade math at Butler High School. Her daughter, Heather, will be moving down the hall to take over her mother’s classroom and schedule.

“I spent the first few years of my career determined not to be just like my mom,” Heather says. “But along the way, I’ve found my own path and now I feel like I’m stepping into her shoes without mimicking her.”

For her mother, Heather’s choice to follow a similar path is a point of pride.

“Heather could have gone into anything she chose,” she says, “but she chose education.”

Are you having to transition teaching your traditional face-to-face summer class to an online environment? This can be a daunting task with a full 16-week semester, let alone for a super short 5-week mini-mester! Compound that with the fact that you may not have taught online previously, and this could easily intimidate even the most seasoned instructor. Have no fear! Many have traversed this path before you and come out successful—you can, too!

Summer courses are short, rigorous, but can be very rewarding for both you and the student when taught with a few best practices in mind. For instance, they usually have smaller enrollments meaning less to grade for you (YAY!), but that means more rapid feedback for them since you can get your grading done more quickly. The smaller class size allows you to have more frequent interactions with each student thereby giving them the support they need to be more successful. Plus, most summer students are highly motivated and typically are only taking one or two classes at a time. This means they are going to be dedicated to learning your material.

There are a few guiding principles you can utilize to help you as you work to design your summer online course. First, let’s do a brief overview on “how” you will be teaching, then we will address the “what” to teach online in more detail.

The how

When designing online courses, you should always start by talking to your institution, or search their website, for information about any specific requirements they have for teaching online courses. Then, by answering these few questions, you’ll be well on your way to success as you design and implement your online course.

You can read more about these in my previous blog post Tips for moving a class online quickly, or for step-by-step instructions for building an online course with your LMS (or without), you can use this handy Online Course Toolkit.

The what

Now, onto the teaching of online courses. Once you’ve ascertained how you are going to teach your course online, now you need to figure out the what, as in “what am I going to teach?” There are four guiding principles as you try to determine what exactly you are going to teach in your summer course.

If you’ve only taught 16-week courses, trying to fit all of that material into a 5-week course is like trying to fit ten pounds of candy into a five-pound bag. You need to prioritize the “have to knows” from the “good to knows.” Think about this, what information do your students really need from your course to be successful in their career years down the road? Assess your required Learning Outcomes and determine the essentials that must be taught in order for you to meet those objectives.

These essential Learning Outcomes should then be clearly communicated to your students in the very beginning of the course. The students should know what they are working towards learning, and what it is they will be assessed on throughout the length of the course. Refer back to them as you progress through the course, helping students realize that these are the foundational skills they’ll need to apply your course materials to their careers.

Now that you’ve decided the specific topics you will be covering in your summer course, it’s time to organize it in a logical flow that teaches your objectives in a scaffolded manner. In other words, make sure the prerequisite/foundational knowledge and skills are reviewed/taught early in the course, and then build upon these as you address your Learning Objectives. You can’t teach a student to solve for “x” in the equation x + 4 = 6 if they haven’t yet learned how to add and subtract. Don’t be afraid to skip around chapters, especially in the summer, to help create a more logical flow for this shortened semester!

While contemplating how best to design the flow of your course to meet your Learning Outcomes, keep in mind, this is a fast-paced course. Again, reiterating the importance of focusing on what you need to teach, extraneous information should be cut from your teachings. You may also want to consider relating much of what you teach to real-world situations. This will convey the importance of what you’re teaching and make it more memorable to the students at the same time.

How do you design your assignments for this short course now that you’ve figured out what you are teaching? Easy! Take what you’ve been doing for your 16-week course, shorten the assignments, and give them more frequently. Your students are already going to be studying, rewriting notes, practicing, and reading – you don’t want to give them homework assignments that take 2 – 3 hours on top of all of that. If you can, break the assignments into bite-sized chunks that take no more than 30 – 45 minutes to complete (or less), and give them a few assignments per week. These will be easier to digest for your students and will also help them retain the importance of the material. You may even offer more flexible due dates in this summer course than you would in your 16-weeks.

