Cartoon by Tom Fishburne - www.tomfishburne.com
Following on from the blog post, ‘What is the flipped classroom?’, it seemed that it would be useful to put the ideas discussed there into practice, and to design and build a flipped module in NILE. As you would expect, there is no one way of putting together a flipped module that will work well for everybody – how you choose to design and run your flipped course will depend on a number of things, such as the level of study, size of class, what you enjoy doing in your face-to-face sessions, and what it is that you’re teaching. How you design your course will also depend on what kind of blend you want between the online and the face-to-face teaching elements. For example, if you want to take a two hour a week face-to-face course, and put 50% of the teaching online, this could be blended as a one hour online and one hour face-to-face session every week. However, it could also be done as a two hour online session in week one, followed by a two hour face-to-face session in week two, and so on. You could also rotate the online and face-to-face sessions on a three or four (or more) week basis, or even have all of term one online, and all of term two face-to-face (or vice versa).
The (fictional) course that has been designed and built in NILE has been created with the following in mind:
Title of module: CRIT101: Critical Thinking – A Practical Introduction
Level: 4
Credits: 10
Duration of course: 12 weeks
Contact hours per week: 2
Blend: 50%
Blend type: weekly blend (1 hour online, 1 hour face-to-face per week)
Additionally, the course has been built with the aim that the face-to-face sessions should be highly participatory and focussed as much as possible on dialogue with and between students. Again, this is not necessarily how everyone will want to run their face-to-face sessions – you may prefer to do just in time teaching1, peer instruction2, team-based learning3, problem-based learning4, small-group teaching5, or any number and mixture of other things that you can do in a face-to-face teaching space.
If you would like to find out more, you can enrol yourself on ‘Critical Thinking – A Practical Introduction’ and browse through the materials and the activities. The course begins with a set of three Panopto presentations which introduce the course and the NILE site to students, so this is a good place to begin when looking through the course. To access the course, login to NILE and click on the ‘Sites and Organisations’ tab. Type ‘CRIT101’ in the ‘Organisation Search’ box, and click ‘Go’. You will then see the course listed in the search results. Click on the drop-down menu next to CRIT101, and select enrol (see screenshot below).
The course is fully functional, so feel free to contribute to the discussion boards and take the tests, etc. It’s also very mobile friendly, so works well via the iNorthampton app on iOS and Android devices.
If you have any thoughts on the course, suggestions for improvements, etc., please feel free to respond to this blog post, or to email me directly at robert.farmer@northampton.ac.uk. If you would like to arrange a meeting with a learning designer to discuss what technologies are available in NILE and how you could further develop your own modules, please email LD@northampton.ac.uk.
Notes
1. Just in Time Teaching (JiTT) is a responsive method of teaching in which the content of the in-class sessions is determined by student responses to online activities, often only completed between 1 and 24 hours before the class begins. For more information see: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/just-in-time-teaching-gregor-novak
2. Peer instruction is a method of teaching developed by Eric Mazur at Harvard University in the 1990s. For more information, a good place to start is: http://blog.peerinstruction.net/2013/08/26/the-6-most-common-questions-about-using-peer-instruction-answered/
3. Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an approach to teaching and learning developed by Larry Michaelsen. For more information see: http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/team-based-learning/
4. For more information about Problem-based Learning (PBL) (and enquiry-based and action learning) see: http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/pbl.htm
5. A useful guide to small group teaching can be found in Phil Race’s book, ‘The Lecturer’s Toolkit, 4th Edition’ (Routledge, 2015). See, chapter 4 ‘Making small-group teaching work’.
Sister to Qzzr, Pollcaster uses the same account details to create simple ‘one or the other’ type polls. A nice feature is that it collects age and gender information from participants (if they wish to share it – they get to share the results as a reward) and links them to a general (county/state/country) location.
You will need to use the <iframe> version of the embed code in MyPad or NILE – look for the ‘Having Trouble?’ option.
