Last semester's lecture videos and test performance

I am teaching the same history class this semester as last. It is face to face and I do a lot of lecture. Last semester I used an Apple TV, an iPad Mini, and the Explain Everything app to record each of my lectures, which I made available to students for their review. This semester instead of doing the same I am giving my students access to last semester's lectures. I tell them the content is substantially the same as is what is important for the exams. The only difference are the jokes. I then wanted to see if there was any correlation between their performance on exams and whether they had looked at those online resources.

Captions for screen-capture videos

I do a modest number of screen-capture videos for my classes and blogs, and keeping them short includes among its benefits easier captioning. I used to rely on the speech-to-text capability built in to the Camtasia Studio product, but over the past few videos I have come to rely more often on YouTube's option to transcribe and set timings. I still use Camtasia to record my desktop videos but then publish directly to YouTube from there and click on the button to edit captions. I like the keyboard commands to control playback while typing what I hear, and the fact that YouTube handles the timing makes it much smoother. One thing I often forget is to publish the captions I typed and to unpublish YouTube's automatic captions. I would not want any YouTube fame to come from being one of those "caption fail" videos. ;-)

Flipping history and taking attendance

Last fall I taught a class with a peak enrollment of 84. We are required to document attendance where I teach so I therefore have to come up with some way to take roll each day. Yeah, like I am going to read out 84 names each time we meet (at least through the late-semester drop deadline). So I had a challenge with how I would take attendance in an efficient manner. I could have passed around a paper and asked them to sign in but I wanted to connect taking attendance to a learning activity.

Tweeting during a movie

I sometimes show films during my face-to-face history classes and find myself challenged in a couple of ways. Of course I show something that is relevant and that I want students to learn from, but letting go of that time together makes me feel a bit insecure. If they can get the lesson from watching a film, what is my purpose?

Constitution Day and a Google Form

Today I am celebrating Constitution Day in my history class by showing one of the Schoolhouse Rock videos that covers some aspect of the Constitution. There were five:

1. Preamble to the Constitution
2. Three-ring circus structure of federal government)
3. I'm just a bill (legislative process)
4. Electoral college (how the president is elected)
5. Sufferin' till suffrage (the vote for women)

This class covers US history up to 1865 so we haven't reached the constitution-writing stage. Maybe when we get there I will watch all five in class and ask the students to compare them to the text or other sources in terms of interpreting the Constitution.

For today we'll watch just one and I will have the class decide which by using a Google Form to conduct an in-class poll. I call this my "history quickie" and got a custom bit.ly link that points to the form. I try to do this each time we meet and ask them questions like what was the hardest thing to understand in class, etc. I post the summary of results inside my learning management system so students can see them.

I reuse the same form each day so that all the results are on the same spreadsheet. I found a trick to add the new question to the form then delete the old one. This creates a new column in the spreadsheet, which makes for easier collection of results if I want to do additional analysis.

And like true American democracy, this vote will not be perfect. The only voters will be people who have a smart phone, tablet, or laptop in class. So the more perfect union that the founders envisioned does not yet exist, at least in my history class.

Citing Online Sources

What is the difference between citing a source that was found on the web and citing a source that is a web page? Some students need to learn the difference. It becomes a problem when the source-found-on-the-web is cited using a URL that includes a temporary access key. This happens with students using the online research databases they can access via our library information system, and it is something to be aware of the next time I have students finding sources online.

Thoughts on group assignments

I divide groups in a couple of different ways. For my online student success class (taught fully online), I divide the class into four groups (usually seven or eight per group) based on their grade at that point in the class (three weeks into a six-week class) to do one small assignment. I use the course grade as a means of judging ability and responsibility, so each group has students who are roughly the same in those areas. The best students are in a group together, and the worst students are in a group together. My rationale is that high-functioning people need to learn how to deal with other high-functioning people and not assume that they will automatically be the leaders of any group they are in. At the other end, someone in the free riders will have to step up and show some leadership else the group will fail. They only have a week to complete the assignment. I find generally that students appreciate the group assignment (note I did not say enjoy), though the students in that bottom quartile who do not participate generally are not interested in the class anyway. None of the students complain about having flaky peers.

