Rubrics: Carmen’s Most Hidden Secret

One of the issues that comes up in many of my posts is being able to give students effective and specific feedback. When you have 45 or more students, giving every one of them good feedback can be very taxing. Thankfully, Carmen has a way to simplify the process, but it’s not very easy to find the options. Under the Outcomes link on the left of a Carmen course, you can create rubrics to use for each of your assignments.

Rubrics can be attached to every type of assignment Carmen offers (assignments, quizzes, discussions and more). You can use them to create a set of canned comments you can give on graded material. This not only can make feedback less time consuming, but also more effective by giving the students specific and standard issues to improve throughout the course.

Rubrics should focus on the outcomes you want students to get from your course (in History those outcomes are usually things like “students will read primary and secondary sources critically” and “students can present and critique historical arguments”). One way to think about the outcomes you want your students to get from your class is to use Bloom’s Taxonomy which you can read about it in my post on adding variety to your discussions. Bloom’s Taxonomy is designed to connect activities like “understand” or “evaluate” with fields of knowledge like “facts” or “processes” to define outcomes for your students.

Find out more about making and using rubrics in the Canvas Guide.

 

World Turned Upside Down: Online Lecturing

One of the major departures for teaching online is the way we present students with their materials. In particular, there is no set times to present students with our take on the material. While it is tempting to convert all of our face-to-face materials into an online course, it might be helpful to think of learning online in a new way and avoiding “lecturing” altogether.

Online teachers should think of their courses as “flipped classrooms.” Theses are courses where students familiarize themselves with material on their own time then complete group work or other learning activities in the classroom (they do homework in class and lectures at home, hence flipped). You can read all about flipped classrooms at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Feel free to skip to the section on the key elements to see practical ways you can flip your class. Online courses are flipped by design, so these are good techniques to consider when making your own course.

Flipped Classroom

Created by Knewton

So how does thinking of online teaching as a flipped classroom affect the way you should approach the course? First, you need to think of a workflow for your students. Flipped classes use video lectures, powerpoints, online videos, and readings to present material to students then have a method for instructors to ensure that students worked through that material before coming to class. In an online course, you could ask students to complete a quiz before they are allowed to participate in discussion for that unit (you can do this by making separate modules for the quizzes and readings in a unit and making the quiz a “prerequisite” for the module under the edit option).

Flipped classes often use class time for discussion (something most of us are very familiar with) but some have students work on a project together or ask students to take turns teaching their peers the materials. These are all ways to replace the onerous discussion requirement with different activities for students to complete. For some ideas on activities other than discussion you can implement in your class, see my post Do We Need to Have a Discussion?

Finally, when considering how to present your own material to students, you should try to focus on the most effective and engaging ways to do that. Short videos are more effective than long videos (5-7 minutes is pretty typical). When presenting a lot of material, split it into several short videos so that students can watch them at their leisure. It’s also generally recommended that you be visible in your videos. If you are reading your powerpoints use software that can take video while capturing your screen like Mediasite or OBS Studio. This is a minor recommendation, but it helps students feel more engaged with a class when they can actually see the instructor. It also gives you another way to emphasize the material.

Do We Need to Have a Discussion?

Much of the day-to-day work when teaching online is running the discussion forum for the class. It requires even more work to ensure that student contributions are thoughtful and carry the conversation forward. This is also, perhaps, the most thankless portion of the job.

Discussion plays an important social role in the class. As mentioned in the page about motivating students, social interactions are a strong intrinsic motivator that will help students succeed and maintain interest in your classes. Discussion is the easiest (but maybe not the most effective) way to add that social aspect to a class.

Carmen does offer other social tools to help bring your students together. One of the most commonly used is Carmen Connect, a tool that allows you to video conference with multiple people. This tool does require set times, so instructors will have to be ready to lead the same discussion multiple times a week (and didn’t we all get tired of that after DSLing?)

Another option is group work. Carmen offers several tools to make group projects possible, the newest being integration with Microsoft Office which makes tradition group assignments (like papers and presentations) easy to organize. Many courses use CarmenWiki as a way to let students collaborate on making webpages or for each student to run a blog. One idea to make a social assignment is to have students critique or comment on each other’s work. Maybe divide them into small groups and have them take turns where a different student writes a response to the materials for the week and the other members of the group comment on that response. This can be done using blogs on CarmenWiki or by allowing students to make pages and discussions in Carmen.

Finally, some tricks can be used to improve discussions. The first is to divide the class into small groups for each discussion (you can do this under the People tab in Carmen). Students will be less overwhelmed by the size of a discussion if they are in groups of 10 instead of 50. Adding variety to discussion topics can also encourage student engagement. Finally, keeping expectations clear and giving constructive feedback early in the class can pay off in less work down the line. When you have issues with students’ posts, make sure your feedback is specific. If a student writes an excellent post, give specific and positive feedback so that they (and others in the discussion) know the ways to succeed.

Have you used any of the tools or techniques in the post? Let me know how it went by leaving a comment!

Research and Teaching Are Not Mutually Exclusive Skills

While many of us might feel like teachers first (after all, that’s where the money comes from), our training in the department is focused on research. Thankfully, with online teaching, many of the skills we use for research can be transferred to our teaching.

  1. Organization

As scholars we deal with a lot of information. In many ways, the process of writing a paper/dissertation chapter is the process of condensing raw primary source information around an argument. That same process needs to be done with the units we build our class around. There is far too much information about Ancient Greece out there for me to expect my students to know it all, so I need to find out what I want to focus on and use the best materials for that. This year I am focusing on how the Greek poleis created a sense of community. I’m ditching the warfare and pottery to talk about religious rituals and theater just like I focused on a small slice of Roman history in my dissertation. You really cannot cover everything in a survey, so focus on ideas you find interesting or relevant and edit your material!

  1. Work Flow

Many of us have different philosophies when it comes to our writing habits but most of us have at least developed writing habits of some kind. I have greatly benefited from setting a very modest amount of work to do every day (write one page). This same system can be applied to preparing materials for an online class: record one video, or make one discussion, or make one quiz. If you start early, you can make a class with a modest amount of work each day. Start your own “master course” by clicking the button on the bottom right of carmen.osu.edu and get started today!

  1. Finding Materials

The last shared skill I will cover here is our skill for finding materials and information for our own research. Many of us teach classes that bring us far from our comfort zone. I have taught Byzantine succession crises and ancient Chinese military innovations despite my firm roots in Western Europe. I made up for my lack of specialty by knowing the right questions to ask and where to look for high-quality overviews (Cambridge Histories Online, for example). Much of the skill of the historian is know where to find information and evaluating the claims in a document. The same skills work when listening to podcasts or watching documentaries to Bohn up on topics outside of our comfort zone.

What skills from your research do you bring to the classroom, digital or otherwise?