You can find information about other third party tools to incorporate in NILE (including the excellent Storify referred to in an earlier post by Belinda) on the NILEX site
“First Year Education Studies students have been participating in a joint project with students at HAN University in Nijmegen and Arnhem in the Netherlands. An ongoing email correspondence with regard to preconceptions of and stereotyping within England and the Netherlands culminated on Wednesday 25th March with a SKYPE seminar and conversation between students at the two institutions.
Contributions and discussions were lively and both cohorts of students were able to expand on cultural and social traditions in their respective countries. The UoN students will form part of a group travelling on a study visit to Nijmegen in June – it is intended that a meeting with the Dutch students who participated in the SKYPE seminar will form part of their itinerary.” (Tony Smith-Howell)
The students reported that talking with their peers oversees in this way it felt no different from being in the classroom. The tutors are already planning further meetings and online mentoring. They captured their feedback of using SKYPE for the session, via the magic of iPad….. http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/marig
Please contact the Learning Technology Team if you would like to find out more about using Skype for your students.
School of Education Early Years students, led by Dr. Eunice Lumsden, recently engaged in a Tweetchat with students from Sheffield Hallam over two days, using the hashtag #epcrep . This was to respond to the new All-party Parliamentary group report ‘Early Years – A Fit and Healthy Childhood’, which has been co-written with contributions by SoE Faculty, and presented at the House of Lords in March. The Tweetchat was moderated by Dr Damien Fitzgerald, Principal Lecturer. An overview of responses has been created in Storify: https://storify.com/teacheruni/all-party-healthy-childhood-report-our-responses-e Students reported that this was an exciting way to engage, and are keen to continue using Twitter as part of their professional development.
If you would like to explore how to use Twitter for Learning & Teaching, please contact the Learning Technology Team.
Background to the Exchange
Aside from the opportunity to network, my aims in attending the exchange was to examine two main areas – how technology can support the process of innovation and the potential for incorporating System Thinking and Design Thinking into the design of material and even courses. This document summarises my experience and the four lessons I have learned.
Technology and Innovation
Two items on the agenda were particularly relevant here. The MICA Social Design Lab ran during one afternoon – this was a social space designed to encourage interaction between delegates and facilitate discussions, given the question ‘How might we advance social innovation in Higher Education?’
Given the rather spartan conference room environment, the range of fun, brightly coloured physical items to record, connect and visualise responses was attractive and facilitators easy to identify. But while idea capture was strong, collection and dissemination was somewhat weaker. Personally, I never encountered any analysis or results from it, though it may have just passed me by. The physical location hampered the exercise too – delegates could too easily pass by and without their physical presence the exercise was reduced in value. Could technology have supported this process better? Yes, I am convinced it could. At the very least, video or photographic capture needs to be on hand to ensure that contributions can still provoke ideas and actions after the event, along with a clear mechanisim to access it. Ultimately, technologies to engage participants, then capture and disseminate material are essential features of an environment that truly wishes to engage stakeholders. How often has a pile of flip chart paper – containing several person hours of contributions at enormous cost – lingered in the corner of my office?
Lesson #1: Low tech is fun and has its place, but technology to engage in, capture and share group deliberation is essential if the exercise is to make a real difference in a design process.
I attended a session entitled ‘Are we succeeding and how would we know?’, where three case studies were discussing in respect of their attempts to measure success. Drew Bewick of the University of Maryland discussed the use of a ‘Return on Engagement’ grid – very much along the lines of a rubric – to measure the operational value, strategic value and risks of projects on a scale of one to five, and recording the resources used, activities, outputs and impact at the same time.
Lizzie Pollock, from Brown University, discussed the measurement of the learning outcomes for individuals being assessed as part of their Social Innovation Fellowship. The items for inclusion included empathy, creative thinking, critical thinking and entrepreneurial ‘grit’. She was still struggling with ways to evidence and measure these attributes – the Torrance Test, for example, was tried, but rejected on the grounds that it was too broad. Brown are also now beginning to consider – like Maryland – impact, including enterprise survival rates and generated revenue.
