Using a Video Tour of your textbook to enhance engagement

I just read the issue from Educause discussing the use of "video tours" of textbooks.  I love the idea, and think it would work well for many courses. I can see myself trying it for COL130, RDG 130 and English.   Here's the video as found on YouTube

Again, students to the rescue!

Once again, when I feel overwhelmed, there always seems to be a student who steps up and says just the right thing!
Here's a few comments I received this semester:
Hi Connie,
Thanks so much for all of your help and support throughout this course. You are always so positive and I appreciate all your input. You seem to have a great understanding for students as well as their individual needs. I really enjoyed having you as my English instructor  :)
Thanks,
Hayley

Thank you very much for everything. I'll keep trying to read a book a lot :) Many Thanks.  Kaori.

Thank you so much for a fun and eventful semester! I believe this has been the most I have ever enjoyed English class... Aimee

Thanks - awesome course!  Steven.


Also, I was very excited to have a visit from a former student who is now running his own business, and has made sure his children have completed grade 12.

Once again, I receive more from my students than they receive from me! 

Student Comments

Just when you feel overwhelmed, and think you are making no progress, a student comes up with something encouraging.   As this semester draws to a close, I am once again reminded of how much more I have learned from my students than they have from me.  Here's an example of a comment I received today:

P.S. This semester has been wonderful. I’m not going to lie to you. At first, I definitely had a biased point of view about the college and kept asking myself “How am I going to get a education through the college?” I didn’t like the college just because of my bias point of view, however; many months after, I felt the instructors here at the college  are willing to help other students to succeed and to reach their goals. I was able to open my point of view and seeing a college as a better place. .... I can’t thank you enough for all the encouragement you have given me throughout the semester. You gave confidence in my work and lifted the bias point of view of the college. Once again, thank you.

Essential Skills Workshop final report (2010)

Essential Skills Workshop final report (2010)

glad to see Essential Skills still are alive and well, despite post-secondary's neglect.

Another Great Idea from the Teaching Professor:

Assignments That Promote Critical Thinking

Written by: Maryellen Weimer, Ph.D.

Teaching students to think critically has long been a goal of education. Some, like the authors of the article highlighted here, think it’s a goal whose importance has increased. When today’s students graduate, they “must fend for themselves in an information environment characterized by a fragmented media establishment, blurb-driven news coverage, and an increasingly polarized political system. Given the normative bias, questionable logic, and contorted facts that people face these days, it is essential that students learn to discern and evaluate different types of information.” (p. 619)
The authors follow with another important point. Advice on assignments that promote critical thinking is pretty generic. “Most suggestions ... offer vague advice: allow students to discuss matters, tell students they need to think critically, ask them to rewrite.” (p. 624) Concrete examples that have been used in the classroom and assessed for their effectiveness are not commonly available. And one goal of this article is to remedy that deficiency.
The article, written for political science teachers, is a bit more discipline-specific than those customarily highlighted in this newsletter, but the assignment suggestions would work in other fields and the article has great value as a model. All disciplines would benefit from pedagogical scholarship like this. All disciplines are pretty nonspecific on the details of assignments and activities that promote and develop these all-important critical-thinking skills.
If one aspect of critical thinking is questioning the evidence presented in support of a claim, these authors maintain that students need to be able to differentiate between factual statements (those that make concrete assertions that can be verified), normative statements (which use value-based ideas, either good or bad), interpretive statements (which use textual materials to establish what an author means), and causal statements (which make cause-effect arguments). After presenting material on evidence, offering examples, and giving students a chance to practice recognizing different statements, these authors give their students a quiz that contains samples of each of these statements. They usually devote an entire period to going over the quiz, as it generates much discussion. If students effectively argue that a particular statement might belong to another category, they are given some extra credit.
To learn the difference between relevant and irrelevant facts, students come to class with two double-spaced copies of a paper due that day. Before submitting the paper, they are instructed to go through it and identify each statement as one of the four described in the paragraph above. “If the paper assignment is to make and support a causal claim, student submissions should propose causal arguments and use relevant facts and logic to provide supporting evidence.” (p. 621) Frequently students find they have made errors. If they identify them, they can earn back some of the points they have lost for making them. The authors note that after this activity, student performance on subsequent papers improves significantly.
To help students understand how interpretive arguments work, teachers have them complete an assigned reading and then “write two logically distinct but plausible interpretations of a particular quotation that they select from the text.” (p. 621) In class they spend time in groups discussing their interpretations, offering each other feedback. Each group then presents the best pair of competing interpretations to the rest of the class for more discussion and feedback.
Other assignments are presented in the article, along with specific recommendations as to the political science content used in them. They are not relevant to those outside the discipline, but the authors make one final point that is extremely relevant. Faculty do not share assignment designs all that frequently, and that is our loss. The various electronic media options expedite this kind of exchange. Assignments carefully designed to accomplish specific goals, like the development of critical-thinking abilities, take time and effort to create. We should be sharing the results with each other. This article illustrates the valuable contribution made by this kind of scholarship.
Reference: Fitzgerald, J. and Baird, V. A. (2011). Taking a step back: Teaching critical thinking by distinguishing appropriate type of evidence. PS, Political Science and Politics, (July), 619-624.

