CoRD Week 3 (Webinar)

Materials (preloaded to Adobe Connect)

PPT

West article
PhinisheD
ECS 30 FB page
Poll pod set up in Adobe Connect: Which activity would be more useful to you?
a) Return to the breakout rooms to create a hybrid activity for one of your group’s courses, using the principles we just discussed

b) Stay in the main room for group discussion of the logistical challenge of distracted students
Three breakout groups:
Group 1: (names of five faculty and staff)
Group 2: (names of five faculty and staff)
Group 3: (names of five faculty and staff)

Three breakout rooms. In the first activity, the rooms have a notepad with this displayed (Saved in PDF form under Interaction Breakout Activity 1):

What do you currently use to build community in your face-to-face courses?

How do you currently set ground rules for these interactions?

What kinds of interactions do you expect to move online or keep face-to-face?
Take notes in the breakout room notepad.
Discuss for 10 minutes, then nominate a presenter to report to the whole group in 60 seconds or less.
If you need help, use the chat box that says “Send message to hosts.”

In the second activity, the following links and abstracts (Saved in PDF form under Examples of Interaction 2 29 12):
Elementary Spanish: https://sites.google.com/a/ucdavis.edu/tesoros/ This is basically a teacher’s manual that accompanies the class. Students purchase access to a website (like an online textbook, but more interactive). Typical class enrollment is 50 students. At our in-person workshop on March 13, Robert Blake will give a demonstration of what students experience, but for now, please focus on the instructor plans for different kinds of interaction in a hybrid course, as found here.

Food Freezing: tps://smartsite.ucdavis.edu/access/cohtntent/group/e7e1a44b-f444-4ea7-a997-f89ddbbba87d/Articles/ModuleOne.swf This is the first unit in Paul Singh’s food freezing class. He describes the planned use thus: 1)Students are assigned one module per week to read online (note that this is a 1-unit class). I ask them not to print the material, since you can not see an animation in print form!
2) On the day when the class meets, we begin with an 8- 10 minute quiz. A quiz usually has short essay type questions from the module.
3) After the quiz, there is discussion, where I bring additional contents from my own consulting experience in industry and research, (related to the day's topic) and students also participate by adding their own experience (sometimes from internships or what they have learnt from other classes). But there is no podium lecture,  I encourage everyone to participate in discussion. Sometimes I may supplement with a short video or even a small experiment that I can bring to the class.
4) There are ten quizzes during the quarter, and there is no final, scores from all ten quizzes are averaged to calculate the final grade.
5) Typical class enrollment is 15-20 students.
6) Attendance is 100% (because each quiz score is counted for grade and there is no make up quiz).

Basic Composition: https://smartsite.ucdavis.edu/access/content/group/e7e1a44b-f444-4ea7-a997-f89ddbbba87d/Articles/NGLC-Composition-Course.docx
This is a course outline from the University of Central Florida that walks through the weeks of a hybrid course in Basic Composition. More information about the course, and the process by which it was created, is available on the Blended Learning Toolkit site.

Arts of Asia: https://smartsite.ucdavis.edu/access/content/group/2c04156b-86ba-45f3-afe2-170e25baca38/AHI%201DV%20F2011%20Syllabus.docx
Katharine Burnett teaches this hybrid course to classes of about 80 students, once a year. At our in-person workshop on March 13, Katharine will give a demonstration of what students experience, but for now, please focus on instructor plans for different kinds of interaction in a hybrid course, as found here.

Questions for Robert and Katharine (I asked before including their materials in the workshop)
I want to have faculty explore your materials as a working model and look at what you’ve done with an eye toward what kinds of interaction it fosters. Later, I would like to have you talk to them in person about the process of creating the materials--why you made the choices you did, what logistical lessons you learned, what you would definitely keep and what you would change, etc.
Can we look now at your materials?
Can we post them on SmartSite or on the CETL website so that they are temporarily available to explore?
What kinds of interaction do you expect online? f2f? between students? Between students and content? Between students and instructor? How do you manage the workload?
Were there any unexpected interactions that arose?

Setting the Stage (4:00-4:10pm)

• Introduce guests and new people
• Tour the technology, make sure everyone can hear, please mute your mikes unless you want to speak when you can raise your hand and I’ll call on you, feel free to chat anytime. Any questions about the technology?
• Orient to where we are in the workshop series, where we hope to be by mid-April
• Last time we talked about course architecture and universal design, specifically the practice of designing your course from the beginning so that many kinds of students (including those with disabilities) can benefit from it, with as little retrofitting as possible. Any follow-up insights or questions that came to mind as you worked on your course this week?
• Any thoughts or questions after viewing the case studies?
• Review West article (it was focused on fully online, so how can we apply it to a hybrid?)

Direct Instruction

Collaboration and community can support engagement, which can support both learning mastery and persistence to degree achievement
Community in a blended course must be deliberate
It can be more difficult in a blended course* In an online course, participation is crucial

• In a f2f course, we have visual cues and interpersonal skills
• In a blended course, it can happen that students feel that one or the other is not crucial, so it gets neglected. Both environments must be tightly integrated into the course.

It’s more effort to develop in a blended course (show graphic) but it also can have the benefits that several of you pointed out in your proposals.

We already talked about what you need in a community, and your students need that too. But think about this: even though we discussed what we need, does a community happen automatically? We get busy, we don’t feel like the SmartSite forum is crucial, maybe we check email during the workshops, all of this happens for us, and also for our students.

I’m not going to go into the benefits of collaboration but I do want to say that it has to happen early, especially in the quarter system.