Consider using the discussion forums discussed in the How to Prepare for Online Teaching blog. These can be short but powerful assignments. If you’re having the students write papers for your course, consider shortening the length of the paper, or the number of papers they have to submit, and focus more on the content you’re having them address. Lastly, really give thought to group projects as well. Sometimes students learn more from each other than they do from us.

These 5-week classes are not only tough to plan out and teach, but they are a heavy lift for the students as they try to learn this material in a compressed time frame. Try offering an extra level of support for these students you don’t normally give your 16-week classes. If you are doing live virtual class sessions (or even pre-recorded videos), consider providing them with copies of the slides or the notes you use while teaching. Set up extra virtual office hours for them to pop in and ask you questions. Create practice quizzes or tests for them to use as study guides, or even provide them with a more detailed study guide than you usually hand out.

By following the guiding principles for how to teach online and what to teach in summer courses, it will set both you and your students up for success. These principles will put you on track to create an effective, efficient, and enjoyable online summer course. Bottom line, these summer students will work diligently, but they will work even harder if they know you’re really trying to help them be more successful in such a short, intensive course!

Technology has really changed the way we teach. It doesn’t seem that long ago that my classes brought their paperback workbooks to class; they tore out review pages and turned them in for grading. They brought notebooks to take notes in, and we gave paper/pencil tests. Now? They can use e-books on a tablet. They access assignments on their phones. Course materials can be available with one click, anytime, anywhere.

But those changes don’t all happen overnight. They take time and preparation. And sometimes that’s not a luxury we have. We might have catastrophic weather or a pandemic or some other event that closes the school for a while. Every course needs an online presence. And it needs to happen now.

So where do we start? Let’s assume our primary goal is to deliver some assessments online while the campus is closed. You may have existing question banks you can use. Or, you may have texts with materials like TestGen available.

If that’s the case, you’ll need to download TestGen software if you want to make a paper/pencil test and then export it to your Learning Management System (LMS).  You then need to download the question banks at Pearson’s Higher Ed site to build your library of questions. You may already have these from your existing tests. (By the way, if you want to export a TestGen test to your LMS, be careful to export it in the correct format. You typically need to look at the Blackboard export option.)

You may find it easier to access the TestGen question bank files from Pearson’s website and upload them directly to the Learning Management System. You will need to search by your text to see if files are available. You might need to use an older edition if the new one is not available or use a similar text if you need more variety of questions. Again, note that TestGen question banks are not necessarily available for every text.

Once you have identified the question banks, download them, and then use the LMS to upload the question banks. Here are links you can use to learn more about the process for your specific LMS.

• Blackboard
• Canvas
• Moodle
• Brightspace by D2L

After you have those loaded in your LMS, you can then create quizzes/tests. Your LMS administrator on campus has training materials for how to do this, and you can also find extensive instructor resources for each LMS online.

As you design your quizzes/tests, keep in mind things like pooling questions to provide variety. You might also be able to scramble the question order. Allow some extra time on tests so students are able to navigate the technology and still have time for the test itself.

In addition, you may want to have a “mini test” for students to practice with, especially if you require them to use Respondus or Proctor U or Honor Lock or a similar tool. You can learn more about the technology tools your school has by checking with your LMS administrator.

When teaching a science class, we often use experiences in the lab to foster critical thinking skills and reinforce the concepts we introduce in lectures. But with campuses closed, students cannot access the lab.

So what do you do? Is it better to forget about labs at all, or is there value in online or hands-on at home methods? This is what one study published by the Journal of Formative Design in Learning tells us.

Don’t ditch labs

Students who take lecture and laboratory concurrently outperform their lecture-only peers, regardless of whether that lab is face-to-face or non-traditional.

