March Faculty Community Conversation: Student Presentations

We’re all familiar with the traditional end-of-semester final presentation where each students speaks to the class for a period of time, often while sharing Powerpoint slide. But what if it could be different? This March Ingrid Stobbe, Assistant Professor of Digital Filmmaking, and Jason Butler, Associate Professor of Drama Therapy, led our Community Conversation on alternative ways to do student presentations or as Jason put it, how we can “play and innovate with our students.” 

Ingrid teaches film production and theory classes at Lesley and one of her students proposed an alternative. He wanted to create a short film as his presentation. As with any other presentation or final paper, he started with his thesis statement: Pink Floyd’s “Live at Pompeii” was an innovative documentary that merged the medium of music with innovative techniques that were starting to appear in documentary filmmaking of the time. He then provided Ingrid with an outline where his thesis statement would be supported by media clips. Ingrid liked the idea enough to open the option up to all the students in the class. They still needed to hit the objectives of the assignment, synthesize what they had learned in class, and communicate that information to others, but it allowed filmmaking students a chance to express themselves in their own medium. For Ingrid, the question at the end of the day was “Is there a way that I can support and allow for the key moments in my class?” 

Ingrid’s alternative presentations were the result of a student request. However, Jason purposely designed his into his Drama Therapy course. Jason based his approach on Universal Design for Learning theories (UDL) where multiple avenues are provided for students to engage with the content and to share their knowledge. 

Jason had both asynchronous and synchronous elements to his course assignments. Students began by creating a fictional story and character to learn about embodiment. They then created short videos of themselves showing how their character is embodied. In the follow up assignment, students compared autobiographical theater with self-love pieces. Many students created traditional Powerpoints, but others did a more creative interpretation which was then shared in VoiceThread. VoiceThread allows the presenters to have traditional slides, images, and video. Viewers can provide feedback in multiple ways, text, audio, or video, allowing them some choice in how they respond.    

Jason also had some tips for synchronous presentations. He hides non-video attendees in Zoom and then asks the students who aren’t presenting to turn off their camera in order to create a stage for the performers on screen. Other times, he asks students to move closer to the camera if they agree with what is being said and to move away if they disagree in order to get the audience involved and interacting rather than just sitting back and watching. He also uses the reaction buttons in Zoom or asks the viewers to enter a word or two in the chat that expresses their thoughts on the presentation.   

But how do you assess such innovative assignments?  

According to Ingrid and Jason, you must give it structure. Jason shares the criteria of what needs to be covered while Ingrid has a workshop day where the student comes in with an outline of the goals they need to meet and how they will do that. While you are providing the student with some flexibility and room to explore, it must still meet the assignment criteria and stay within the boundaries of what the instructor can grade. Having a rubric helps communicate the criteria and to grade.  

How do you provide options when you teach more traditional content?  

Look for places where you can provide a little bit of choice for students. Where can you provide a small piece of creativity for them. Your students might not be ready to dance their dissertation, but can they share a picture or a piece of music that will transmit another aspect of the article they presenting on? The process forces us to think in different ways. 

One significant goal is to create a classroom culture where students feel empowered and comfortable talking risks and stepping out of their comfort zone. Small gestures over time where you allow students choice or opportunities to be themselves helps to create that safe space. Jason shared that in partnership with UDL, there’s a trauma-informed pedagogy perspective that says when we are activated due to trauma, we can’t function or reason… or learn. One of the common reasons for trauma is a lack of choice. It’s difficult to properly engage with something when we feel that it is being imposed on us. Providing some form of choice in your assignments diminishes that activation and allows students to more fully participate. 

Do you provide alternative ways for students to share their knowledge? Let us know how. 

 

Collect Assignments and Provide Feedback

Collect student assignments and provide feedback online all without cluttering up your inbox.

As you consider your options, check with your students about their access to technology. Do they have access to a computer at home or do they only have a mobile device (tablet or mobile phone)? Do they have fast, reliable internet at home or are they on a slower connection or data plan? This information will help you as you plan for which tools and workflows will work best for your course.

  • Online Discussions: Create and facilitate online discussions using the myLesley Discussion Board. You may use the Discussion Board to replace or enhance classroom discussions in a digital format. The discussion board is also a great tool for peer review. Students can post their work to the discussion and receive feedback from their fellow classmates.
  • Blogs and Journals: Use the myLesley Blogs or Journals tool to have your students create articles or editorial, review their readings or reflect on assignments and progress on coursework. Blogs can be shared with the entire class allowing students to view and comment. Journals are a private space between you and the individual student. It’s a great place for reflection and private feedback from the instructor.
  • Assignments: Use the myLesley Assignment tool to post, collect, and grade papers or other written assignments all within your myLesley course.
  • Presentations: Use VoiceThread to create and collaborate on online presentations. Students can create individual or group presentations to share with class and receive feedback.
  • Tests: Create a test to assess student comprehension. myLesley supports a large number of test formats including multiple choice, essay, short answer, calculated numeric, and more, all which may be taken online. Create a full mid-term exam or a series of smaller knowledge checks to ensure everyone is mastering the content or to discover gaps.

