NEW SEMESTER BRING NEW OPPORTUNITIES
The first week of class is always filled with possibilities. Motivating students to create the life that they wish for begins during the initial class sessions, whether it be face-to-face or online. The aim during this time is to create that engaged relationship that will pay dividends throughout the semester. Dr. Mary Clement, who visited BRCC in the past and shared her best practices, suggests that we find out what type of high school experience our students had before we explain our expectations. Sharing the major differences between high school and college is vital for our first-time students. She notes, "How do we change this mindset going from high school into college? The number one way is to put your policy in writing in the syllabus. If the paper is due Monday, and the student is not in class that day, will the paper be accepted after Monday? Will it be accepted after Monday at all? If the answer is yes, until when and with what penalty?” Further, because there’s so much variation across different high schools in terms of homework, attendance requirements and making up for missed work, and grading practices, Clement recommends creating an interest inventory to give students during the first week of class. If it is anonymous, students may feel more comfortable answering the questions. You can find more suggestions here.

USING PEER REVIEW IN YOUR CLASS

Are you looking to increase the amount of peer-review experiences in your courses but are afraid that some of your students may not be ready? Here is an interesting learning experience you can use that will provide good feedback to students, allow students to practice this skill, and alleviate some of the worry you may have. Dr. Trent Batson shares the following, "I used the following technique that worked well in my writing classes:  the writer and the peer reviewer both have a copy of the paper in print. They are both sitting at computers and communicating via chat or some other real-time tool. As the reviewer reads the paper, starting with the first paragraph, she types her immediate reactions and thoughts -- almost like a think-aloud protocol -- thereby providing a strong sense of what any reader might be wondering or reacting to as the reader goes through the paper. I found that using chat made the communication more neutral and helped the reviewing student "speak" (through typing) more freely and off-the-cuff.  The writer of the paper gets a strong lesson in reader-based writing and also gets good advice about where confusion arises or where good points are made. I didn't ask the reviewer to evaluate the paper, just provide that think-aloud response." Dr. Robert Danberg recommends the book Beat Not the Poor Desk by Marie Ponsot as a useful resource for this active learning technique.

FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY STARTS ON FEB. 6
As you look over the professional development opportunities listed on the spring 2015 calendar that we distributed at the kickoff event last Wednesday, please note that the first Faculty Learning Community (FLC) is set to begin on February 6 at noon. We still have a few slots open for the FLC which will be using the common reader Inspired College Teaching by Dr. Maryellen Weimer. The book has been praised by new teachers and those with lots of experience. Some of the topics to be covered include maintaining instructional vitality (the midcareer challenge), feedback for teachers that improves learning for students, and reflection for growth and change. If you would like to join the FLC, please send an email to pourciaut@mybrcc.edu.

Anyone reading this blog knows that I am big proponent of active learning. You should also know that I believe that students have a lot to learn from their peers and I try to infuse my class with opportunities for them to review their peer's work. A recent article by Tiffany Potter, Letitia Englund, James Charbonneau, Mark Thompson MacLean, Jonathan Newell, and Ido Roll (University of British Columbia) entitled "ComPAIR: A New Online Tool Using Adaptive Comparative Judgement to Support Learning with Peer Feedback" provided me with a new appreciation for student interaction. One of the concerns of using peer review is that students, especially early in their college career, may not be able to properly evaluate someone else's work. What the folks from UBC found through their research is that using a comparison option alleviates some of that effect. Better yet, the process help students learn more deeply, improves their ability to assess their own work, and improves their capacity to provide feedback on the work of others in a collaborative learning environment. You can read the entire article here.

PEER FEEDBACK IS A TWO WAY STREET
If you were ever dissatisfied with the quality of peer feedback in your classes, Christina Moore's article can definitely help you and, most importantly, help your students offer and receive better feedback from their colleagues.She writes, "I started teaching students that peer review is a two-way street. Getting useful feedback depends on how students frame their requests for it. Developing this skill not only teaches students how to receive effective feedback, but also gets them in the habit of reflecting on and analyzing their work."