Non-traditional labs can be as effective as face-to-face labs

• A good non-traditional lab tool can increase test scores, improve students’ attitudes and preparedness for the hands-on lab, and strengthen conceptual knowledge.
• In one particular study, the students said the online laboratory experience was the same as or better than their prior experiences in the traditional setting.
• Students can access the lab whenever and wherever suits them. Flexibility will be important at the moment, particularly for those suddenly having to care for children.
• In an online lab, students can reflect on what went right and what did not go as planned, and then can repeat the experiment as many times as they need.
• Virtual chemistry labs can help students visualize structures and processes at the molecular level and allow types of experiments not possible in a standard undergraduate laboratory—e.g., quantum chemistry.

Examples of online labs

Online labs can range from simple videos and games, to graphing and 2D simulations, to interactive 3D virtual reality experiences. Simulations, as mathematical models of processes in the physical world, allow users to manipulate parameters and can be used by faculty to customize laboratories in various disciplines. Some examples include:

• Virtual dissections (see Practice Anatomy Lab in Mastering A&P)
• Chemical reactions (see Chemistry simulations in Mastering Chemistry)
• Laws of motion experiments (see PhET simulations in Mastering Physics)

Examples of hands-on at home tools

Hands-on kits available from various vendors can provide students with practice of experiments, and manufacturers usually assume liability. One example is Chemistry LabPaqs from Hands on Labs (http://holscience.com/)

A good tool should have

• Software that is easy to install, user-friendly, and intuitive, yet challenging.
• Experiences similar to the traditional laboratory.
• Useful sequences for learners that scaffold their use of the system.
• Some form of feedback (even if it is just immediate results of labs and simulations).
• Help for visualizing and demonstrating concepts and constructs that might otherwise be difficult to observe (depending on exactly what domain it is).
• Alignment with the learning objectives across all learning activities.
• Clear instructions (even if the task is more open-ended in the lab) and criteria so students know what to focus on.
• The ability for students to “experiment” in the environment without penalty.
• Digital laboratory manuals that accompany hands-on lab kits must also be user-friendly and intuitive.

Source:
Rowe et al., Efficacy of Online Laboratory Science Courses (2017) Journal of Formative Design in Learning

Online teaching has gone viral! COVID-19 is causing teachers, who never thought they’d teach this way, to dive right into unchartered territory. Learning how to use technology to deliver content and evaluate students’ mastery of course principles is happening–almost overnight—and often without much guidance for instructors.

Faculty are often working more hours than they can count, trying to quickly ramp up so their students have little disruption in their learning.

Creating online learning environments is daunting, even for seasoned online instructors with weeks of lead time. But now, face-to-face face teachers are under the gun to get these courses up and running pronto. Those teaching in Spring 2020 are under pressures no one ever anticipated.

Add on to that the stress of self-isolation, homeschooling children, and sharing home office spaces with partners and children. Self-care is vital for any caretaker, and right now, it’s vital for teachers too.

This article offers teachers self-care tips to destress and renew so they continue to offer their expertise and talents to their students in these unprecedented times.

1. Work-time

Use the Pomodoro method of working. Complete 25 minutes of intense work followed by a 5 minute break. Repeat 3x if needed. Then take a 30 minute break before beginning the cycle again.

Remember, a 40-hour work week included water cooler time or meetings. Four hours of intense work per day is really an ambitious goal. Clearly, sometimes we spend more time and sometimes less, but don’t let working online dominate your entire day.

You need designated down time. Make rules for working hours that suit your most productive times and around other people and duties in your home.

2. Workspace

Designate a workspace (even if you have to share). Straighten and clear your work area every day. Try to keep this space only for your online teaching. Leave it when you have completed your work and don’t return “just to check.”

If you have to share a desk or computer with others, create a schedule and a way to remove your tools for work. Try putting your office tools on a cutting board you can take with you when you exit or find a box for your files/papers. This way, you have a portable workstation you can remove to prevent others from disturbing.

3. Teaching support

You are not alone. There are plenty of resources for teaching online, some at no cost. Sites like Pearson’s can provide you with online teaching tips as well as faculty experts to consult about best practices for teaching online.