John Isham, of Middle bury College, had done some interesting work on the three impact areas of the project itself, the student(s) concerned and the Campus, emphasising the inter-relation of all three. He identified a weakness in project management skills amongst participants in projects and was conscious that just ‘building stuff’ is an inadequate measure of success. Students were beginning to be involved with evaluating other students’ projects but this was at a fairly early stage.
Two points struck me here in particular – the lack of pre-determined project management structures or tools can be a barrier both for students who have little or no experience of managing a project and supervisors who have no ‘dashboard’ view of the progress of a project or its outcomes. Secondly, we seem locked into a ‘new year, fresh start’ approach to developing social innovation projects and ignore the lessons of the previous year.
Lesson #2: A project management system – simple and free to use – is needed to support students and their mentors/supervisors/assessors.
Lesson #3: Evaluation of previous social innovation ventures by students before they start their own, would be a valuable learning experience for them and provide data for the hosting institution.
Systems and Design Thinking
Unfortunately, both sessions related to these topics – ‘Systems Thinking for Leading Changemakers’ and ‘Can Everyone be a Designer? ‘Provocations in the Pedagogy of Design Thinking’ failed to fully deliver to my expectations, the latter being a discussion about a process I didn’t understand! Mary Anne Gobble’s summary article (Gobble 2014) has assisted me to a great extent on the topic of Design Thinking. Whether you believe this to be fad or fact, the importance of taking the “beneficiary’s” perspective into account during the design phase of any social innovation would seem to be a critical success factor.
Lesson #4: Empathy is not just a desirable personal attribute; it is a critical success factor in the design process.
Systems Thinking seems to sit uncomfortably in social innovation design, being apparently more suited to translating the messiness of real life into computer software. However, there are clear connections here to the knotty problem of measuring success – by establishing the ‘units’ that exist within a process flow and their rates of change (along with auxiliary variables) we can begin to pinpoint objective measure of success. Overall, I couldn’t see how a non-specialist could apply these techniques easily, though David Castro did provide some interesting resources and links (including free modeling tools such as InsightMaker) that I may well do some more exploration with.
Summary
Clearly there was a lot more that I got out of the visit, some of which are on http://ashokaun15.weebly.com/. I have an excellent contact in Waterloo, Canada who is sharing her experience of embedding Flipboard into teaching with me, along with the Tophat student response system and met a wide range of contacts from around the world. Many of the delegates leave you speechless at the problems they are seeking to overcome and the relentless enthusiasm they still have to press on. Wrangling with a few NILE issues pales into insignificance when trying to develop a system to support 100,000 students in Indian rural schools with no Internet connection!
But as Wray Irwin pointed out before I left, you would be surprised just how far ahead we are in the field of social innovation compared with most. Developing the support infrastructure for prospective social innovators and evaluating our successes and failures more effectively will push us ahead further still.
References
Gobble, MM. (2014). ‘Design Thinking’, Research Technology Management, 57(3), pp. 59-61
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tim Curtis for inviting me to attend, Rob Howe and Chris Powis for allowing me to go and the ‘awesome’ support of my fellow delegates in Washington.
(a copy of the fully hyper-text linked version of this document can be found at http://1drv.ms/1FEGoad)
Click the image to start the quiz. It would appear IE9 (installed on UN computers) won’t open this link properly, so please use Chrome or Firefox.
You can find out a bit more about the free tool used to create this quiz in the NILEX site. Quizzes can be embedded directly in NILE.
Another major marking season will soon be upon us and being prepared before the event can prevent avoidable stress for students and markers.
LearnTech are offering 90 minute SaGE refresher training courses in March and April, with an option for subject/division groups to review their own second marking and external examiner procedures afterwards.