MAKING LEARNING RELEVANT
Are you considering how you can create opportunities for students to apply course content outside the classroom? The IDEA Center has a great paper on this topic. Here is a brief excerpt. Although there are many examples in academia, nursing education offers one of the clearest examples of applying course content outside the classroom. Learning content in the classroom is supplemented with field-based application, in some cases, from the very first courses in a nursing program. Nursing students complete many hours working in hospitals alongside licensed nurses to apply their learning and sharpen their skills. And it doesn’t take a nurse educator to understand that this learning outside the classroom is vital to a nursing student’s education. No one would want to be treated by a nurse that only had classroom experience!

CREATING ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES ONLINE
Creating online courses doesn’t end at uploading videos to your site and getting enrollments. As an online educator, you need to ensure that your students are actively participating in your course and getting real value out of it. This will pay off in the long run as people come to recognize your course as the most valuable in the market. In this post, Dr. Eileen McGurty, an expert in online education, shares her strategies for boosting participation in online courses.

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT KICKOFF
Enjoyed seeing many of you at Vice Chancellor Cross's gathering on Thursday. The feedback I received at the meeting and via email over the last two days has been very positive and validating. Please know that the Teaching+Learning Center is a resource for you so let us know how we can help.

INCREASING STUDENT PARTICIPATION
Dr. Kelly Rocca discovered why students do and do not participate in class by reviewing articles on the topic from 1958 until 2009. Based on the literature review, Rocca names five factors that influence whether or not a student chooses to participate in class including: logistics (mainly class size-smaller is better); confidence and classroom apprehension (intimidation from classroom extraverts); personality traits (low self-esteem and non-assertiveness); instructor and classroom climate (not paying attention to students, making fun of their answers, being overly critical, sarcasm, moodiness and aloofness); and, gender differences (this is subsiding as the population of colleges shifts to majority female, a statistic that matches the faculty more). Some of these factors may be out of your control but it is clear that your attitude and approach is very influential in setting the right classroom environment that promotes learning.

TAKING YOUR CLASS TEMPERATURE
A terrific article in College Teaching gives us some valuable insight into how formative assessment can reveal the level of student learning in our courses. The group of researchers list a number of great interventions that can be used to gauge the temperature of your class. For instance, assignment blogs are designed to encourage communication, collaboration, and dissemination of feedback but are great way to gather questions from your students and provide feedback about certain aspects of an assignment. Blogs are open-access, so if a student asks a good question, all of the other students will benefit from that exchange. Teachers can also use the assignment blog to identify general areas of concern based on previous student work or to offer feedback to the class as a whole thereby allowing students the opportunity to self-assess. It also creates a great engagement opportunity between faculty and students and peer to peer. This activity will also help to improve your student's ability to think critically.

PREPPING FOR CLASS
August 20 is rapidly approaching but there is still time to review your syllabus. Make sure you are listing all of the course requirements and be very specific about due dates and your policy on accepting late work.

ART MATTERS
Finally, we want to post one of the new pieces that have recently gone on display in the Magnolia Building. The work shown is called Something Borrowed, Something Blue by BRCC faculty member Steve Schmitt.

Sarah Jones, a doctoral student at Michigan State, reminds us in her insightful post that giving more low-stakes assessments has a multitude of benefits for our students. She writes that providing your student with low-stakes testing will "produce large improvements in student final exam scores, help narrow the grade gap between poorly prepped and highly prepped first year college student, and might even result in more positive course reviews." She cites research by Scott Freeman, David Haak, and Mary Pat Wenderoth (Published in the Life Sciences Education edition of The American Society of Cell Biology) who wrote "We found no evidence that points from active-learning exercises inflate grades or reduce the impact of exams on final grades. When we controlled for variation in student ability, failure rates were lower in a moderately structured course design and were dramatically lower in a highly structured course design. This result supports the hypothesis that active-learning exercises can make students more skilled learners and help bridge the gap between poorly prepared students and their better-prepared peers." Some may be worried that their already heavy workload will be further burdened by more assessment. But the use of Canvas can actually reduce the amount of grading you have to do if you set up the quiz or analysis using the LMS. You can also use peer review, a great active learning tool that enhances learning for all students.