4. Take care of your students

By now you may realize how time consuming and emotionally draining maintaining an online presence with your students can be. Take these steps to help take care of your students, and yourself!

• Remember #1 and don’t feel you must be physically present 24-hours a day because your students may email you at 2 a.m. And while you need to find ways to create a real relationship at a distance with your students, they didn’t have access to you in the classroom beyond their class times and your office hours. The same rules also apply online.
• Be clear with your students when you will and will not communicate with them. Defining expectations reduces misunderstandings that can occur when asynchronous communication becomes the rule rather than the exception.
• Be cognizant of this crisis and consider bending some rules in your class that made sense before but may become less relevant now. Practice flexibility.
• Focus more on collaborative activities between students if possible (shared Google docs or other methods of online collaboration).
• Rethink deadlines.
• Offer students some live time virtual meetings with you.
• Create short video messages to your classes showing your willingness to understand how this crisis is impacting their lives.

5. Exercise

If you follow the Pomodoro method mentioned above, use the breaks for some type of physical exercise. Intense mental focus is relieved by short bursts of physical activity.

• Try using an exercise ball to stretch out your back. Or you jump on that stationary bike or step machine.
• Designate off time for physical workouts every day. Being confined in our homes doesn’t mean we can’t work out. Use YouTube for dance workouts (you can do this with anyone in your home or alone).
• Take a walk (keeping safe distances). Getting outside, even if it means on the roof of your building, will do wonders for your attitude. Morning sun is particularly important, so try to get some of those early morning rays on the top of your uncovered head.

6. You are what you eat

Eat well, but not deprived. Now may not be the best time to go on that diet, but it is a time to eat well.

• Comfort foods like chips and candy aren’t the best mindless munching snacks. Instead, try nuts, fruits, or crunchy veggies. Reserve your “treats” for designated times and make sure to really focus on the enjoyment of that special something (chocolate for many of us).
• Eating out is not an option currently, so find ways to get fresh vegetables, fruits, and other groceries in safe ways. There are companies that will deliver fresh veggies and fruits to your door weekly, and many markets are providing curb side pickup or deliveries of preordered items.
• This may be the time we all learn to create shopping lists and stick to them, making meal plans, maybe even cooking those recipes we’ve been saving and never trying.

Remember as you plan and eat well, we will all emerge from our cocoons in time; while a few pounds to shed may not be something to worry about, gaining 20 or 30 pounds will decrease your sense of well-being, creating additional stress. So, refer to #5 again!

7. Take care of your feelings

Most of us are overwhelmed by this crisis. Be gentle with yourself if you find you are less patient with others, have times when you just want to be completely alone, feel anxious, or find yourself in a cleaning or cooking frenzy. These are just signs that you need to decompress a bit.

• Take up that hobby you’ve been putting off; use yoga or meditation to set the tone for the day or to decompress, or relax with a book in the evening. There are many free apps that can help you with these types of activities.
• Reach out virtually to friends and family through regular video meetings. Free resources such as Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, or Teams in Outlook can help you connect real time with those you love.
• Attend virtual concerts that many orchestras and musicians are creating to provide comfort and inspiration, watch live cameras of zoos or wildlife, or start that blog you’ve been putting off.

Externalize your feelings in healthy ways by talking with supportive people either in your home or at a distance. If these feelings result in prolonged depression, please know there are many online counseling services that provide counseling. Counselors nation-wide are mobilizing and also working from home to help decrease stress and depression.

8. Care of others

One of the greatest methods of self-care is to flip the focus of helplessness or irritation and think of ways you are already caring for others. Look for fresh ways to be supportive of friends, family members, and your community that you hadn’t considered before.

There are sites and apps that offer opportunities to volunteer virtually in a number of ways beyond just donating. Often getting out of ourselves and into the needs of others lifts our spirits, increases our self-worth, and spills over to the jobs at hand; caring for the educational and sometimes emotional needs of our students.

Know that while you may not be getting the applause and ticker tape parades you deserve, your tireless efforts to provide ongoing education are not without notice. We will come out on the other side of this, and hopefully with greater depth in our understanding of what teaching and teachers mean and can come to mean to the students today facing challenges we have never encountered.

You are the trailblazers, teaching the leaders who will face new worlds of challenges. Take care of yourselves! The world needs you!

When students are actively learning, they are making connections to their own lives, questioning, and collaborating, which we know leads to more significant, durable learning outcomes. In the classroom, we deliberately plan learning activities and discussion to engage learners and keep them active. We stay alert during class to pick up on cues that learners are tuning out or struggling so we can pivot and improvise as needed.

One of the toughest adjustments to teaching online is that we lose this immediate feedback-action loop. We can’t adjust in real time to keep learners engaged in specific activities or assignments. So, it’s important to set up learning opportunities that extend past the activity or assignment itself.

Here are some ideas for encouraging active engagement online.

1. Incorporate their lived experience

We usually encourage students to bring their experiences into our classroom. But now, we have to figure out how to bring our discipline-specific content into their experiences. Now we’re all at home, students are not focused on our content at a specific time or in a specific place.

To keep them engaged and actively learning, we have to help them experience their lives through the lens of our content. We don’t want them to only think about our content when they’re sitting in front of their device. Give them things to look for, think about, and capture as they clean the house, care for family members, walk the dog, and watch Netflix. Encourage them to find the ways your content manifests in everyday life. For example:

• Laws of physics scavenger hunt. Ask learners to take pictures/videos of laws of physics in action around their home. Share online and ask the class to vote for the best examples.
• Neighborhood visual ethnography project. Learners walk around their neighborhood (using safe social distancing practices) and take pictures. They use grounded research techniques to analyze images and categorize characteristics to make hypotheses about their neighborhood’s culture. They could incorporate public records searches to consider property values and census information.

2. Make them research assistants

In a discussion-based class, we would generally provide learners with some context and content in lecture and readings and then engage them in discussion and analysis to promote deeper understanding and durable learning. Online forums can be lively and contribute to significant learning, but they are not a straight substitute for classroom discussion. So, instead of providing them with all the relevant readings and context, ask them to find it. Imagine you now have a class full of research assistants.

Here are two examples showing how you might transfer what you do in the classroom to an online environment:

Example 1

Classroom: Lecture on elements of Victorian society that influenced Jane Eyre and discussion to apply to reading and incorporate learner experiences

Online: Learners research specific aspects of Victorian society, looking especially for contemporary sources that would help learners empathize with Victorian readers. Find examples in the reading of things that would have resonated with or be significant to Victorian readers that today’s readers might not find as significant or understand.

Example 2

Classroom: Assign journal readings about applying theory to curriculum design and then a practical assignment to create a lesson plan.

Online: Provide summaries of major learning theories and then ask learners to find journal articles that apply one of the theories to curriculum design in their discipline. Post the article, a summary, and then explain two specific ways they would incorporate that theory into their own curriculum design.

3. Ask them to write the test

You’re right to be concerned about cheating when learners are taking assessments online from home. There are proctoring apps that can help mitigate this risk, but not everyone has access to that technology. Turn testing into an active learning experience (and reduce the risk of cheating) by asking them to write the test.

Quantitative disciplines or introductory skills-based courses

In quantitative disciplines or introductory skills-based courses, give learners the learning objectives and ask them to write items that assess the learning objectives and provide the correct answers with justification. Ask them to create multiple choice distractors that represent common mistakes, miscalculations, or misconceptions and explain what error each distracter represents.

Qualitative disciplines or higher level theory-based courses

In more qualitative disciplines or higher level theory-based courses, learners can create their own rubrics to evaluate existing works or their own projects. They can use the rubrics they created to evaluate their peers’ work, or they can use someone else’s rubric to evaluate their own or others’ work.

4. Read together

Asking questions while you read and talking to someone else about what you’re learning are two proven active learning strategies. Use online tools to allow learners to annotate readings together.

• The app Hypothes.is allows people to annotate PDFs or even websites.
• You can upload a reading to Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Adobe Cloud and share it so learners can make and reply to comments.
• In any of these apps, learners can tag you or each other for specific questions or responses. Just remember to turn on your notifications.

5. Solve problems together

Often, online group projects are less collaboration and more divide-and-conquer. You can both lean into and disrupt this tendency by using a jigsaw strategy. In a jigsaw strategy, groups of learners become “experts” in one concept or topic, and then they shuffle into new groups where they become the representative of their concept in a new mixed-expertise group. The new group has to work together, sharing and leveraging their specific expertise, to solve a problem.

Example

Classroom: A lecture and readings introduce the concept of sustainability and provide an overview of the types of sustainability initiatives in which corporations engage. In groups, students research the sustainability initiatives of three companies and decide which has the best strategy.

Online, option A: Each group is given one company to research. They find out everything they can about that company’s sustainability initiatives and the impacts of those initiatives on the company, consumers, and planet. They create a scorecard to represent the criteria they think is important and how that company scores. Then, in a sync session, breakout jigsaw groups are created where learners have to make the case for their company. Together, the new jigsaw group comes up with a consolidated scorecard and scores all the represented companies.

Online, option B: Each group researches one aspect of corporate sustainability and creates a rubric to score companies on that aspect. In a sync session, breakout jigsaw groups combine their score cards and collectively evaluate a company.

We’re all familiar with trends coming and going in higher education; we’re also used to seeing a lot of research too. How do we know what’s really worth it?

Throughout my years as a professor, one subject that has garnered significant research is building community in the classroom. Building community is a valuable tool for improving equity. When I began teaching online, I found it to be far more difficult to achieve.

I would assign students to groups in my Learning Management System (LMS) and encourage them to work together on a weekly Relevant Application assignment (to see how the mathematics we were doing realistically applied to the world around them). These group assignments were regularly met with resistance from students – citing, “I took an online class so I wouldn’t have to work with other people!”

This attitude is one we can’t afford to tolerate, especially as our world increasingly becomes digital, and more people are working in teams with folks from around the country and the world virtually.

What can we do about it?

A few years ago, I attended a talk at InstructureCon (Canvas developers annual conference) on creating Affinity Groups for students in online classes. I loved what I saw; implementing their strategies eliminated complaints from students about working in online groups.

How Affinity Groups work

As in many online classes, at the beginning of the quarter my students are assigned to post a short biography to a discussion board; in this post, they introduce themselves to me and the rest of the class. They are asked to discuss their educational goals, hobbies and interests, as well as something unique about them.

When I read their submissions, I make notes of hobbies and interests of all the students. As I see trends of topics being mentioned 3 or 4 times, I list them as a potential group category. I then create a group set, and name the groups based on the categories that stood out for that particular group of students.

It’s fun to belong

Almost every quarter I have “Parents”, “Binge Watchers”, “Gamers’, and “Travelers” to name a few, as recurring group themes. You can even add alliteration for more flare, like “Proud Parents” or “Great Gamers”. It is fun to keep an eye out for those unique groups that surface in a given quarter. One quarter we had “Anti-Coffee-ers” for example – a group of students who surfaced declaring their dislike for coffee, or “Foodies Forever”.

A tight knit group

I choose to cap the groups at 5 and create more groups than necessary, because I don’t know exactly what students will be drawn to. Lastly, I always create a “z. None of the Above” group, as an option for students who don’t identify with any of the other group. In Canvas, you can simply rename the groups while you’re creating them. In Blackboard, after you’ve created your Self-Enroll Group Set, you’ll have to go to each group individually and rename them by selecting Edit Group.

Freedom of choice

At this point, I ask students to self-enroll in the groups of their choice through my LMS (both Canvas and Blackboard have the option for students to self-enroll). Note: If your LMS doesn’t allow for this action, there are other ways you could use to have for your students choose their group, like a poll or survey where they choose one option.

No one is left behind

Once the given deadline has passed for choosing a group, I put those who haven’t selected a group into the newly created “Non-Responders” group and encourage them to choose a new name amongst themselves. Not surprisingly, that group of students tends to not succeed as well as the others. I also check for groups with just 1 or 2 members, and combine them, getting creative with the name – like “Binge Hikers” (combination of “Binge Watchers” and “Hikers-R-Us”). Lastly, I delete the groups that didn’t attract any students; now you have students in groups with similar interests.

A little change makes a big impact

This may seem like a small distinction from randomly assigning groups, but it is fascinating to me how the knowledge that they are all parents, or they all like to cook, helps them to engage with each other more effectively and actively. Rarely do I get any resistance from students saying they don’t want to work in groups anymore.

My focus here has been on how to design groups to help encourage students’ engagement. Two other great resources for strategies for effective group work are these Duke University and Carnegie Melon University articles. You can also learn more about the importance of student engagement in survey results from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), as well as other research done by National Academic Advising Association (NACADA).

From on-screen to first-hand

Jason Agins says he was “an armchair traveler” as a kid.

“I watched a lot of Lonely Planet, and anything else on the Travel Channel.”

Years later, he says he still loves to explore, although now he sees the world first-hand.

Proof: he’s visited 55 countries in the last 6 years.

(He says he doesn’t have a favorite. It’s a four-way tie between Turkey, Japan, Russia, and Mexico).

Today, with South Florida as a home base, Jason has forged a career in non-traditional education that lets him connect with students in other parts of the world every day—through his computer screen.

A global teacher

Jason is the Master Teacher of International Communities for International Connections Academy (iNaCA), a K-12 global online private school.

“I work with our 230 or so international students,” Jason says.

“They have to learn not only how to be virtual students, but also how to learn from American teachers and, in effect, get an American education.”

“The complexity and nuance that’s involved in that is constantly challenging—for them and for me,” Jason says.

“But helping my students grow, and learn, and go on to do awesome things is so worth it.”

Meeting face-to-face

You’d think Jason’s global adventures might have taken him to see some of his students in their home countries.

Not so, until last year when for the first time, Jason met one of his former students face-to-face.

“At the same time she was a student at iNaCA, she was helping take care of her sick grandmother, and had other family obligations at home in Latvia as well,” Jason says.

To get her to graduate, Jason says he spent a lot of time on the phone and on Skype talking through her different priorities.

“Considering the circumstances, she wasn’t the strongest student,” he says. “But she had grit—and she graduated.”

Eight months later, while traveling through Eastern Europe, Jason met up with her and her family.

“All my kids are superstars,” Jason says, “but she’s a really special success story.”

A new venture

Jason’s passion for people around the world had another effect on him as a young man: he spent a lot of time listening to talk radio.

“You certainly don’t see a lot of kids tuning in to AM radio.”

“But I thought it was so cool that from my living room, I could hear stories from people all over the world.”

That interest in storytelling is something Jason recently circled back to.

As he did with travel, Jason found a way to work it into his job.

A podcast is born

“After AM radio fell off the map, so to speak, I took up listening to podcasts,” Jason says.

“Having worked at iNaCA for several years now, I’ve taught and met so many incredible
students.”

“One is in Cirque du Soleil. Another is a child movie star in France. One student enrolled because her family is doing mission work in Brazil to fight human trafficking.”

“These kids are amazing,” Jason says, “and I realized nobody was documenting that.”

A few months later, Jason released the first episode of his own podcast, which showcases the stories of international iNaCA students.

7 episodes in

Jason hosts the podcast himself.

“I try not to talk much,” he says.

“I’m just there to ask the probing questions and get the students comfortable. The stories, the good stuff, comes from them.”

So far, Jason’s released 7 hour-long episodes. Four more are on the way.