This article appeared in the December 1, 2011 issue of The Teaching Professor.

This article appeared in the December 1, 2011 issue of The Teaching Professor.

Increasing Student Engagement online

Here's a quick tip I found in the Online Classroom:

"Threaded discussion summaries

To help create shared learning experiences, Beezley has students take turns summarizing the threaded discussions. This helps create a common understanding, serves as a means of assessing students’ understanding of the content, and gives the chance to actively engage with the course content.

Rather than posting these summaries to the discussion board, Beezley has students post them to a course wiki or to Google Docs. This increases the accessibility of the summaries, which can be important for future reference and to enable all the students to edit them in case the student who did the original summary overlooked or misinterpreted key concepts.

Beezley recommends discussing the summary (synchronously or asynchronously) with the students to assess its accuracy and prevent incorrect information from becoming ingrained in students’ minds. “Whenever possible, have students interact with the summary so that they are looking at it critically,” Beezley says."

 I like the ideas of  not simply posting to the discussion board.  A couple of years ago I completed a U of Manitoba course called "Emerging Technologies".  In it, instructor George Seimans would frequently post a vodcast summarizing trends indicated in discussions, and give us tips on what else to consider.  This simple activity increased my sense of engagement.

Storytelling and eLearning - a great article

Here's great article I found online:

Storytelling in eLearning: The why and how

By Shelley A. Gable / September 2011

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Every year, I have to complete training related to confidentiality policies (as a learner, not an as the instructional designer). Most years, I think of the training as time wasted—I already know that I'm not supposed to blab confidential information to my friends and family. But last year, the training instructor opened with a story about a confidentiality breach caused by an employee checking his email in a cafe. As someone who often works on the go, that got my attention.
Whether you design classroom training, eLearning, m-learning, or work with another medium entirely, storytelling is a learning tool that possesses the power to motivate, persuade, educate, and even entertain.
If you're in the midst of developing an eLearning course with consecutive slides relaying concepts and guidelines, take up the challenge of redesigning those slides into an informational story. It will make the training more interesting for your learners and tap into your creativity. Not sure if you can do it? Read on to find out how.

Why Tell Stories?

Malcolm Knowles, John Keller, and other learning theorists remind us adult learners must see the relevance of something in order to feel persuaded to learn about it. Explaining concepts in the context of a story that learners can relate to is crucial to the learning process. By helping learners integrate knowledge into their mental models in meaningful ways, the realistic context of a story makes information easier to remember. Although theorists like David Ausubel and Donald Norman have done the research in support of this, most of us intuitively know it is easier to remember the gist of a story and its lessons compared to a list of miscellaneous facts.
Cleverly crafted stories stimulate an emotional response to training content, such as a desire to help, curiosity about how something works, or a drive to achieve. Thus, the story helps persuade learners to engage in the training and ultimately perform the desired behaviors. When written in a conversational tone (and with a pinch of humor, if you have a knack for that), stories can even entertain.

How Do I Write a Story?