NEW CANVAS CAPABILITY
Canvas, our open online learning management system, recently announced the immediate availability of a new annotation feature in its mobile application. This new functionality allows students to open, annotate, and submit an assignment directly within Canvas. Historically this has been accomplished through a third-party app, which can create an additional expense for our students. Providing one platform where all of these capabilities reside eliminates the need for students to buy additional software and reduces the need for paper, both cost saving actions. The mobile annotation feature allows instructors to spend less time demonstrating procedures for moving and transitioning digital assignments and more time teaching. Digitizing assignments inside Canvas also allows instructors to grade assignments using the Canvas SpeedGrader. Read more here.

ENGAGEMENT IN THE ELEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Learning is about personal relationships. Deep learning doesn’t happen through reading or rote memorization online any more than in the physical world. It is the experiences and meaningful conversations (or maybe human interactions) within a course that enable students to critically reflect, and deepen their learning. All too often, online students feel isolated, which can decrease motivation and increase attrition. When learning occurs entirely through computer-mediated instruction, professors often overlook simple steps like asking participants to introduce themselves. Details like asking your students to create a video introduction to a class can have a powerful impact. Video-based introductions can help develop a community of learners more quickly than simply posting text on a discussion board. Students who are in courses with introductory videos have been shown to actively participate in online discussions very early in the course. And research shows that learners who are more engaged and have higher levels of interaction, have higher success rates. Read more here.

THE FEEDBACK IS FOR YOU
The classroom is a non-stop hub of feedback: test grades, assignment scores, paper comments, peer review, individual conferences, nonverbal cues, and more. Feedback is essential for student learning. Still, students’ ability to process and use feedback varies widely. We have some students who eagerly accept feedback or carefully apply rough draft comments, while many others dread or dismiss their professors’ notes or reject exam grades as “unfair.” Although feedback is integral to our classrooms and work spaces, we often forget to teach students how to manage it. Two Harvard law professors, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, argue that identifying different kinds of feedback is a good place to start. Continue reading here.

JOINT OWNERSHIP OF LEARNING
Robert Carroll has written an interesting opinion piece about the teacher-student relationship. At its essence, it is about engagement but he frames it in terms of an athletic performance. He asks "So why do we, as teachers, still exist? The formal education process is no longer about information, and successful teachers have come to realize this. The ability of learners to access information has increased to the point of absurdity. The role of the teacher now is to help learners effectively identify and evaluate information sources, but this alone does not justify our continued presence in the educational process." He continues, "While learning is self-directed, it is the teacher that is accountable for the learning:  accountable to the students, to the program, and to themselves. Courses flourish when the student-teacher relationship is reciprocal and includes “joint ownership” of the course. And the responsibility flows both ways–a student performing poorly is a failure on my part, and I work with them to get them to perform to the best of their ability."

GROUP DISCUSSION WITH A TWIST
We have encouraged you to use class discussion as an active learning method in your classes and we have provided teaching and learning faculty development workshops in the past to provide you with the information and tools to implement this learning experience. B. J. Brooks and M. D. Koretsky provide a twist on this active learning method in their article "The Influence of Group Discussion on Students' Responses and Confidence During Peer Instruction" published in the Journal of Chemical Education. They advocate that you allow your student to respond to a discussion question individually in writing and then have them share that answer with two or three colleagues. After the discussion, the students can change their answers, write another explanation for the answer and once again indicate their degree of confidence in their answer. The research shows that the learning experience provided a richer understanding of the answer and improved their confidence level in having the correct answer. The depth of their explanation was enhanced as well. Students spent an average of seven minutes in discussion making this an active learning method that can be used each time you meet as a class. The research also confirmed that when faced with conceptual problems, students need the opportunity to practice problem solving and the discussion improves their ability to explain why the answer is correct.

CLOSING OUT A SEMESTER POSITIVELY
A fellow faculty development colleague reminds us that the end of the semester is the time to do some assessment that will provide you with valuable feedback as you plan for the next semester. There are a number of things you can do to help your students transition to the next phase of their academic careers or workforce lives. He suggests, "Just as you discussed the syllabus on the first day of class, do so again, this time to reaffirm that learning outcomes have been met and to remind students of the material that has been covered. Of course, it is a good idea to review that syllabus a few weeks out from the end of the semester to make sure that the outcomes have been met. The review can be done as a large group discussion, or you might assign groups within the class to assess how well the course had fulfilled its outcomes, material coverage, and other goals."

MUSIC DELIVERS IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
When designing and teaching a course through the online delivery method, research shows that you should build in authentic and relevant opportunities for your students to interact, connect, and present themselves as real people. Students see these opportunities to socially interact and connect with others as foundational attributes of your courses. Further, research suggests that opportunities like these influence students’ perception of the overall learning experience. Joanna Dunlap and Patrick Lowenthal conducted research in this area and suggest that using music as one of a number of ways to help students interact and connect with each other can produce positive student learning results. Music offers a way to involve students in student-to-content interaction through generative learning activities—by having students compile playlists, write lyrics, compose songs, perform songs, create music videos, and so on. Music-driven, student-to-content interaction also involves students in multisensory learning, further supporting knowledge acquisition and construction. They provide a number of discipline specific active learning methods that you can integrate into your online class.

MAKING PROMISES TO STUDENTS
Dr. Peter Filene says that there are two halves of the teaching/learning dialogue: aims and outcomes. Aims describe how you want to convey crucial aspects of your subject in lucid, interesting fashion. Outcomes describe how you want to change how your students think and feel, what he describes as the essence of learning. Dr. Filene says that faculty very often confuse outcomes with what they themselves will do rather than what they will ask of their students. He encourages us to think about outcomes as the promises we are making to our students. What will you ask them to understand and do? How will you (together) go about achieving these goals? What kind of assessment will you use to allow them and you to measure progress in learning? You can find more of Dr. Filene's wisdom in his book The Joy of Teaching: A practical guide for new college instructors (LB2331.F493).

NEW JOURNAL PROVIDES NEW OPPORTUNITY
Here is a great new opportunity for our eLearning faculty to publish their research findings. The inaugural issue of the Journal of Emerging Learning Design (ELDJ) was published in April. The ELDJ is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that provides a platform for academics and practitioners to explore emerging learning design theories, concepts, and issues and their implication at national and international levels.  An outgrowth of the annual Emerging Learning Design Conference, which makes its home at Montclair State University, the ELDJ invites scholarly communications in the emerging learning design field and will present best practices in design and implementation by offering articles that present, propose or review engaging and dynamic approaches to pedagogy and how technology can better enhance it.

RECRUITING AND RETAINING BLACK MEN
Marilyn L. Riley is still haunted by a teenager named Dante, who came reluctantly and angrily to her summer program for black men and ended up nearly walking away with five credits from Mesa Community College, in Arizona. The first few days, he slouched in his chair and glared at his instructor, his cap sideways, his pants sagging. "Sweetie, in my world, this isn't going to work," the petite adjunct professor and clinical psychologist, who is also black, told him. "You've got all this leadership potential, but no one's going to relate to you when you're looking like a thug." By the end of the summer session, she said, he was sitting up straight in his chair, was demonstrating critical-thinking skills, and was within striking distance of earning five college credits. But before that could happen, his mother packed up and moved the family to New Mexico, and he had to withdraw. Ms. Riley told that story at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, in one of several sessions devoted to the challenges of recruiting and retaining black men. In another session, J. Luke Wood, an assistant professor of administration, rehabilitation, and post-secondary education at San Diego State University, described his research on black male students in community colleges. He visits community colleges to administer surveys and advise them on strategies for recruiting and retaining minority men. Mr. Wood said that faculty members tend to pay more attention to students who speak up in class and that many black men, in particular, lack the confidence to do so. In addition, "a lot of men are reluctant to ask for help because it makes them look weak," he said. "You have to be proactive in establishing relationships with these men."

IS A MOOC IN YOUR FUTURE
Community college leaders haven’t exactly jumped on the “disruption” bandwagon. That may be understandable given the popular narrative that digital innovation will replace faculty members and even entire colleges according to an Inside Higher Ed story. But the two-year sector’s wariness seems to be fading, if the annual convention of the American Association of Community Colleges is any indication. The conference featured many sessions on how budget-strapped colleges can use self-paced online courses and free digital content, such as massive open online courses, to boost efficiency and serve more students. The two-year sector is open to that idea, said Walter G. Bumphus, the association’s president and former BRCC Chancellor. Bumphus later told the meeting’s attendees that he and fellow leaders of the association talked with Khan backstage about possible collaborations, and discussed setting up a committee to consider how to use the academy’s material. “It’s going to be good for community colleges and good for AACC,” Bumphus said.