Teaching: Course Design

10 Top Hat Strategies for Active Learning

Top Hat provides for active learning, beyond the multiple choice “clicker” question. Below, you’ll find 10 activities to implement using Top Hat — from taking attendance and posing basic multiple choice questions to creating metacognitive “wrappers” that help build engagement.

To learn more about how to build questions and presentations in Top Hat please see our eModule: Leveraging Top Hat in Presentations.

  1. Attendance: Top Hat can be used to take attendance. Simply click on the Attendance icon at the top of the presenter pop-up or presentation screen before beginning your presentation.
  2. Summative Assessment: Top Hat can be used for graded activities, such as multiple-choice quizzes. We advise that Top Hat be reserved for low-stakes assessments.
  3. Formative Assessment: Top Hat can be used to pose questions to students and collect their answers for the purpose of providing real-time information about student learning to both the instructor and the students. Students can use this feedback to monitor their own learning, and instructors can use it to change how they manage class “on the fly” in response to student learning needs. Some instructors assign participation grades to these kinds of formative assessments to encourage students to participate. Other instructors assign points for correct answers to encourage students to take these questions more seriously. Other instructors do a mix of both, assigning partial credit for wrong answers.
  4. Homework Collection: Through the Review feature of Top Hat, students can record their answers to multiple-choice or free response homework questions and submit their answers via Top Hat outside of class. In addition, instructors can use the Pages feature of Top Hat to create high quality, multi-media content for review. Such content can be constructed with text, in-line questions, and videos all in one page.
  5. Discussion Warm-Up: Posing a question, giving students time to think about it and record their answers via Top Hat, and then displaying the results can be an effective way to warm a class up for a class-wide discussion.This approach gives all students time to think about and commit to an answer, setting the stage for greater discussion participation.
  6. Contingent Teaching: Since it can occasionally be challenging to determine what students understand, Top Hat can gauge understanding in real-time during class. If the Top Hat data show that students understand a given topic, then the instructor can move on to the next one. If not, then more time can be spent on the topic, perhaps involving more lecture, class discussion, or another clicker question. This approach has been called “agile teaching” by Beatty et al. (2006), who write, “This contrasts with the common practice of teaching according to a ‘ballistic’ lesson plan: designing a plan for an entire class meeting, ‘launching’ the plan, hoping that it hits reasonably close to its target, and waiting for the next exam to know for certain.” Certainly there are other ways to determine if students are understanding course material as one progresses through a course, but Top Hat can provide a convenient way of doing so. See also Draper & Brown (2004) for more on this approach.
  7. Peer Instruction: This is a tech adaptation of Think-Pair-Share. The teacher poses a question to his or her students. The students ponder the question silently and transmit their individual answers using the Top Hat. The teacher checks the histogram of student responses. If a significant number of students choose the wrong answer, the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbor. After a few minutes of discussion, the students submit answers again. This technique often (but not always!) results in more students choosing the correct answer as a result of peer instruction. This approach can also set the stage for a class-wide discussion that more fully engages all students. See Mazur (1997) for more on this approach.
  8. Repeated Questions: In the peer instruction approach described above, students respond to a given question twice–once after thinking about their answer individually and again after discussing it with their neighbor. Some instructors ask the same question several times, with different activities in between rounds of “voting” designed to help students better answer the question. For instance, an instructor might have the students answer the question individually, then discuss it with their neighbor and respond, then participate in a class-wide discussion and respond, and then listen to a mini-lecture on the topic and respond. For particularly challenging questions, this can be an effective technique for helping students discover and explore course material. This can also be used as a prediction method, as suggested in James Lang’s Small Teaching. The instructor asks a question ahead of the lecture or activity to activate prior knowledge or get at misconceptions or preconceptions. Then the question is repeated after the lecture or activity to solidify the correct information (Lang 46).
  9. Muddiest Point: In this approach, students answer a discussion board question at the end of class asking asking them what concept they have not mastered or understand poorly. The instructor reviews responses and re-teaches or re-emphasizes that information during the next class, via video posted to Carmen, or in an email or discussion board.
  10. Top Takeaways/One Minute Essay: This approach is similar to the Muddiest Point, but asks the students to summarize the main ideas of the lecture. The instructor can choose to make this an essay or a bulleted list of top takeaways. The essays or takeaways should mirror the learning outcomes of the lesson. If not, the instructor can address this in the next class or via the LMS.

Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License – Original Source: Vanderbilt University – The Center for Teaching © 2017 – “Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”) – Derek Bruff, Director Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Adapted and appended by Katie O’Keefe, The Ohio State University, College of Veterinary Medicine, Office of Teaching and Learning, 2017.

Gameful Course Design Supports Intrinsic Motivation

If students approach learning the same way they do video games, imagine the benefits, suggested Rachel Niemer, director of the Gameful Learning Lab at the University of Michigan. GAMEFUL PEDAGOGY and gameful course design, she added, encourage learners through support of intrinsic motivation.

Neimer spoke at OSU’s Innovate Conference held May 16.

“When gamers come (into a gaming session), they start at 0 and build learning credit for how they learn, as well as competency,” she explained. The reverse is true in the typical classroom where students start at 100 and then are penalized for errors.

Moreover, in classrooms, students often complain about content being too difficult or too complex. To the contrary, if a game is too easy, people stop playing. “Ideally, students would be intrinsically motivated to do the difficult job of learning,” she said. “… In games, people are intrinsically motivated.” There’s also a sense of play involved, which is rewarding in and of itself.

According to Niemer, gamification encompasses theories of motivation and the learning sciences. Three components of motivation, for example, are autonomy, belongingness, and competency. Application of game principles to non-gaming activities, as a result, can be powerful.

Some methods for adding gamefulness to a course include:

  • Framing the course as a competition not for grades, but for indications of competency like badges that accumulate on a student’s profile page or in an application.
  • Providing students with choices on how to play or earn a grade.
  • Offering students the ability to design their own assessments of learning.
  • Creating a method whereby students can see their own progress (not measured in grades but in tasks completed but not deadlined, for example) and compare it to other students’ progress in a course.

Allowing students the opportunity to “predict” points they will earn on activities and assess where to put their time and energy. (They already do this, Niemer said, trading off performance on one class’s assignments to study for an exam.)

Niemer and her colleagues have created a gradebook tool called GradeCraft that manages gameful courses and supports gameful course design. Instructors can purchase individual copies if their first experiments with gameful pedagogy show promise.

“Impact Student Motivation: Make School a Better Game” is available for viewing in its entirety.

Open Pedagogy Benefits Students

Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D., of Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an open education advocate, spoke to Ohio State participants at the 2017 Innovate Conference this May.

Jhangiani has studied the higher education environment, and he pointed to the state of Ohio as typical of lowered state educational funding placing an increasing burden on tuitions. One of the few aspects of higher education attendance costs that faculty have control over, he argued, is related to course materials.

Since 1971, he said, course material costs have increased over 1,000%. “There’s no other consumer good – AT ALL,” Jhangiani said, “that comes close …. Not even healthcare.” He asked faculty and administrators at OSU to put themselves in the mind of a student. A study of 22,0000 students in Florida in 2012 and 2016 showed that 66.5% don’t buy all the required textbooks; 47.6% take fewer classes as a result of course material costs; and 45.5% don’t take a particular course because of high course materials cost.

Moreover, publishers who sell students materials and restrict access to the materials afterwards or don’t allow printing after the course are “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Jhangiani argued for open resources to support classes, which allow faculty to “revise and remix” content, increasing and “reclaiming” academic freedom. The number of open resources available through sites like guttenberg.org, open.bccampus.ca, open.umn.edu, openstax.org, and others “look, smell, and taste like a Pearson book.”

Thirteen peer reviewed studies of the efficacy of open resources or textbooks representing 119,720 students showed 95% of are doing the same or better when these resources are used as opposed to traditional textbooks and materials. In addition, drops, retention, and passing grades are better.

In addition, Jhangiani said, “traditional assignments suck energy. What if we grow up and fix the problem?”

For example, he said, “Wikipedia is the first port of call for students, and … if we’re honest, the first port of call for faculty.” Wikipedia always needs more articles about scientists and sciences. “What if students write them?” he asked. Moreover, “what if students write the questions for assignments? It takes a deep understanding to write distractors.”

This process moves from the concept of open resources to OPEN PEDAGOGY. Jhangiani suggested educators craft policies and delivery systems with little thought about their effect on students. He pointed to learning management systems (Blackboard, Canvas) as exemplifying that “learning is best done by management.”

“Ideology is embedded in every technology,” he explained. “What are we here for?”

According to Jhangiani, deep learning is not about content transfer. “I’m going to challenge you,” he told participants, to think more and more about collaboration and sharing and not leaving decisions about student learning to only the people in the room.

Jhangiani’s presentation is available for viewing. His slides are open resources available for use or remixing. His book, Open: The Philosophy and Practices That Are Revolutionizing Science and Education, is available for anyone to download and read.

CVM @ Innovate: Clinical Cases as Text-Based Games

Earlier this year, Jay Hsiao, Instructional Designer from the Office of Teaching and Learning, participated in the 5-week eXperience Play (XP) Cohort and learned about developing text-based games that provide students opportunities to learn through game play. A similar concept is gamification, in which gaming elements are used in non-game contexts, such as experience points, badges, and leaderboards.

At the 2017 Innovate Conference on May 16, Jay was invited to showcase his work with the cohort during the Steal My Idea session.

In text-based games:

  • Instructors must empathize and think about how non-experts approach a particular subject.
  • Instructors can create simulations that carry students step-wise through complex subjects.
  • Instructors get to have fun and be creative in the process!
  • Students can exercise control over their own learning, think critically and make their own decisions.
  • Students can practice and learn from experience, in an environment where they can fail safely.
  • Students have an opportunity to exercise empathy and consider how others, including experts, may approach a particular subject.

Continue reading CVM @ Innovate: Clinical Cases as Text-Based Games →

Making an Impact @ CVM: Making Learning Affordable and Accessible

Aligned with President Drake’s 2020 Vision, Ohio State’s Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) “helps educators take ownership of their course content and find creative solutions to promote student savings. This includes re-imagining the textbook, encouraging innovation, and empowering faculty through grants and training to adopt, adapt, create and share open educational resources, effectively utilize library resources, and create high-quality digital materials.”

The Office of Teaching and Learning’s Instructional Designer Jay Hsaio has been working with Drs. Ryan Jennings and Chris Premanandan from the college’s Department of Biological Sciences on an ALX grant they received this academic year.

Jennings and Premanadan are writing a digital histology textbook that will be used in CVM’s introductory histology course. Some project goals include:

  • Mitigating out-of-pocket costs to students by replacing the current textbook.
  • Replacing human-specific content, and instead covering the spectrum of anatomic inter-species differences that are fundamental to a veterinarian’s medical training.
  • Providing comprehensive and extensive digital materials and quizzes that are readily accessible to students outside the classroom.

Watch the video below to find out more about ALX and the project. The Office of Teaching and Learning will also provide updates as the project progresses.

Have a great idea? The ALX RFP is now open, and will remain open over through the summer. Follow this link to find out more about the FTP, and feel free to contact Teaching and Learning for consultation. We would love to support another wonderful project!

 

CVM @ Innovate: Global Impact with the Global One Health program

The College of Veterinary Medicine was represented at this year’s Innovate Conference held on May 16, in a session entitled “Lightning Ideas: Impact Beyond the Classroom.”

In this session, 4th year DVM-MPH student, Sarah Waibel, co-presented on the Global One Health program; the program is led by Dr. Wondwossen Gebreyes, and it aims to “connect Ohio State to Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Brazil, Thailand, China, India and beyond in a coordinated, multidisciplinary approach to improve health, build capacity, and provide learning opportunities for students across the globe.”

Continue reading CVM @ Innovate: Global Impact with the Global One Health program →

How to Design Programs for Significant Learning

Significant learning meets two criteria: 1) learning lasts beyond the end of a course, and 2) learning has an impact on personal, professional, social or civic life. The latter suggests significant learning changes how a person thinks, feels, or acts in their lives.

During the FAME First Friday Series on April 7, a group of presenters in the fields of medicine and education discussed ways they have encountered of “Applying Significant Learning Principles in Curriculum Design.”

Larry Hurtubise, M.A., from Nationwide Children’s Hospital, pointed to backward design as the first step to developing curriculum that promotes significant learning. Matching learning objectives with teaching and learning activities and using assessment to refine those activities creates a state of continual improvement.

Assessment across an educational program, he said, combines multiple individual student assessment activities to reach an accurate judgement of mastery (as opposed to high-stakes summative testing). Moreover, program assessment is more in line with current competency-based medical education and adult learning styles.

Competency-based medical education, he argued, requires a paradigm shift from a passive learner shaped by positive and negative reinforcement to a learner who constructs his or her own understanding and knowledge of the world through experiences. This empowered learner must question how an activity helps them gain knowledge and encourages them to become self-directed, “expert” learners.

The group, who also included Claire Stewart, M.D., of Nationwide Children’s, and Brenda Roman, M.D., of Wright State’s College of Medicine, shared 12 tips for programmatic assessment taken from a 2015 article in the journal Med Teach.

  1. Develop a master plan for assessment.
  2. Develop examination regulations.
  3. Adopt a robust system for collecting information.
  4. Ensure that every low-stakes assessment provides meaningful feedback for learning.
  5. Provide mentoring to learners.
  6. Ensure trustworthy decision-making.
  7. Organize intermediate decision-making assessments.
  8. Encourage and facilitate personalized remediation.
  9. Monitor and evaluate the learning effect of the program and adapt.
  10. User the assessment process information for curriculum evaluation.
  11. Promote continuous interaction between stakeholders.
  12. Develop a strategy for implementation.

FAME is the Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement center at the OSU’s College of Medicine.

Tips to Improve the Academic Lecture

OSU Department of Psychology instructor Anne Wilson typically found herself teaching in classrooms designed for didactic lecture. Then she had the opportunity to deliver her introductory psychology course in one of the university’s new active learning spaces.

That classroom, designed in much the same way as CVM’s new active learning classroom in VMAB, forced her to consider certain questions:
• Is active learning always better than lecturing?
• When should someone want or need to lecture?
• Is good lecturing better than bad lecturing?
• What makes a great lecture?

Great lectures, Wilson suggested during a Teaching Academy event on May 4, tell a story, use visual aids effectively and always consider the audience.

According to Wilson, storytelling in lectures makes the content more meaningful and memorable. The power of a story is evident when we consider our favorite childhood books and still remember their lessons decades later.

Faculty can define a unified meaning or message in a lecture and use their own stories or students’ stories to sequence content, promote discussion on or focus review of facts and concepts. Moreover, the stories behind academic studies — the Stanford Prison experiment, for example – “hook” a finding in the mind of the listener.

She also recommended including video and images in lectures to address the “Multimedia Principle”: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. At the same time, lecturers must concentrate on reducing cognitive load based on the “Coherence Principle,” which posits that people learn better when extraneous material is excluded.

(While students may clamor for fully loaded slides at CVM, putting all content on presentation slides doesn’t really do them much good from a learning perspective.)

Wilson also reviewed the “Signaling Principle,” which suggests learning is enhanced if instructors provide cues for how to process information. Small actions – like developing presentation slides with the assistance of an instructional designer – can accomplish this task by using tables, bolding key terms, or sequentially presenting data on graphs during an explanation so students’ attention is guided.

Ultimately, content that does not support or promote the central message of the lecture should be eliminated.

Assessing the students’ prior knowledge, laying a foundation of facts, and then making connections between new content and what the students already know also contributes to a deeper learning experience.

Wilson was just one of several engaging presenters at the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s annual conference. To review other resources, visit http://academy.osu.edu/annual-conference/session-materials/. The Office of Teaching & learning particularly recommends the slides from the keynote address.

Of Interest: Let’s use video to reinvent education

“In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student — what was the five percent they didn’t know? Maybe they didn’t know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power. Then you build on that in the next concept. That’s analogous to — imagine learning to ride a bicycle. Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, then I come back after two weeks, and say, ‘Well, let’s see. You’re having trouble taking left turns. You can’t quite stop. You’re an 80 percent bicyclist.’ So I put a big ‘C’ stamp on your forehead — and then I say, ‘Here’s a unicycle.’ As ridiculous as that sounds, that’s exactly what’s happening in our classrooms right now.”