In my (full term) American history class, I create groups based on shared interest. This is a face-to-face class, though the assignment would be the same for an online class and the method of dividing the groups would likely not change. The group project for the class is to create a web site that requires students to collect primary source documents, analyze them, and write a synthesis of those analyses. One of my introductory lectures for the class is to show the students that some of the questions we are asking ourselves as Americans (like what our country's place is in the world) have always been asked. I present a series of questions and show examples of how those questions were asked in the time period covered by our course and how those questions are being asked today. I tell them that throughout our class those questions will come up again and again and that those questions help us as historians make sense of all the different ways we can look at the past. After the lecture, I ask each student to tell me what he or she thinks is the most important question. I use those answers to create groups of six to eight students, and those groups are together throughout the semester and the web site. I do this in lieu of an individual research paper, and they tell me in my end-of-class survey that they feel like they learn more about the past through this assignment than they would have with a traditional research paper. I use a peer review survey to get them to share how much effort they and their group mates put in, and I use the results of that survey to adjust individual grades.

Both of these methods require a lot of work. I could divide the class randomly or let students pick their own groups, but I like to have some kind of instructional design behind what I do in class. I have been grouping by ability in my online student success class for the dozen years that I have been teaching it, and so far it has worked great. I am grouping by interest for the second time this semester, and one change I have already made is to have my students do the peer review survey three times instead of once. That way they can adjust their work ethic if necessary before they get going on the big project.

General questions about online teaching

I teach a class on how to use Blackboard for the @ONE project,  and recently a participant asked the following questions on the "Discussion Grading and Help" forum. I liked her question and decided to blog her questions and my answers:

In general, does teaching online pay the same as teaching face-to-face classes?

• In my district there is no pay differential for online teaching.

Where are good places to look for openings regarding online teaching positions?

• Almost all California community colleges offer online courses, and the best place I know to find jobs in this system is the CCC Job Registry.

Is it hard to find an online teaching position?

• The difficulty depends on the institution.

Does the @one certification cover all levels of online teaching or just college? Is there anyone out there teaching online classes other than college?

• The standards for the @ONE certification program are based on standards originally written by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. More information is on the @ONE web site.

Do you find online teaching requires more work, less work or the same work as face-to-face classes? In what way?

• In my experience online teaching requires a lot more work initially, as there is a lot less room for error than in a face-to-face class. If I screw up in class, I can let my students know immediately (or the next time we meet) about my mistake. If I screw up online, I might alienate a student who might decide not to log in again. The efficiency gained from experience makes it less work eventually, and the freedom to schedule the time I work helps make up for the extra time required.

What are some of the things you would do differently, if you could teach your first online class again?

• I would spend more time teaching in a web enhanced or hybrid mode before teaching my first fully online class.

Do any of you do group work with your online classes?

• Yes, I teach a class on online student success and give students a group assignment to give them the experience of working on a team they do not get to see in person.

My answers are of course based on my experience, and I do not include hearsay from other colleges and districts. Many institutions make for many situations, and I expect the answers to differ in other places.

Teaching a larger class and managing enrollment

This semester I was asked if I was willing to teach a larger history class. Normally our history classes are capped at 45, but I can earn extra pay if I am willing to teach 70. The trick is the class has to reach that number, else my pay does not increase. So this class I hustled for students to enroll. I emailed the counselors asking for them to refer students, and I also emailed the other history instructors telling them to send students they could not accommodate my way. Before the cap was raised I already had a wait list of 18, so I would not have had to worry about finding students to enroll.

Email works for students

I am fortunate to be teaching a class on how to use a learning management system that has students and teachers enrolled. One of the discussion topics in the class encourages participants to share how they use the various communication tools available. I saw a quote from a student about email that grabbed my attention:

"When I get an email from a professor, I feel like inside there will be some important secret message that we all have to know in order to get through with class. While I pay attention to other forms of communication, emails definitely get my fullest attention."

YouTube and Webcam for instructor presence

I post a weekly video for my fully online classes to help establish instructor presence, which is one of those best practices for distance education. Initially I thought it would be tough to do but the use of a webcam and YouTube's easy basic editing tools make it a breeze. The caption tools in YouTube are especially useful for short videos, which include the ones I use. For longer videos, especially instructional ones (like the one embedded on this page), I use Camtasia Studio.

Discussion grades

A student expressed confusion when she saw her points for a discussion topic were 10/10 but I said that there could be 20 points per topic with a maximum of 80 for all discussion (8 topcis total). I replied:

Each of the 8 unit discussions is worth 10 points for a total of 80. I do not want to devalue the other assignments that make up the class grade, so I leave at 80 the maximum points that can be earned through discussion. However, I recognize that some students will find certain topics more interesting and I also want to encourage communication among students, so I award points for quality responses to what our classmates write. These are extra credit within that discussion topic with a maximum of 10 extra credit points, so the score for an individual topic can be up to 20/10. Therefore it is possible to earn all 80 of the discussion points possible in just 4 discussion topics.

Wording for Quizzes

I teach a professional development course and use quizzes to encourage reading and reinforce learning. Since my "students" are peers and at times feel uncomfortable with being graded, I like to set them at ease with some wording in the description of the quiz. The quizzes are set to allow unlimited attempts and each question's feedback shows where to find the correct answer.

The purpose of the quiz is for you to review some of the topics covered in this lesson to validate your understanding of its terms and tools. It is not meant to provoke anxiety but instead be a guide. Take the quiz as many times as you wish

GaGA Group Site

Our district has a Google Apps account, and last semester I used the Google Sites tool to conduct a group assignment. On the first day of the class I asked the students to pick which of the course questions most interested them, and I used this to divide them into groups. I created a site for each group and assigned the group's members as editors of the site.

Textbook experiment

For my history class this fall I am using flatworldknowledge.com to create a textbook for students that is free to read online. Students can purchase it in ebook, PDF, and hard copy if they wish. I liked the book well enough to use it and made a few changes, especially removing the chapters that cover time periods outside the scope of our class.

I hope that the decision to save students money will benefit them.

Topic rankings and grades

In my history class I ask students to rank the topics a class covers three times: on the first day, at the midterm, and on the last day of class. I wanted to see if the rate of change for students was correlated at all with their course grades. For this exercise I did not look at the first ranking, as 23 of the 40 who were there chose the option "I don't know enough yet."

My spring 2012 class was on U.S. history from 1945 to the present, and I asked the class to rank the seven decades we covered ('40s through the '00s). A total of 27 students ranked all seven decades on both the midterm and at the end of class, and I divided them into three groups:

1. Minor changes (from 0 to 3 topic rankings changed)
   The 7 who were in this group had a GPA of 3.14.
2. Moderage changes (4 or 5 topic rankings changed)
   The 11 who were in this group had a GPA of 2.55.
3. Major changes (6 or all 7 topic rankings changed)
   The 9 who were in this group had a GPA of 2.11.

So what do my numbers mean? Maybe the students who already know their history can spend their class time focused on doing well, whereas the others are figuring out what they feel is important and not as concentrated on assignments. This question I am very interested in examining again.

Grades and handing in tests

Whenever I have taken an in-class exam I always wondered if there was a difference in the exam grade between those who turned in the test immediately and those who took their time. At various times in my student career I have had desperate exams and ones I felt better about, and I could never figure out for me if completing a test earlier or later was better. Now that I am a professor I can see if there is any effect on my students.

Permission numbers and grades

How do students who add a class via a permission number do compared to those who were enrolled on the first day of class? In my face-to-face classes, students do not receive a permission number from me until after the class starts. Students are dropped when they miss a certain number of class sessions. On my online classes, students receive a permission number from me via email once they are available to me. I do not hold a face-to-face orientation.

Time period for short answers

Remind students to provide a time period when they identify a term on an exam. Too many students did not demonstrate some awareness of when an event occurred or the time period of a trend and lost points because of that.

Quiz score and time spent on quiz

I am disappointed at how my students are doing on their reading quizzes this semester. I use the quizzes to motivate them to get the reading done before we meet in class, as I want them to have a broad familiarity with the chapter before I lecture or we do a group activity or watch a video that is more focused. Each quiz has 10 questions that I wrote, and I tried to make some questions easy and some questions that required some critical thinking.

The average score did not change when I increased the time limit after the first three quizzes:

Quiz	Time Limit	Attempts	Average
1	10 mins.	31	62.9%
2	10 mins.	43	48.8%
3	10 mins.	41	47.8%
4	20 mins.	41	55.6%
5	20 mins.	37	56.8%
6	20 mins.	34	48.8%
7	20 mins.	35	54.6%

Quiz attempts with a 10-minute limit averaged 53.17% and those with a 20-minute limit averaged 53.95%.

Then I thought I might look at how much time each student spent on the quiz and see if I could correlate that with a score but I discovered nothing interesting there. I had to do some heavy data massaging (create a report in D2L that included the time per attempt and then use Word and Excel to strip out all of the questions and answers for each attempt), and I discovered the following for chapter 1:

Score	Count	Average Time
8	5	6.2 mins.
7	8	6 mins.
6	7	6.4 mins.
5	8	6.6 mins.

One student each scored 3 and 4 points on the quiz.