Teaching: Course Design

Faculty and Staff Development Session Focuses on Pedagogies of Inclusion

Six faculty joined Office of Teaching and Learning staff to discuss pedagogies of inclusion during a Thursday morning event on “Inclusive Pedagogies.” The conversation was rewarding, and lasted well past the session with instructors sharing their how they approach engaging as many students as possible.

Inclusive pedagogy is a method of teaching that incorporates dynamic practices and learning styles, multicultural content, and varied means of assessment, with the goal of promoting student academic success, as well as social, cultural, and physical well-being, and it often reflect the strategies we know work to engage all students.

All instructors are urged to begin to assess assumptions they have about experience, knowledge, ability, identify, and viewpoints.

Tips and takeaways from the session included the following, among others:

  • Recognize any biases or stereotypes you may have absorbed.
  • Rectify any language patterns or case examples that exclude or demean any groups.
  • Attend to student identities and seek to change the ways systemic inequities shape dynamics in teaching-learning spaces, affect individuals’ experiences of those spaces, and influence course and curriculum design.
  • If discriminatory remarks are made in your class, it is your responsibility to interrupt them and point them out as such. If you do not, students may think that you either approve of or are unaware of the impact of the comment or behavior.
  • Do not assume that all students will recognize cultural, literary or historical references familiar to you.
  • Convey the same level of respect and confidence in the abilities of all your students.
  • In class discussion, be wary of unfair patterns of communication (e.g., men interrupting women, a white student getting credit for a student of colors idea) and ensure fair access to class discussion for all students.
  • In courses in which class discussion is important, consider calling upon students rather than only relying on volunteers. Some students may be willing to participate but may not volunteer, for cultural or personal reasons.
  • Consider who comprises panels of experts or guest lecturers.
  • Use Universal Design for Learning (UDL) when preparing activities, materials, and presentations.

Creating Custom (Talking-Head) Videos with MediaSite

A recent email from Caroline El-Khoury, PPS director, noted, “Classes are held unless the University closes. During inclement weather some faculty members may choose to cancel their own class and send a lecture capture link to the students rather than rescheduling.“In this update, we want to give you an option that will allow your class to “meet” even if all of you can’t be on campus. In particular, these following tips will help you create your own custom talking-head videos, which you can then provide to students on Carmen.

(For completeness’s sake, you can also perform a custom capture using one of the college’s capture-equipped rooms, and requesting a link from VIS.)

Equipment
At the very least, you should have the following tools available (recommendations not meant as product placement):

  • A webcam – We have used the Logitech C920 and we like it; you may also have one already built into your monitor or your smartphone/tablet
  • A microphone – We have used the Blu SnowBall for various custom caption solutions; if you have a headset with microphone, such as the Apple EarPod (free if you are an iPhone user), it may also be a good option. 

Many laptops come with a microphone built-in, but we have found that these usually do not yield clear recordings.

Using MediaSite

MediaSite is the university’s solution for video capture and consumption. What’s nice about MediaSite is that it can give us in-depth analytics on areas such as who’s watched a video, how much of the video an average viewer watches, and popular segment(s) of the video. With MediaSite, you have the option to create content with a combination of video, audio, slides, and desktop recording. MediaSite is the system that is being actively investigated for use in the Clinical Skills Lab.

(Before you start, here are 10 tips to record yourself with a webcam, written by Laura Schmitz for the UniCast blog.)

Custom talking-head videos can be created on your own PC/Mac device using the MediaSite Desktop Recorder application. Here are some tips to get your started:

If you are using a smartphone or a tablet, such as the iPad:

Finally, you can share your media by Adding a Presentation to Carmen, or by Linking a MediaSite Presentation elsewhere. 

In the next installment of this series, we will show you how Top Hat can be used as more than an in-class audience response tool!  As always, please feel free to reach out to CVMOTL@osu.edu for ideas and/or assistance.

AAVMC to Unveil Competency Framework for Veterinary Medicine

For the past two years, a group of respected educators from the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges member institutions has been working to develop a competency framework for veterinary medicine that aligns with approaches used by other health professions.

The Office of Teaching & Learning became aware of this work when it began and participated in an activity designed to provide feedback to the group working on this project, specifically examining a very early draft of the competencies during a session at the 2016 Veterinary Educators Collaborative.

The finalized framework will be introduced during a plenary session at the 2018 AAVMC annual meeting in March.

Council for Professional Education Chair Tod Drost and OTL Director Melinda Rhodes-DiSalvo will be present at the meeting and are excited to share what they learn with colleagues at CVM and consider how the framework might assist in advancing educational excellence. In essence the framework will respond to the questions “What does the public expect a graduate veterinarian to be able to do?” and “How do you actually assess students’ competencies in these areas?”

According to AAVMC: “The framework will be introduced as a ‘best practices’ model which all member institutions are welcome to adopt or consult as they modify existing curricula or develop new ones. While no action will be taken to adopt the program as an official standard for evaluating educational outcomes, the body of work represents the most substantial effort ever undertaken in this area of academic veterinary medicine and is expected to serve as a valuable tool to guide curricular development, refinement and outcomes assessment.”

The project was led by Associate Deans for Academic Affairs Dr. Jennie Hodgson of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and Dr. Laura Molgaard of the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine.

AAVMC’s website has additional information about the process and working group.

Teach Students How to Learn Provides Insight Into Learner Empowerment

The first of two discussion session on application of instructional practices outlined in Teach Students How to Learn — the OTLs autumn semester book group selection — took place this week. Faculty attending said this particular selection was helpful in gaining insight into how students can empower themselves as learners.

The Office of Teaching & Learning has shared some of the strategies presented in this text with students. In particular, we provided them with information on metacognitive learning strategies and the study cycle.

Continue reading Teach Students How to Learn Provides Insight Into Learner Empowerment →

Spiral Approach Used to Teach Clinical Skills Across Years

Tufts University School of Dentistry has piloted a course for fourth-year students “that now involves a team of students from each year and a real-time student response tool that plants the seeds of community in previously anonymous auditorium classes,” according to a new Educause article.

The course teamed “each fourth-year student with a third-year student, a second-year student, and a first-year student so they could work together on the fourth-year student’s case. This is a new pedagogical approach called ‘Student-driven Pedagogy of Integrated, Reinforced Active Learning (SPIRAL),’ modified from a program designed by Mark Wolff and Andrew Spielman from New York University College of Dentistry (see figure 2).

 

According to course developers, “Each student has particular responsibilities to align with their progress through the program.

  • First-year students are responsible for presenting information pertinent to the case that has to do with the patient but represents ‘Normal’ (see figure 2).
  • Second-year students are responsible for presenting information on the medications the patient is taking, any illnesses the patient has, and risk factors.
  • Third-year students are expected to answer a clinical question using evidence-based principles.
  • Fourth-year students select one of their patients for the case presentation and coordinate the team project while working with their patient. They also must demonstrate leadership skills through coordination of their team, and afterwards they conduct a self-assessment.

“For the peer-review element, the students analyze one another as a team by reflecting on the project to discover areas for improvement and assess factors of one another’s teamwork, presentation, and time-management skills. We also have mentors for each team — faculty and clinical staff members who oversee the team and monitor its progress.”

Read the complete “Integrating 21-st Century Workplace Skills into Lecture Based Courses article.

How to Increase the Value of Tests

  • Incorporating frequent quizzes into a class’s structure may promote student learning. These quizzes can consist of short-answer or multiple-choice questions and can be administered online or face-to-face. … Providing students the opportunity for retrieval practice—and, ideally, providing feedback for the responses—will increase learning of targeted as well as related material.

  • Providing “summary points” during a class encourages students to recall and articulate key elements of the class. Setting aside the last few minutes of a class to ask students to recall, articulate, and organize their memory of the content of the day’s class may provide significant benefits to their later memory of these topics. Whether this exercise is called a minute paper or the PUREMEM (pure memory, or practicing unassisted retrieval to enhance memory for essential material) approach, it may benefit student learning.

  • … Pretesting students’ knowledge of a subject may prime them for learning. By pretesting students before a unit or even a day of instruction, an instructor may help alert students both to the types of questions that they need to be able to answer and the key concepts and facts they need to be alert to during study and instruction.

  • Finally, instructors may be able to aid their students’ metacognitive abilities by sharing a synopsis of these observations. … Adding the potential benefits of pretesting may further empower students to take control of their own learning, such as by using example exams as primers for their learning rather than simply as pre-exam checks on their knowledge.

Continuing the Conversation: OTL Presents on Teaching Without Lectures

During a facilitated discussion Wednesday morning on “Trends and How-to’s of Teaching without Lectures,” faculty participants raised many thought-provoking points regarding the merits and challenges of moving away from lecture-heavy delivery of course content. The conversation was offered as part of the college’s faculty professional development series.
  • Why do we lecture? Due to factors such as program history, curricular structures, and time constraints, lectures may seem to be the most pragmatic, straight-forward way of guaranteeing delivery of the curriculum as a whole. In addition, the prospect of receiving negative student feedback for trying non-lecture activities may be inhibiting to faculty.
Dr. James M. Lang advocates for starting with “small teaching” changes, or activities that can be incorporated rather easily at the individual class or lecture level. Another idea for experimenting with small changes is flipping a class or two by assigning learning materials for review outside of class, making use of small knowledge-checking activities, and leaving class time for additional knowledge-checking, reinforcement, and application. Mini-lectures are often used in alternative delivery methods for quick provision of essential information.
  • When and where would we consider incorporating non-lecture techniques, such as active learning? First take a look at your teaching goals and learning outcomes, then consider how those outcomes are best assessed. Brainstorm what kinds of activities and materials you can offer to your students so they achieve the learning outcomes. We call this process Backward Design.
  • What is active learning? Activities in which students actively engaging with knowledge and application. Some techniques include Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Team-Based learning (TBL), and Think-Pair-Share (TPS). See this link for additional techniques.
  • How do innovative instructional approaches affect grading? It’s worth looking at whether your exam questions align with learning outcomes. You might also ask the following: Is an exam really the best method for assessing student achievement of the intended learning outcomes? If not, how can exam questions be restructured to promote learning above the recall level? Are grades given to students on exams really indicative of their outcome achievement? If not there may be a better way to measure student learning. Is student learning better assessed with competencies than grades alone?
If you are interested in learning more and/or having additional conversations, please feel free to contact Teaching and Learning at CVMOTL@osu.edu. You can also find the resources from the session in this Top Hat course.

Ohio State Digital Flagship Announcement Provides Opportunity to Highlight Local Ed Tech Initiatives and Innovations

Announced this week is a new collaboration between OSU and Apple called the Digital Flagship University, which has 3 components:
  • a student-success initiative to integrate learning technology throughout the university experience
  • an iOS design laboratory on the Columbus campus serving faculty, staff, students and members of the broader community
  • university-wide opportunities for students to learn coding skills to enhance their career-readiness in the app economy.
Faculty and staff should know that our college has been involved in its own iPad initiative since autumn 2016. At that time, the Office of Teaching and Learning and Professional Program support saw iPads as a way to remedy technical issues associated with ExamSoft test administration, to maximize student use of educational technology, and to support instructor ability to implement different instructional approaches.

Our office views this announcement as an opportunity to further engage teaching faculty and staff around the pedagogical advantages of students having access to a common set of learning technologies.

In fact, some exciting work involving the iPad (as well as other devices and applications in our eLearning ecosystem) includes the following:

  • As part of the Stanton Clinical Skills Lab effort, a team led by Dr. Tatiana Motta has been making exciting progress on the development of various models, like the ear model below, that can be 3D-printed. Such models can also be used to develop Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality (A/V/MR) experiences, which Dr. Motta has also been exploring.

  • In some of his lectures, Dr. Austin Hinds provides his students with guided notes that they can fill in during class. Through the use of an Apple TV purchased by Teaching & Learning, Dr. Hinds is able to wirelessly project his iPad to screens in Wexner Auditorium. As a result, he is able to write and illustrate content in real-time. In this instance, he helped students with their guided notes. Being able to wirelessly project also allows him to move around the auditorium and engage with the students more effectively.

  • As mentioned in last week’s update, Drs. Jessica Hokamp and Maxey Wellman have introduced an activity into their cytology elective course during which students are asked to effectively use the microscope, identify areas and cells being viewed, and capture the area identified using the iPhone.

OTL provides training each year to students, and Jay Hsiao and Kate Midnight, our instructional designers and educational technologists, are interested in helping you to explore integrating learning technologies into your courses?

Do you have any ideas that you would like to implement? Feel free to contact us at CVMOTL@osu.edu!

Incorporate Interactivity Into Your Courses Using Top Hat

Top Hat is fast, simple to use, and great for implementing quick participation and knowledge checks during your face-to-face class time. Top Hat is CVM’s only classroom response system for academic courses, as Teaching and Learning no longer supports the old TurningPoint clickers. 

(Watch this short video to find out more about Top Hat.)

You may have heard that you need to load your PowerPoint into Top Hat, but that is only one of the options! Using the Top Hat desktop application, you open Top Hat alongside your PowerPoint presentation without uploading it at all.

If you like that option, here’s what you can do to get started:

  • Each CarmenCanvas course can only be synchronized with one Top Hat course; please check with your team leaders to see if you already have a Top Hat course!
  • Contact Office of Teaching and Learning. We will help you create a semester Top Hat course, synchronize your student roster, and get you started with creating content and activities.
  • If you use Top Hat to give grades to students, we can also help you with synchronizing grades from Top Hat back to CarmenCanvas.

Tip: ALX Project A Great Opportunity To Enhance Your Course Design While Authoring A Free Course Textbook

It is no secret that textbooks constitute as a major source of expense for students, and some students opt to not purchase textbooks due to cost. However, “education can’t be excellent if students aren’t fully equipped. The cost of textbooks shouldn’t be a limiting factor to their success.”

The Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) program out of the Office of Distance Education and eLearning set out “help instructors take ownership of their courses and content [through exploring] creative solutions that promote students savings. This includes re-imagining the textbook, encouraging faculty innovation, and empowering our faculty through grants and training opportunities to adopt, adapt, create and share open educational resources.”

The Office of Teaching and Learning has been working with a team led by Dr. Ryan Jennings and Dr. Chris Premanandan this summer on an in-house textbook that will be used in the VME-I Veterinary Histology Course. Entitled Veterinary Histology, the textbook currently consists of 14 chapters, spanning from basics such as the cell itself, to specialized structures such as the cardiovascular system and the eye. Students will be able to access this free textbook on the web while online, or download a portable file to any device (phone, tablet, laptop) to review offline; they can also choose to print any part of the book. Writing this textbook allowed the team to take ownership over not only the selection of content, but also how the content is presented and used in the histology course.

If you are interested in participating in this process, ALX will offer a webinar entitled “Make and Use Open Resources with Tools and Support from the Affordable Learning Exchange” on 8/17/2017; you can sign up via this registration link. In addition, ALX is currently accepting applications for their next round of grants; you can via this application link.