Help and Resources

Online Tutorials 

The IT/eLIS Support Site provides resources and tutorials for all Lesley-supported technology, including myLesley, Kaltura Media, VoiceThread, Collaborate Ultra, Microsoft Teams, and more. Not finding what you’re looking for? Put in a support ticket for more information or to set up a training. 
 
Hoonuit (formerly Atomic Learning) features hundreds of self-paced video tutorials for popular software, online tools, tech integration, and more. Log in to Hoonuit with your myLesley username and password. 

Request a training 

Do you have questions or don’t know where to start? Reach out to eLIS and set up an appointment to learn more. eLIS staff are available to meet with you in person in University Hall, online, or on the phone. 

August Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series

The Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS) is a free webinar series designed to bring faculty, instructional designers, partners, and Blackboard experts to you. Speakers share their tips, best practices, pedagogy, and higher education hot topics so you can stay ahead of the curve on teaching efficiency, course design, and student learning outcomes.

This August theme is “Best Practices to Start the Academic Year.” Review the descriptions below and register today.

Manage Your Blackboard Grade Center
Presenters: Kendall St Hilaire and Steve Ramos, Indiana River State College
Tuesday, August 6th – 10am ET

At Indian River State College, all faculty are expected to use the Blackboard Grade Center, and provide timely feedback to students. This webinar will walk participants through the external and internal drivers that resulted in the required use of the Blackboard Grade Center. Presenters will discuss the Virtual Campus master course model, and the process for setting up all Grade Centers within the master courses. The presentation will also cover the important role of the Grade Center when it comes to analytic reporting. IRSC also utilizes Blackboard Analytics for Learn reports to distribute data to key stakeholders such as Department Chairs, Deans, and Academic Vice Presidents.

Presenters will cover best practices in managing the grade center and share tips and tricks for faculty and those who provide technical support to faculty. IRSC will also share their techniques for offering training on the Grade Center, both through face-to-face trainings and resources that are accessible to the faculty member at the moment they need support when working in the Grade Center.

Register for the webinar

Beginning the Term Blackboard Checklist
Presenter: Helen Keier, Associate Director for Learning Management Systems, John Jay Online
Thursday, August 8th – 11am ET

The beginning of a term is often a hectic, stress-filled time for instructors, filled with a variety of tasks that must be completed all at once. Taking cues from the advice we often give our students (“Use a date planner,” “Write it down,” and “Check the Syllabus”) Beginning the Term checklists can help us make sure we stay on task, we meet our deadlines, ensure that nothing is overlooked, and most importantly, provide our students with a fully-realized experience in our classes. In this session, we will discuss the approach adopted by one college to make sure that Blackboard courses are ready for their students – from the start of the content copying process to making the course available on the first day of class.

Join us in this webinar to learn best practices for using and constructing your own custom Beginning the Term checklists, and discuss how checklists cannot only streamline your pre-semester preparations, but help you improve your online courses.

Register for the webinar

Incorporating Student Feedback Before, During and After Your Course
Presenter: Corrie Bergeron, Instructional Designer, Learning Systems Administrator, Lakeland Community College
Tuesday, August 13th – 10am ET

We all SAY that we want student feedback, but how do we put that into practice?  An answer might lie in our expectations for how we want our students to use the feedback that we give them.

Before the course even begins, we set out our expectations in the syllabus and schedule.  We expect them to read and understand it – but what if they don’t?  We give formative feedback on assignments and discussion posts.  How do we expect them to assimilate it and respond?   We give feedback on summative assessments – what do we want students to do with that after the class ends?   We’ll look at ways to elicit both overt and implicit feedback about our courses.

We’ll discuss situations where things go seriously sideways – when do you try to right the apple cart, and when do you just try to jump clear with minimal injuries? Finally, we’ll look at the process of making adjustments to a course while it is still in progress, in the short break between semesters, and when you have the luxury to step back and take a long overall look at it.

Register for the webinar

Updating Content to Make Your Courses More Accessible
Presenter: Melissa Hortman, Assistant Professor & Director of Instructional Technology, Medical University of South Carolina
Thursday, August 15th – 11am ET

The landscape of higher education is drastically changing in terms of student profile and the technology to support their learning. Barriers can be removed by creating more usable course content, and it is our responsibility to ensure that digital content is accessible to all. There are various ways to update your content to make your course more accessible by integrating easy principles into your workflow.

Register for the webinar


Improving Peer Feedback with Peergrade

Lisa Spitz is an assistant professor at Lesley’s College of Art and Design and the program director for the User Experience online BS degree program. Lisa worked with eLIS this fall to pilot a peer feedback tool, called Peergrade, in her Sketching for Interactive Design course. Below she shares her and her students’ experiences using Peergrade.