– Sal Khan, Founder and CEO of Khan Academy

Satch Sal Khan’s full TED talk “Let’s use video to reinvent education”(Click the banner image to watch the video)

While you may have never heard of him, Sal Khan is revolutionizing education. The former hedge fund analyst began his unlikely path in education when he started tutoring his cousin in mathematics using the internet. By 2006, Khan had shifted his tutoring strategy to the creation of videos which he publicly posted to YouTube. The videos became a hit with an audience that spanned well beyond Sal’s friends and family, leading Khan to quit his job in 2009 in order to found the “Khan Academy”.

Today, the on-line Khan Academy is a global leader in free education. Over 15 million users visit the site each month in order to access over 100,000 videos, articles, and exercises. Learners can use the site in order to practice everything from the most basic mathematics skills all the way to preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT).

Continue reading Of Interest: Let’s use video to reinvent education →

Panelists Offer Tips for New Faculty Preparing First Lectures

On April 5, Dr. Maxey Wellman, Dr. Jason Stull, and Dr. Theresa Burns teamed up for a panel presentation on “Getting Started on Classroom Teaching” as part of the New Faculty Series. They provided the following observations, recommendations, and advice to participants.

On inheriting lecture materials

Because people have unique approaches in the classroom, Dr. Stull and Dr. Burns suggested new faculty give themselves plenty of time to review materials and make adjustments based on the learning outcomes/objectives for the lecture. Dr. Stull also urged them to contact the course team leader for clarification of course goals or design if needed. Dr. Wellman recommended making notes to oneself after delivering a lecture about what worked and didn’t work – a post-mortem of the lecture – and then refining presentation for the next delivery.

On appropriate level of instruction

Don’t hesitate ask a colleague or the Office of Teaching & Learning to review a lecture for appropriate content level and learning outcomes/objectives, panelists agreed. In particular, new faculty should consider the content as it assists in preparing Day 1 veterinarians.

On writing test questions

Dr. Burns said it’s critical to align test questions with learning outcomes. She also observed that tests can be viewed as another opportunity to learn material, and that students might benefit when faculty articulate this value. Dr. Wellman recommended writing the test questions before delivering a lecture “because it will remind you … to stress the topics that are important.”

While there’s no real template for writing questions, there are best practices, Dr. Stull noted. All panelists acknowledged writing a strong test question takes time and refinement, and that ExamSoft item analyses are helpful with refinement. They also recommended having interns, residents, and former students test out the questions to check for clarity. Finally, they suggested giving students an opportunity to practice what they will be tested on, and when possible reviewing tests with students to reinforce material and enhance learning.

The panelists directed participants to the Office of Teaching & Learning and University Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (UCAT) for workshops and consultations.

On finding graphics and media for presentations and keeping content current

According to Dr. Burns, each department and each section almost always has one person who photographs or records a number of cases. They are often the best resource for multimedia and images. Dr. Stull keeps lecture or topic folders, and as he comes across material during the year, he puts it into the folder for review the next time the lecture is prepared. Dr. Wellman gathers journal articles in the same way and makes adjustments to her lectures to feature the most current findings in veterinary medicine.

On teaching style and engagement

Dr. Stull advised structuring lectures to always highlight the learning outcomes/objectives first, including as many cases as possible, and bringing “your own enthusiasm” to a topic. “You have to be you,” Dr. Wellman said. She also told new faculty to chunk material for presentation and in between topics returning to the lecture’s objectives slide and checking off what’s been completed so students understand the connection between content and objectives.

Because so many people have some discomfort talking in front of 150-plus people, Dr. Burns said, “Fake it ‘till you make it.” The more new faculty lecture, the more comfortable they will become, she assured participants. She pointed out it’s possible to be entertaining and teach well at the same time; the two are not mutually exclusive. Panelists also said students understand when faculty view them as colleagues and don’t lecture down to them, and they appreciate it when they see faculty enjoy teaching.

The New Faculty Series is organized by Associate Dean Mary Jo Burkhard. Presentations occur each month and provide extended onboarding on topics faculty have questions or concerns about. All faculty members are invited to attend if they see a topic that interests them.