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Tips for Online Instructors: Managing Files, Feedback, and Workload
Teaching online is a rewarding experience; but any instructor who makes the transition to online education, thinking it will be easier and less time-consuming than face-to-face classroom teaching, is in for a big surprise! Establishing a regular presence in the online classroom, grading assignments and discussions, and maintaining records and notes from term to term are all time consuming – but essential – tasks. Learning to take care of the details of online teaching more efficiently makes it possible to be more effective in your teaching. The following is an abbreviated version of guidance I provide to new instructors about ways to keep their course files organized, students engaged, and workload manageable.Teaching online is a rewarding experience; but any instructor who makes the transition to online education, thinking it will be easier and less time-consuming than face-to-face classroom teaching, is in for a big surprise! Establishing a regular presence in the online classroom, grading assignments and discussions, and maintaining records and notes from term to term are all time consuming – but essential – tasks. Learning to take care of the details of online teaching more efficiently makes it possible to be more effective in your teaching. The following is an abbreviated version of guidance I provide to new instructors about ways to keep their course files organized, students engaged, and workload manageable.
For every class, I have multiple folders on my computer:
- Current Term
- Past Terms
- Announcements
- Syllabi
- Assignments
- DQs (Discussions)
- Feedback
Within each of those folders, other folders and documents are nested. For example, each term I drag the current term folder into the past terms’ folder; it’s important to maintain records, particularly of grading and feedback. I refer to my announcements folder each time I teach a course; and, past terms’ syllabi are the foundations for each new term’s syllabi.
Within the current term folder, I have multiple folders, one for each week’s assignment. I download all of the submitted assignments each week to that folder and re-label each student’s graded paper with the grade earned in the file name. That way I have a quick and easy reference to old assignments, if needed, and a more efficient way to post grades; e.g. JohnSmith.125.
Within the DQ (discussion) folder, I have a folder for each week, and within those, a document for each DQ. I update those documents regularly, as I often write “keeper” posts during the term – i.e. replies to students in which I explain concepts that tend to give students some trouble. Each term, I actively look for opportunities to insert those “standard” replies as part of my response to students. For example, I’ll comment on a specific student’s points, and build on those (including asking questions) by including one of my standard replies in my post. If I make 15-20 posts in a DQ during the week, probably half of them include some standard text. These pre-written posts enable me to clarify concepts and stimulate critical thinking without reinventing the wheel, help me ensure that the specific learning objectives for a discussion are met, and ensure that the discussions don’t devolve into non-productive (or unrelated) tangents.
Within the feedback folder, I also have at least two folders, one for each DQ and one for assignments. Within the DQ feedback folder, I have multiple documents, including one for each DQ each week. I then have a variety of standard DQ feedback responses that are unique to the topic of that DQ and that differentiate performance based on quality and quantity criteria. Including those pre-written feedback comments as part of each student’s personalized DQ feedback saves me time and ensures that I provide the substantive feedback that is critical for learning.
The assignment feedback folder includes documents for every assignment in a course. The top of each document includes the rubric for the assignment, which I then have handy to copy/paste directly onto a student’s paper. Also included are some standard comments, some of which I insert in the body of a student’s paper when grading (to highlight a specific error/opportunity), and some of which I insert into the feedback sections of the rubric, as appropriate. These comments, like my DQ responses and feedback, continue to evolve from term to term, as I see repeated errors. I try to develop “tips” announcements for each assignment that provide guidance about these common errors so that some are reduced from term to term. I may also make modifications to assignment directions when I notice repeated errors – because if students lost points for the same reason from term to term, there’s an obvious indication that there are some opportunities for clarification on my part!
In my experience, this approach allows me to provide comprehensive, personalized feedback to each student. I can identify and note specific opportunities for improvement throughout their submission, to facilitate their learning, and to support my grading. The fact that it reduces the time it takes me to complete my grading makes it easier and more likely for me to provide the type of quality feedback and guidance that the students need.
In other words, rather than typing the same comment 20 times in a week (because 10 students made the same error multiple times in their paper) or NOT noting the error over and over again because I don’t have time to spend three hours on each paper repeating the same comment, I can highlight and make notes throughout each paper, providing detailed feedback, and I can do it efficiently. Typing something 20 times adds no additional value over pasting it in 20 times. But, not providing the comments at all, because devoting hours to grading each paper is onerous…and/or not returning papers in a timely manner because providing detailed feedback within a quick turnaround time seems impossible … both of those practices definitely decrease the learning opportunities for our students.
My goal is always maximum effectiveness with maximum efficiency. One key to being a great online instructor is increasing your efficiency in managing your workload so that you can devote more time to teaching, guiding, and interacting with your students.
Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, strives to instill online courses with active learning, “providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject” (as defined by Meyers and Jones). To this she adds: “interact[ing] with realia, manipulatives, simulations, etc.”
Educators need to take into account the characteristics of the online classroom when trying to incorporate active learning into online courses, Beezley says. For example, the nonlinear nature of the online classroom and the lack of face-to-face interaction with its visual cues make it difficult to ensure that all learners are experiencing the course in the same manner.
“Face-to-face discussions are linear. Everyone has a shared experience. The conversation slowly builds, and hopefully by the end you’ve moved everyone from one level of understanding to a new level of understanding. In an online environment when you have students participate in a discussion through a discussion board, it’s not linear at all. There’s not necessarily a shared experience,” Beezley says.
Threaded discussion summaries
To help create shared learning experiences, Beezley has students take turns summarizing the threaded discussions. This helps create a common understanding, serves as a means of assessing students’ understanding of the content, and gives them the chance to actively engage with the course content.
To help create shared learning experiences, Beezley has students take turns summarizing the threaded discussions. This helps create a common understanding, serves as a means of assessing students’ understanding of the content, and gives them the chance to actively engage with the course content.
Rather than posting these summaries to the discussion board, Beezley has students post them to a course wiki or to Google Docs. This increases the accessibility of the summaries, which can be important for future reference and to enable all the students to edit them in case the student who did the original summary overlooked or misinterpreted key concepts.
Beezley recommends discussing the summary (synchronously or asynchronously) with the students to assess its accuracy and prevent incorrect information from becoming ingrained in students’ minds.
Synchronous collaboration
Beezley is an advocate of synchronous sessions as a way to create active learning opportunities. She uses Wimba, a live classroom program, to facilitate synchronous collaboration, including discussions (chat and/or voice), polling, and breakout rooms in which students can work on shared documents and report back to the entire class.
Beezley is an advocate of synchronous sessions as a way to create active learning opportunities. She uses Wimba, a live classroom program, to facilitate synchronous collaboration, including discussions (chat and/or voice), polling, and breakout rooms in which students can work on shared documents and report back to the entire class.
Beezley prefers to have students actually talk to each other as they collaborate in the breakout rooms. As in a face-to-face classroom, the instructor can visit with each group to ensure that they are going in the right direction.
“If things are going well, I usually leave them to do what they’re doing and know that they’re going to be reporting back when we meet in the main room. I find that I can usually just be the observer because the conversations are going well. I think the trick is to try to pull them back to the main room before they get to the point where the discussion has died down. Sometimes groups may not be done discussing before you pull them all back and ask them to report on whatever they did. [You need to] establish a culture of accountability, making sure that they need to use the time wisely, or they will run out of time and won’t be able to complete the task,” Beezley says.
As in the face-to-face classroom, spontaneous off-topic conversations are likely to occur in the synchronous online environment. While too much of this can detract from the learning experience, a certain amount of it is productive. “Some of my best learning in college occurred while walking out of a classroom when the class was over and asking, ‘Did you understand this part of the lecture? It was confusing to me.’ Conversations like that are hard to have in the online environment. When you put people together in small groups, sometimes they have those kinds of conversations. I think those conversations are a good thing.”
To help facilitate these collaborations, Beezley assigns each student to a base group of students who work together throughout the course. “Instead of having one large group, I like the idea of everyone taking part in the same discussion in small groups of five students who are always working together and talking things through and reporting back to the class.”
Ready, set, go
As a graduate student, Beezley participated in synchronous sessions facilitated by her instructor Peyri Herrera, who used a technique Beezley calls “Ready, set, go” to actively engage students.
As a graduate student, Beezley participated in synchronous sessions facilitated by her instructor Peyri Herrera, who used a technique Beezley calls “Ready, set, go” to actively engage students.
It’s a simple understanding check in which the instructor asks students to answer a question in chat and to submit their answers simultaneously on cue. The questions can be simple or complex. They can test recall or higher-order thinking. The key is to have students hit submit simultaneously so everyone’s answer is revealed at the same time.
“As a student I really feared that I would be wrong, because when it’s live there isn’t as much time to think about a response as there would be asynchronously. I think that fear is a healthy thing for students to feel. It raises your level of engagement. It makes you pay attention. It really helped me learn because whenever I was right I felt validated. But when I was wrong, I would pay attention even more.
“When you have that opportunity for the synchronous exchange of ideas, I think the stakes are higher than when it is asynchronous. When it is asynchronous, you have time to think through your responses, and I think that’s a good thing to have those times as well, but I think in that asynchronous event you have to think on your feet and apply what you know quickly. As an instructor it’s a great opportunity to really see where your students are and understand how much they’ve learned,” Beezley says.
Brain-Based Online Learning Design
Abreena Tompkins, instruction specialist at Surry Community College, has developed a brain-based online course design model based on a meta-analysis of more than 300 articles. In this study, she distilled the following elements of brain-based course design:
Tompkins’ model uses the acronym IGNITE.
Intervals: Tompkins recommends using an interval of intense focus for approximately 15 to 20 minutes followed by a two- to three-minute break. “Physiologically, your neurons are keen and alert for no more than 20 consecutive minutes. At the end of those 20 minutes, your neurons have gone from full-fledged alert to total collapse, and it takes two to three minutes for those neurons to be completely recovered and back to the total alert state. If you break longer than three minutes, you’ve redirected your attention,” Tompkins says.
Shifting from intense focus need not be a radical change. It can be as simple as posting to a discussion board.
Grouping: Present information in groups of three or five. “The brain can process no more than nine items in a sequence, and it actually does this much more efficiently with three or five. Odd numbers work better than even numbers. If you’re going to give students a list of six things to do, make it one, two, three, whitespace, four, five, six. The brain responds to whitespace because the brain processes things in groups. Students will be better able to focus as they look at this group of information. You’re providing the same amount of content. It just makes it more learner-friendly,” Tompkins says.
Novelty: When students are bored they tend to not pay attention to information that is present. Tompkins recommends injecting novelty to prevent boredom. “If there’s no announcement to make, post a good joke for the day. If you’ve got a header picture, change it once a week. Insert pictures with each unit. Do something to get their attention. You want students to go in and say, ‘What’s new today?’”
Interconnectedness: Learning needs to be connected to students’ reason for taking the course. Tompkins recommends making these connections by providing experiences and demonstrations and revisiting those experiences. Constant review is essential because people learn through two mechanisms: repetition and connecting to prior knowledge, Tompkins says.
Technology and time: Select the appropriate technology to suit the needs of your students. For example, podcasts may be effective for master’s-level students, but they are not a good choice for teaching developmental-level students.
It’s important to provide enough time for students to process what they’ve learned. “Don’t put so much work in there that there’s no time to process what you’re asking them to learn. I think sometimes instructors fill their courses with all kinds of things that there’s no way students will have time to do everything,” Tompkins says.
Environment: Keep the affective aspects of the online learning environment in mind. Welcome student emails. Understand your learners’ needs.
This model does not require sophisticated high-tech solutions. “It can all be done with a very simple course design,” Tompkins says. “I recommend using visuals all you can because over 90 percent of us are visual learners.”
- Low-risk, nonthreatening learning environment
- Challenging, real-life, authentic assessments
- Rhythms, patterns, and cycles
- Appropriate chunking or grouping
- Learning as orchestration rather than lecture or facilitation
- Appropriate level of novelty
- Appropriately timed breaks and learning periods
- Purposeful assessments
- Learning that addresses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners
- Active processing with mental models
- The use of universal examples, analogies, and parallel processing
Tompkins’ model uses the acronym IGNITE.
Intervals: Tompkins recommends using an interval of intense focus for approximately 15 to 20 minutes followed by a two- to three-minute break. “Physiologically, your neurons are keen and alert for no more than 20 consecutive minutes. At the end of those 20 minutes, your neurons have gone from full-fledged alert to total collapse, and it takes two to three minutes for those neurons to be completely recovered and back to the total alert state. If you break longer than three minutes, you’ve redirected your attention,” Tompkins says.
Shifting from intense focus need not be a radical change. It can be as simple as posting to a discussion board.
Grouping: Present information in groups of three or five. “The brain can process no more than nine items in a sequence, and it actually does this much more efficiently with three or five. Odd numbers work better than even numbers. If you’re going to give students a list of six things to do, make it one, two, three, whitespace, four, five, six. The brain responds to whitespace because the brain processes things in groups. Students will be better able to focus as they look at this group of information. You’re providing the same amount of content. It just makes it more learner-friendly,” Tompkins says.
Novelty: When students are bored they tend to not pay attention to information that is present. Tompkins recommends injecting novelty to prevent boredom. “If there’s no announcement to make, post a good joke for the day. If you’ve got a header picture, change it once a week. Insert pictures with each unit. Do something to get their attention. You want students to go in and say, ‘What’s new today?’”
Interconnectedness: Learning needs to be connected to students’ reason for taking the course. Tompkins recommends making these connections by providing experiences and demonstrations and revisiting those experiences. Constant review is essential because people learn through two mechanisms: repetition and connecting to prior knowledge, Tompkins says.
Technology and time: Select the appropriate technology to suit the needs of your students. For example, podcasts may be effective for master’s-level students, but they are not a good choice for teaching developmental-level students.
It’s important to provide enough time for students to process what they’ve learned. “Don’t put so much work in there that there’s no time to process what you’re asking them to learn. I think sometimes instructors fill their courses with all kinds of things that there’s no way students will have time to do everything,” Tompkins says.
Environment: Keep the affective aspects of the online learning environment in mind. Welcome student emails. Understand your learners’ needs.
This model does not require sophisticated high-tech solutions. “It can all be done with a very simple course design,” Tompkins says. “I recommend using visuals all you can because over 90 percent of us are visual learners.”
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