In this course, students use sketching to document research insights, tell a story, and visualize mobile interface concepts and interactions. Each individual assignment includes a period of sketching and revising, where students provide peer feedback and then revise their own sketches for overall clarity. My initial experience teaching this course in Blackboard raised a number of challenges with the peer review process: not all peer feedback was of the same caliber and not all students received the same amount of feedback. This meant I was compensating for poor and/or incomplete feedback. I was also manually tracking the quality and quantity of feedback each student provided to their peers, for grading purposes. Further, due to inconsistencies in the types of feedback received, students reported finding it difficult to revise their work. 

Over the summer, John McCormick in eLIS introduced me to an online peer review platform called Peergrade. The overall format and structure of Peergrade was a good match for my particular assignment structure and I was interested in seeing how it might better support our students in the peer review process.

The tool itself was fairly easy to learn. As an instructor, I was able to set up my “classroom” in Peergrade and create each of my assignments. For students, their experience entailed posting their sketches in Peergrade and then evaluating their peers’ sketches based on a custom rubric (which I set up in advance of the course running). The biggest challenge I faced was in tailoring the rubrics to each individual assignment. Students evaluated their peers work based on quantity and diversity of sketches as well as unique requirements for each assignment. The rubrics I created provided students with both quantitative and qualitative feedback on their sketches; and the system guaranteed that each student received feedback from three other students.

Students responded favorably to the use of Peergrade. They were fairly self-sufficient in using the Peergrade platform. It required very little technical support from my end; for instance, allowing late assignment submissions and permitting students to re-upload their work. Some adhoc quotes found in journal entries and the course evaluation include:

  • “I really like Peergrade, I only wish the rest of my courses used this site. It is so much easier to give the feedback and receive the feedback that you want without upsetting another peer about your opinion. Since it is anonymous it is easier to be truthful if you have suggestions on changes.”
  • “That program allowed me to finally get honest feedback from my peers on how they truly felt about my work.”
  • “By reviewing other students, I often could improve my own work through just that process alone.”
  • “The peer commenting system was a great way to discuss among other students each other’s work before turning in the final assignment each week. Critiquing helped me understand my own skills better.”
  • “Peergrade was life changing, love it.”

In an ideal world, I’d spend more time user-testing assignment rubrics before launching these assignments with a live class. However, design is an iterative process and course design is no different and I anticipate refining each assignment rubric with each course instantiation.

If you’re just not sure how this would work within your classroom context, I’d say start small. Choose one project in which you’d like students to give and receive quality peer feedback. Decide what a “good” assignment submission looks like and set up your rubric to probe specifically on those areas. Then, see what the experience looks like from both the Instructor and Student views. Having an initial experience with Peergrade will help you to determine just how and when it might be an asset in your courses. 

Peergrade is currently be used in a small number of online and on campus courses at Lesley. If you would like more information on using Peergrade or peer feedback in your courses, contact elis@lesley.edu.

Provide Grading Feedback With Audio and Video

Blackboard now allows you to embed an audio/video recording of your feedback as you grade attempts. This feature is available for all graded content, including assignments, graded discussions, or in the Grade Details area of any Grade Center column.

Why Provide Audio or Video Feedback?

Providing feedback using audio or video allows you to connect with your students, especially those at a distance. You can give them a glimpse of your personality and show them the real person behind the text. Creating this connection can make it easier to interact, share information, and ensure that your students don’t feel isolated.

Text-based feedback can lend itself to misinterpretation – students may weight all of the feedback equally or be overwhelmed by a lot of text on the page. Audio allows you to add tone and emphasis, perhaps even humor and support, while video allows you to add facial expressions and gestures.

How Do I Add Audio or Video Feedback in my Course?

You can add audio or video feedback on any gradable item in your course. To do so, access the Feedback to Learner area. You may do this directly from an Assignment or from within the Full Grade Center.

From within an Assignment:

From your student’s submission, navigate to the Assignment Details area. In the Feedback to Learner area, In the Feedback to Learner area, click on the Full Content Editor button. This will open the full text/content editor.
Screenshot of Feedback to Learner area of Assignment

For more information on grading assignments or accessing the students’ submissions, see Grading Assignments in myLesley.

From a Grade Center column:

Navigate to the Full Grade Center and hover your mouse over the item you wish to offer feedback. Click the chevron to open a menu and select Quick Comment.

screenshot of accessing Recording Feedback from within the Full Grade Center

Launch the Recorder:

From the Full Text/Content editor, click the Record Feedback Button (first button on the third row of the text/content editor).screenshot of record feedback button

This will launch the recorder. Click the video button to launch your webcam or click the record button to record audio only. Each recording may be a maximum length of five (5) minutes.screenshot of record feedback

Once you have finished recording, your audio or video recording will be added to the student’s feedback area. Detailed instructions for using the Record Feedback option may be found here: Record Audio and Video.

What if I want to upload a video I recorded elsewhere or provide my students with a screencast?

If you recorded a video in a different tool, you may upload it using the Kaltura Mashup Tool. You may also upload a video to Kaltura directly from your mobile device.

If you would like to record a screencast, you may use Kaltura CaptureSpace Lite.

Where can I find more information on providing feedback to my students?

To find out more about providing feedback to your students, check out the resources below: