Remember to Update Your Syllabus for Online Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly caused a major disruption for colleges around the globe. As BRCC works to move all of our onsite (face-to-face) courses to be offered using Canvas, it is important to remember to look at your syllabus. Some of the information students may now need may not be part of your current version. Dr. Danielle Geary wrote a straightforward article complete with a list of important items back in 2018. It is very relevant to us now as we transition and I encourage you to take a look at it as you redesign your course including your syllabus. We will continue to post relevant information and updates to the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Canvas class as well so remember to check that resource at least daily. Finally, if you are looking for some assistance, send an email to elearning@bears.mybrcc.edu along with a brief description of your needs.

Moving Your Onsite Classes to Canvas

The spread of the COVID-19 (commonly referred to as the coronavirus) is causing may colleges to cancel classes and many are moving to the online delivery method to continue classes. BRCC faculty are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the Canvas LMS which can provide an online learning environment in the event that the situation worsens and potentially spreads to Louisiana. There will be a professional development webinar provided the OLC today at 1:00 pm. You can register to participate here. In addition, the OLC has a Continuity Planning and Emergency Preparedness resource page with tips to help you turn your face-to-face class into a hybrid. The BRCC Chancellor's Office has released the following guidelines to be used by all staff, students, and faculty.

·         -Stay home if you are exhibiting any of the following symptoms:

o   Fever

o   Cough

o   Shortness of breath

·         -Seek medical attention.

·        - If you are experiencing any symptoms, contact your instructors and the Dean of Students at dos@mybrcc.edu or submit a report in BRCC Cares (Request for Assistance Link).

·        - Any student that is absent and has exhibited the symptoms above must provide medical clearance to the Dean of Students to return to campus.

·       -  Accommodations (e.g., extended due dates, electronic submission of assignments, videos of instructor lectures posted to Canvas, ect.), when possible, will be made for individuals who may be temporarily unable to attend class due to restrictions placed on them related to possible exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19.

·       -  Please communicate electronically with your instructors regarding all course related matters.  

A Dickens for the 21st Century

Can old things be made new again within the context of 21st century cultural norms? A paper by Megan Witzleben with Hilbert College suggests just that. She writes, "Today, we may not teach Dickensian prose as superior. However, we do seek to empower students through verbal and cultural literacy to connect them with influential stories of the past and present. This paper demonstrates how teaching a little-known Dickens detective story, “Hunted Down,” in its original serialized context, and then performing a dramatic reading of that story to a community partner, helps students understand Dickens in his own time and in ours." What she is suggesting is another way to incorporate active learning into our classes. She even suggests some service learning opportunities around the work of Dickens. I encourage you to view the student's personal journals towards the end of the article.

Is Linking Learning and Work a Must Do for Faculty?

The latest white paper from the American Council on Education (ACE) is creating a healthy discussion about what is and isn't part of a faculty's responsibilities when it comes to their students. The ACE paper suggests that having students career-ready should be something that faculty should be doing. The paper's authors acknowledge that both community college and university faculty influenced the work. Working at a community college and teaching a course called College Success Skills (CSSK) may be influencing my opinion on this matter but in talking with employers, local chamber members, and students themselves, many see it the same way. Our CSSK course provides knowledge about the obvious college success issues (test anxiety, taking notes, engaging with faculty, study habits) but we also spend time on what some would call soft skills (communication, netiquette, time management, critical thinking). Having worked previously at a flagship research-intensive university as well as a regional doctoral university, I will be the first to tell you that each mission was different. But at the end of the day students are attending college/university to get a job. This white paper comes at a really important time as the financial support from government continues to shrink and the public seems to have lost their faith in a college degree. Having a constructive conversation to reset our priorities is a useful thing to do and I welcome your feedback on this issue as well.

Does Active Learning Work?

Dr. Donna M. Qualters uncovers some interesting information in her research study Do Students Want to be Active? Four important themes emerged from the analysis: the students had an overall positive attitude toward active learning; active learning was perceived to enhance their ability and efficiency in studying; active learning was perceived to improve the learning environment; and, active learning promoted their thinking about their learning and thus helped them to better understand their individual learning style. She also uncovered a few negatives that could easily be converted using the right interventions. She concludes by writing, "The most important need to be addressed is the inability of some students to deal with change. Many of these students come to higher education with expectations of very passive classroom experiences and those expectations must be uncovered, probed and altered. For some students it may go as far as the necessity to reframe what learning is: learning is not about covering material or gathering facts, learning is about integrating and using information in a meaningful way."

Providing Feedback That Will Be Used

You can always tell when the first round of assessment begins in the 16 week classes. That is because we always see a rise in the number of eLearning and accommodated testers in the Testing Center. In addition, after more than three decades in higher education, I know that having enough time to do all of the things we need to do for good teaching and learning is one of the tasks that faculty constantly struggle with. That is why a recent article that ran in Inside Higher Ed caught my attention. Dr. Deborah J. Cohen provides us with what she describes as a faster way to grade in 2020. She writes, "I came of age teaching when students picked up their graded work in boxes outside of professors’ offices. That also meant many students never came to retrieve their final papers after I had spent hours on tedious commenting. Some had graduated, and some simply did not care -- they were fine just seeing the final posted grade. It was as if I were writing long, involved letters to myself. I refuse to engage in that wasted work now. Whatever requires my feedback happens earlier in the semester, so that students have an opportunity to use the comments to improve their work. And on every syllabus, I indicate the following, which sets clear boundaries and places accountability squarely on the student: “You will get much more out of this course, and any course you will ever take, if you concern yourself more with the processes of how to think, how to learn and how to write than on the letter grades. In 10 years, you will probably forget the grade you got in my class, but I hope that what will stay with you are the learning tools and skills that you will acquire." I suggest you read the entire short article to learn more about her time-saving grading practices.

Is Your Teaching a Downpour or Drizzle?

Teaching occurs when learning happens. They are intrinsically connected and the relationship depends on trust, engagement, and respect. A recent Teaching Professor article uses the analogy of rain occurring as a downpour or a drizzle. Dr. Maryellen Weimer notes, "Storms come and go fast. When the downpour reaches the ground, the water runs away quickly—little gets into the ground. Drizzle offers a different image—fine, slow, silent, and yet penetrating. Drizzle soaks into the ground." She then poses the question to us wondering if our teaching is a downpour or a drizzle. Living in Louisiana, where it rains quiet often, we can certainly relate to this metaphor. While a good downpour is needed every now and then to clean off the roads and ground, we know that a good, steady drizzle is best for our plants, flowers, trees, and crops. Dr. Weimer writes, "Getting wet in a drizzle is a holistic experience. You don’t get some drizzle on your face but none on your feet. You’re in it, surrounded by it, unable to escape from it. Is education that kind of holistic experience? Not usually. If the work in multiple courses comes together, forms coherent connections, that doesn’t happen because we teach the curriculum as an integrated whole." So is your teaching more like a downpour or a drizzle?

Teach Students How Their Brains Learn

With all of the knowledge we now know about how our brains work best, why are we still ignoring the benefits of sharing this information with our students? You have probably noticed that I like to tweet about brain research on the CTLE Twitter account. We have also incorporated brain research into our College Success Skills course as we teach students how to be better at critical thinking. Looking back at some of the material we used initially reminded me of a good article by Dr. Judy Willis that appeared in 2012 (are we really 8 years removed from that?). In the article she writes, "Curriculum in schools of education has changed in response to changes in society, pedagogy and technology. As computer technology became an asset in classrooms, schools of education appropriately included that instruction in the curriculum. Many states made similar education program curriculum adaptations in response to multiculturism, increases in English language learners, and the use of the concrete-connect-abstract progression in math instruction. Now that the neuroscience research implications for teaching are also an invaluable classroom asset, it is time for instruction in the neuroscience of learning to be included as well in professional teacher education." Her words are just as salient in 2020 and we now know even more about how the brain learns. Spending some time in your classes dispensing this new knowledge will pay off for your students and help them to learn the information you are sharing. You can find information on this topic on this blog and on the CTLE Twitter page.

SQ3R Is Not a New Star Wars Character

It is about that time in the semester when we begin to notice a pattern developing. We have assigned reading for our students and reminded them that it should be done before the class so that they can come with prepared questions. Yet they don't seem to have grasped the concept and so we fall back into presenting the entire reading material during class rather than using our active learning teaching interventions that promote deeper learning. We have shared some teaching interventions that work in this blog before. Dr. Dimple J. Martin offers us another process that she uses that may work for you as well. Dr. Martin writes, "First, let’s acknowledge this universal epidemic. College students despise reading textbooks and e-books that cover content with academic information. Fortunately, I discovered a cure for the reading plague that only requires five teaspoons of ingestion: 1) survey 2) question 3) read 4) retrieve and 5) review. In my class, I have found the SQ3R Method to be a step-by-step approach to learning and studying from textbooks. Although it took my students time and practice to master this method, it has been valuable in regards to preparing students for more content-driven class discussions, increased retention and understanding of information, strategic study skills, and test preparation." You can read the entire article here.

Yes, I Agree and...

We all know the drill. We have decided to use the discussion board feature on Canvas to engage with our students and have them increase their peer-to-peer interaction. We determine the topic and issue an assignment with directions asking students to begin the topics. Once that is done, they are also asked to comment on the topics started by their fellow students. We sit back and wait and nothing happens. Well, to be fair, some students post and then other students give one to five word responses that do not move the conversation forward at all. So what went wrong? Dr. Beth René Roepnack has written a concise article on how we can improve online discussion by simply changing a couple of things. Her article appears on Faculty Focus and she offers the following suggestions. " I adjusted the structure of my online discussions from students starting threads (you know the drill, post-and-reply-to-two) to the instructor starting them, which creates a more organic discussion structure similar to classroom conversations. This simple modification, along with asking open-ended questions from the deep end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, creates discussions that support student learning and engagement with the material and each other." You can read the entire article here. If you use her suggestions, let me know if you experienced the same results that she did.