Now that we have established stories possess the power to motivate, persuade, educate, and even entertain, the next step is writing a story. It is helpful to gather possible stories from subject matter experts (SMEs). When engaging a SME, use prompts like, "tell me about a time someone broke this policy" or "tell me about the salesperson who went from struggling to successful using this methodology."
However you might not even need to prompt your SMEs; storytelling is so inherent in human nature that they may volunteer stories throughout the course of the project. In which case, your task is to recognize potentially relevant stories and ask probing questions to capture the details needed to support the training.
When asking probing questions, keep the basic elements of a story in mind.
Setting. Where the story takes place. In the confidentiality training example from earlier, the setting was a cafe.

Characters. The actors in the story. In the earlier example, an employee (i.e., someone like me) was the main character. Other characters, such as the employee's manager, entered the story later.
Event (problem). In the workplace, every task has a purpose. The event or problem in a story usually illustrates that purpose. In the earlier example, the event was the confidentiality breach, which illustrated the purpose of the organization's confidentiality practices.
Development (actions and consequences). This element should explain to learners what happens if they perform a task correctly or incorrectly—connect the dots between a series of choices and their consequences. In the earlier example, the storyteller went on to explain the consequences of the breach for the organization and the employee.
Climax (lesson learned or problem solved). The climax typically explains the result of a sequence of events, or it might present a twist that shows how the character turned the situation around. In the earlier example, the lesson learned consisted of ways to prevent a security breach (such as not facing a laptop toward a window).
Ending. Stories often close with a concluding statement that reflects on key points and offers closure. In the earlier example, the story ended with the main character summarizing what he will do to be more careful next time.

Incorporating surprise and/or humor makes stories especially memorable. If a story becomes lengthy, consider breaking it up throughout a course. This presents opportunities for foreshadowing and cliffhangers. In the example I provided earlier, the first part of the story opened the training, and then subsequent details were revealed as the training progressed. The story's ending served as the summary at the end.

How Do I Work a Story into an eLearning Lesson?

We've established that stories benefit learning; however, if that story becomes a large blob of text on an eLearning slide, its benefits could be diminished. Find engaging ways to tell a story, perhaps by playing with the approaches below.

Comic strip. Comics visually engage: The images help put learners in the setting and they clearly convey characters' emotions. The short spurts of dialogue can help make the story move quickly. Also, the novelty of the approach helps gain attention.
Interactive timeline. When telling a story from a single perspective (i.e., not including dialogue), a timeline format can communicate a sequence of events and consequences. An interactive timeline can capture attention with appealing visuals and by offering learners a hands-on way to move the story forward.
Social media. A short story can work well as a text-based narrative to inspire a discussion thread. Depending on the story's purpose, an eLearning course might encourage learners to share their own similar stories to personalize the lesson learned or analyze the story provided to draw out key points.
Audio narrative. Often, the best storyteller is someone who had the experience firsthand or is especially passionate about its message. An audio recording can convey the associated expression and emphasis.
When using audio carefully consider what visual stimulus to include on the screen. While it's appropriate to offer an optional transcript, experts tend to agree that narration that reads verbatim text from a slide is actually detrimental for learning. Instead, consider including an image of the storyteller or diagrams that supplement the story. Audio could also supplement any of the other suggestions above.
Video. Video can take the benefits of audio up a notch. A video of the storyteller allows learners to benefit from nonverbal expressions - a human touch they might especially appreciate if completing large amounts of eLearning.
Careful consideration of visual stimulus applies to video, too. Videos don't have to focus exclusively on the storyteller. They can also use the storyteller as a voice over narrator while showing related action, such as scenes from the workplace.

Let's go back to the challenge. Armed with the knowledge of how to construct a story and how to integrate it into eLearning, revisit those slides of concepts and motivate us with a story.

About the Author

Shelley A. Gable is an instructional designer and freelance writer. She has designed training for functions such as financial services, call centers, and engineering education. Gable contributes to the Integrated Learnings: eLearning blog, hosted by Integrated Learning Services (ILS). ILS provides eLearning consulting and custom instructional design and development. To contact Gable, visit her website.

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Class activities that work

This week I have experienced a couple of successes:
1. English 095 - these students have surpassed my expectations on their class presentations.  They have researched topics, and offerend interviews with people on the street.  For example, two students presented their research on the definition of the American Dream.  They went to pubs and randomly asked people questions about the American Dream. They researched the historical roots of the American Dream, including information on Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" of American development.  I haven't hear about Turner's frontier thesis since my history days at U of L.  Amazing!
It seems that the more I give back to the students, the more they engage.