Sessions are on 23 and 31 March (2-4), 21 (2-4) and 24 April (10-12). If you are part of a subject group in your school who want to use the review option, please book into the same session.
Booking is at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-your-mark-count-a-sage-refresher-tickets-16118479807
Although some mapping applications are included as part of the NILE External Resources blog, more detailed use cases have been assembled in this Xerte learning unit to guide you through some possible applications of free mapping and associated software. This includes creating overlays, plotting images, exploring historic imagery, creating tours and crowd sourcing geographic data. Most tools allow the created content to be shared to viewers who will not need to register in any way.
Many of these use cases could be applied to collaborative student projects or research tasks which relate to specific geographic areas, though the requirement for registration of an editing tool will restrict their use as part of a summative assessment.
We hope to grow and improve this resources, so if you have any use case examples or other applications we would be very pleased to include them. Since this original post was made, we have added CartoDB as another resource.
Our colleagues at CfAP are often on the receiving end of poor assessment design. In this post, Kate Coulson, Head of CfAP, describes the impact on the student experience and looks at ways to ensure this won’t happen to your students…
“Maya* is an undergraduate in the second year of her degree. Throughout her first year, she was averaging a C grade in her assessments. Maya has just received her grade and feedback from her first assessment of her second year. She was given a D grade and the marking tutor advised her to visit CfAP to get some support and guidance in “understanding the question”.
When Maya meets with a CfAP Tutor she becomes very distressed and states that “the question didn’t make sense” and “I don’t know what I needed to include”. She also states that she spoke to her tutor directly as she was unclear about the assessment but their conversation left her more confused. When chatting to her course mates about the assessment, they had interpreted the requirements in a totally different way and she panicked and didn’t know what to do.”
When writing questions for essays or assignments it is imperative that you think about the student. Badly written essay questions confuse the student and can affect their confidence and performance in the task – sometimes even leading them to question whether University is the right place for them.
Tips to help you avoid the pitfalls:
- Allow time to plan your questions or tasks.
- Be clear about what knowledge and skills you want the students to demonstrate (these should be informed by your learning outcomes).
- When you are writing a question or task, consider the stage of the programme and module where it takes place, and evaluate whether the students have the content knowledge and the skills necessary to respond adequately.
- When scheduling, be aware of other assessments students will be given from other modules on the programme. Nobody benefits from students having to divide their time and energy between multiple deadlines.
- Discuss the assessment with your students – both the task itself and the purpose of it. Explaining why you have chosen this task, and how it will help them to reach the learning outcomes, will help them feel ownership. Be prepared to adjust in response to valid feedback.
- Share grading criteria and rubrics ahead of the assessment. Students should know what they are aiming for, and what satisfactory performance looks like. Better still, consider writing a model answer. This will help you to reflect on the clarity of the essay question, even if you choose not to share it with the students until after the deadline. It could also serve to inform the grading of students’ responses.
- Use your colleagues to critically review the question or task, the model answer and the intended learning outcomes for alignment.
- Use formative tasks to help students to develop their understanding of expectations and standards. Better still, plan out the ‘assessment journey’ when planning your module, to ensure students have opportunities to learn the process as well as the content of the assessment. The Assessment and Feedback cards from the JISC Viewpoints project can help you do this.
Writing good essay questions is a process that requires time and practice. Review your questions after the students have completed them, think about how the questions have been interpreted. Studying the student responses can help evaluate students’ understanding and the effectiveness of the question for next time.
Useful reading and resources:
The University’s Assessment and Feedback Portal provides more information about assessment design, including links to published research in this area.
The Assessment Brief Design project from Oxford Brookes gives detailed guidance on writing clear and targeted briefs.
For more on the great work done by the Centre for Achievement and Performance, visit the CfAP tab on NILE.
*”Maya” is a fictional character, although her story is based on real events.