First of all, what do you use to build community in your f2f courses? Go into breakout rooms, take notes, and as a group, classify what kinds of interactions you expect to move online or keep face to face. How do you currently set ground rules for these interactions? (Expect that this discussion will be messy.) Nominate a spokesperson and come back together to report to the whole group in 60 seconds. (Discussion: allow 10 minutes; reporting: allow 5 minutes)

Now bring in Presence: the degree to which an individual is perceived and perceives himself or herself as “real” in a space--able to connect socially and intellectually, and to feel that the teacher has things in hand. Being There and being Together.
Show PhinisheD as an example that social presence can be powerful
Show the ECS Facebook page to illustrate the perfect convergence of personality, discipline, and tool. This would not work so well for an instructor who was not comfortable with Facebook, or for a discipline that needed a great deal of collaborative drawing, say, on a whiteboard.

One way to categorize basic types of interactive tools: * chat (usually synchronous, usually text-based, may or may not be archived, usually not editable)

• discussion board (usually asynchonous ongoing threaded discussions, in which you can edit your own but not the overall history)
• blog (chronological posts with responses, with text, images, multimedia, etc.; usually asynchronous but can be synchronous)
• collaborative tools (may include wikis, google docs, etherpad, etc., with text, images, multimedia, etc., that anyone can edit; may be either synchronous or asynchronous)
• voice or visual communication (synchronous interactions that usually include voice and often include webcam of other learners; may also include screensharing)
• social media (Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google+, etc)
• All kinds of specific tools exist that combine elements of these types, but this is a good start for now.
• f2f allows all of these things, though it tends to encourage the quick reaction rather than carefully composed reflection

What kinds of interaction do you think each of these kinds would foster?

Guided Practice

Go back to ECS 30 FB page as a model for what I want you to do. What kinds of s/s, s/i, and s/c interaction do we see here (speculate about what I would see in the classroom)? What kinds of presence (teaching, social, intellectual)? Would this work or help in my own hybrid class (probably not because it is so small and because I am not a FB pro)? What other kind would fit better with my personality or discipline (chat, discussion board, blog, wiki, or video connection)? (If I were in a group with others, we’d all discuss the fit for my class and then the fit for each of their classes.)

In the breakout rooms, you’ll find four links that will take you to different working examples of hybrid courses. Two use the “flipped” classroom model, which has content delivery online and interaction f2f, and two use the model of both content delivery and interaction both f2f and online. Both models work. Three of the four are from UC Davis faculty, and one is from the University of Central Florida. Vote someone the recorder and someone the timekeeper/facilitator. Take 40 minutes as a group-I’m guessing you’ll want to spend about 10 minutes exploring each option-and, together, answer the four discussion questions. Take notes, because you’ll have 3-5 minutes to present to the whole group. I will float around from group to group, and you will be able to message me if you need me.

Show other instructors models* content delivery online, interaction f2f (“flipped” classroom)** Katharine Burnett

• • Paul Singh
• both content delivery and interaction online** Robert Blake** BlendKit Composition
• How to stitch together the f2f and online portions of the class?

Allow for questions for Robert after bringing everyone back together. Each group presents for up to five minutes, then a time for general comments and questions (20 minutes)

Application and Extension (note that we did not get to this material because everything else took more time than planned)

Vote on what would be more useful to you: Return to the breakout rooms to create a hybrid activity for one of your group’s courses, using the principles we just discussed, or stay in the main room to discuss as a group some of the logistical challenges of student engagement (distracting students and scaling up) Use a poll.

Go back to your groups, and pick one of the classes under design, and together create a collaborative activity or assignment, something that includes pre-work together or individually online, work together in class, and more work together out of class, and possibly bringing it to a finish in class. Make sure it meets module-level objectives, which tie into class learning objectives. Plan for set-up and transition in both settings. Use the list of five different interactive tools. You have 15 minutes.

Close: 10 minute discussion/debrief.  Address Naomi’s question about engagement, typing on laptops or texting about non-course-related subjects, also snacks as an aid to both learning and community. Address questions of scaling up.

create a carnegie justification (which you’ll need for ICMS) or a nettiquette guide or a collaboration statement
Provide Dyrud article for follow-up

Blog post: In the last year I have made the decision to ban open laptops in my classes. I teach two undergrad classes of approx 20 students and one larger of about 100 where I’ve instituted this policy. (I teach design for theatre and film classes and I assume many are taking these classes for fun – I have a cross section of students from all areas.) I did this because I was seeing a distinct drop in student performance directly related to surfing the web and I found it to be a big distraction when students weren’t engaged with what was going on in class. I admit my own addiction to electronic devices and know it’s difficult to tear myself away-I now call the break a “text break” and this seems to relieve some tension with this policy. I believe if a student has another priority he/she needs to make the choice about coming to my class or working on something else. I also think in some cases it’s just habit and and an electronic addiction. BTW-I have not had one complaint about this policy-(that I’ve heard anyway). Here is what I put in my syllabus: “Classroom decorum and etiquette: A new rule — No open laptops or electronic devices in class. Activity not related to classroom instruction such as phone calls, texting, emailing, surfing the web, talking unnecessarily during lectures, etc. is distracting to other students and the instructor and takes time and attention away from your educational experience. (Anecdotally, I have found that students who surf the web during class time have been getting lower grades. I will try to have “text breaks.”) You will be allowed to use computers when needed for project research and presentations. Generally, I will ask students to leave class if they create disruptions. Additional policies posted on our class Smartsite.”
Question for faculty to discuss: How might this look in a hybrid course? Would it be different depending on the learner population--Lower division, upper division, grad students, others? How to balance this policy with the goal of tying together the online and face-to-face portions of the class?