Jason says he’s gotten enthusiastic feedback from early listeners.

“It’s so cool to have a student say to me, ‘I downloaded all the episodes on my phone!’”

Jason says he plans to continue producing the podcast indefinitely.

“My love for travel and radio and conversation just converged. It was the perfect storm.”

The next generation

Jason’s wife, Stephanie, also works for iNaCA.

“She likes to travel as much as I do,” he says. “Maybe more.”

The couple is expecting a baby girl this spring.

Jason says they have no plans to stay grounded after she arrives.

“Of course she will be well traveled,” he says.

“We went to Mexico City over winter break, so technically, she’s already been on her first international trip, he says, “with many, many more to come.”

Jason blogs about his world travels here.

Your assessment plans, just like all your other learning plans, have probably been suddenly disrupted during this crisis. And, due to family responsibilities, or anxiety, your students may not have the time or ability to concentrate on full length exams like they would typically be able to in a classroom setting.

But all is not lost. As you know, the goal of giving an exam is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit. If there are other ways of doing this — for example, a culminating project, portfolio, or other open-ended assignment that a student could submit online, consider these before an online exam, particularly a multiple-choice exam.

If you decide to use a traditional summative exam, these research-based tips can make the online experience better for you and your students.

1. Create clear and specific rules and instructions so students know exactly what to do

• Online assessment is new for your students. Reduce anxiety by clearly communicating the rules and instructions before the exam so there are no surprises.
• For example, if you would like them to write their essays in paragraphs or to show their work for problem sets, be sure to explicitly state this.
• The rules may include how many opportunities students have to complete the exam, if they can or cannot save and come back later to finish, if they need to put away all mobile devices or whether it is an open or closed book exam.
• Provide other details such as the list of learning objectives the exam will address, how many questions to expect, the amount of time they will have to complete the exam, how many points each question is worth, etc. A study guide or a practice test can also help your students prepare.

2. Reduce the opportunities for cheating

• Password protect your exam and limit to one attempt.
• Require students to complete a statement of honesty before beginning the exam (this can be done through a digital form or added as the first item of the exam).
• Open and close access to your exam session within a predetermined time period.
• Shuffle items or create multiple versions of the exam to randomly assign to students.
• Create a pool or item bank to pull random questions from (many platforms allow for this, including MyLab and Mastering, and most learning management systems (LMS)).
• Ask students to justify or explain their answers by adding an open response field after each selected-response question.
• Use more open-ended question types instead of true/false or multiple choice questions if you don’t have the capabilities listed above.

3. Make sure students can reasonably complete the exam within the time allotted

Unless you are assessing how quickly your students can complete the exam, allow them ample time to complete it. It is important to keep in mind that your students don’t know the knowledge and skills as well as you do, so be sure to cushion each item with more time than you would expect to take to complete the exam yourself. If possible, have an assistant or colleague proofread your exam before it is time to administer it.

4. Align your exam questions to learning outcomes.

• Regardless of whether the exam is online or on paper, if you are creating it from scratch, make sure you use the objectives as your guide as you develop the questions.
• Determine which types of questions or items best reflect the learning objectives. For example, if the objective requires a student to critique a poem, then an essay question would be a logical and efficient choice, whereas a multiple choice question would not typically be the most efficient way to gauge a student’s ability to critique.

5. Scoring and point values should be based on the complexity and difficulty of the questions

For instance, if you have a multipart question, consider assigning partial credit for each part of the question if the system allows. For math or science problem sets, allow students to show their work such as sending in a photo of their workings or describing the steps they took to solve a problem or complete a process.

Sources
American Educational Research Association., American Psychological Association., National Council on Measurement in Education., & Joint Committee on Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (U.S.). (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing.
Burton, S. J., Sudweeks, R. R., Merrill, P. F., & Wood, B. (1991). How to prepare better multiple-choice items: Guidelines for university faculty. Brigham Young Testing Center and The Department of Instructional Science. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University.
Sawyer, R. K. (2006). The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.