Teaching Public Health Topics Online

Three general videos to share with YD faculty who can then share with students:

• Points (1:50 minutes)
• Searching and Filtering (1:38 minutes)
• YellowDig Functions: A Quick Start Guide (2:36 minutes)

If students need to create superscripts in their posts, here is a video on how to do that.

• Creating superscripts in YellowDig (~1:18 minutes)

Are you thinking you’d like to use YellowDig to replace your Blackboard discussions? Before you do, I would highly suggest watching the following videos and setting a time to meet with an Instructional Designer to discuss ideas.

• I need a discussion (2 minutes)
• How to Build Strong Communities (5.5 minutes)
• Why no assignments? (5 minutes)
• What ‘no assignments’ really means? (2 minutes)

Also, YellowDig is offering regular free webinars and they are excellent. If you cannot attend, they are all recorded and available afterwards. 

Webinar (ASU): History, Efficacy and Instructional Design with Yellowdig (1 hour). Excellent! Shares some updated best practices.

Consider these two visuals of two different types of discussion – “discussion assignments” vs “Discussion Community”.

Image taken from YellowDig video on How to Build YellowDig Communities. Here you see the ‘go getter’ slowly turning into the procrastinator because most students procrastinate toward the deadline for the discussion assignment.

Image taken from YellowDig video on How to Build YellowDig Communities. Here you see a different type of interactive community where specific topic discussions can weave throughout the course and not end when each module ends. The go getter and the procrastinator are now all part of the discussion community.

Notes from a YellowDig webinar with faculty from Fort Hayes University.

Creating points creates a structure of the board and identifying value in specific types of activities.

There are two types of interventions instructors can make for a YellowDig board:

1) Board settings (ie points, weekly point max),

2) instructor interventions while course is in session – the number of posts instructors make, comments make and instructor badges.

Influence of points. YellowDig is based on a motivation system.  It’s the power of the social engineering and gamification in this platform. When students realize that what they write gathers comments and others start engaging with their writing from others then the quality of their work goes up, their work is more engaging.

Relationship between student actions, board settings and instructor interventions.

What are minimum number of words set per post or comment?  The default setting is not enough (40) and how do they get students to say more? And for comments, too?

Comment/post control is the value that the instructor places on comments. By default comment is worth half of points as a post.  Some faculty are taking their “bad experiences’ from regular discussions when students didn’t comment well.  Others used MORE points for comments to encourage conversation.

The interaction effect of structure settings had the largest conversation ratio (ie 4 comments per post): settings of all 3 comments (Encouraging comments (pin control), and upvotes and weekly max).

What is it that you want to accomplish on the YD board? See “formula” on YD webinar with Fort Hayes State University.

• Encourage conversation?
  • To encourage conversation you want students to be appropriately awarded for commenting on other posts. It is ok to give equal or more points for comments.
• Encourage reading?
  • To encourage reading then consider the points set for a post to be higher.

Instructor participation:

• Instructor posts (Fort Hays recommends 1 post/week by the instructor. They found this to increase the conversation ratio and the reads per post)
• Instructor comments
  • The more the instructor comments the more the students will post. It is encouraging the conversation to continue.
• Instructor badges
  • When instructors give a badge the conversation ratio increases.
• Suggestion: faculty participate judiciously and positive reinforcement (ie comments and badges) improves student interactions.
• Board settings suppress the influence of instructor participation (The settings you choose before the class starts will have much more of an impact, than what you do when board is active.)
• When students are given agency within the board they enjoy using YellowDig and the quality of posts and comments have gone up.

How to build a strong learning community in Yellowdig (for full details watch YD video)

• Time and participation
• Survival of strong and useful conversations
• Interconnected members
• Listening

Goal of YellowDig is a single assignment without weekly assignments with weekly deadlines. It is more of an open free form conversation. YellowDig suggest that the weekly assignments with deadlines each week have a damaging effect on building communities. Mostly because when you start the next week you are automatically killing off past discussions, especially if every student is expected to post. You also create an over- production of content and don’t produce any of the back and forth conversations.

How can we change our frame of reference from the ‘post every week’ format we are used to:

• You can take your assignments and turn them into prompts. If the free form discussion doesn’t work for all of your students, you can leave them with a prompt such as .. ‘if you cannot think of something to talk about this week, consider this..’.
• Faculty can be a dynamic part of the community by posting interesting and current articles that correspond to the content. This will help to engage students. Encourage students to post current event articles, too.
• Give students freedom and guide them along, as needed.

I recently read a book titled Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby with James M. Lang.  My approach to teaching is very practical and application based so I appreciated some of the ideas shared in this book. Some were new ideas to me, some not, and I’ve compiled my favorites below.

First, I’ll share the premise behind small teaching online, which is “Paying attention to the small, every day decisions we make in teaching represents our best route to successful learning for our students, in almost any learning environment we can imagine.” (p. xxii)  Essentially it is applying small, actionable modifications that can be integrated into existing teaching practices.

• Transparent Assignment Design. Sharing the What, Why and How for assignments.
  • Make assignments transparent by sharing the what, why and how:
    • Here’s what I want you to do: Explain the task.
    • Here’s why I want you do to it: Explain the reason this task will contribute to students learning.
    • Here’s how to do it: Include detailed instructions, checklists, examples and grading rubrics.
  • Evidence-Based Research:  Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Project, by Mary Ann Winkelmes.
  • Website: tilthighered.com
• The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching and Writing in Higher Education
  • Three educational researchers examined the kinds of writing assignments students found meaningful. They include:
    • 1) Those that allowed multiple opportunities for engagement throughout completion of their assessments.
    • 2) Those that allow students to see connections between course work and their own experiences.
    • 3) Those that allow students control over the writing process.
    • It is helpful to provide checklists for students, especially for larger assignments with incremental deadlines.
    • Evidence-Based Research: The Meaningful Writing Project, with Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, Neal Learner.
• Design and Teach for Cultural Inclusion
  • Help all students feel a sense of belonging.
  • Increase awareness of the ways that cultural contexts influence online student behaviors and levels of engagement.
  • Resource: How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts and Cultures (NAS, 2018) Free PDF Download.
  • Article: A fundamental look at cultural diversity and the online classroom. Karen Milheim, 2017
• Using Nudges
  • Send personalized emails to students who don’t log in within first few days of class.
  • Nudges can show struggling students that you are paying attention and that you care.
  • Evidence: Article: Small changes, large rewards article – How individualized emails increased classroom performance. Cohen, 2018.
• Control and Value
  • When students feel they have control over their learning and feel value in what they are learning this can increase motivation and learning. Help students see the meaning and value of class activities by helping them make connections between new and pre-existing knowledge.
  • Resource: The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. Cavanagh, 2016.
• Ideas for using Selective Release
  • If there is any requirement for mastery of content or specific course terminology you can use selective release so students can take a quiz on specific content or terminology before moving on.  This can be an effective way to provide multiple opportunities for engagement.
  • Have an open ended quiz where students need to summarize the key points of the previous module and predict how it will relate to the new module.  The purpose of this is to practice retrieval and look for connections between previous module and the current one. Once they submit this quiz the new module can become available.
• Guiding Questions for Audio Lectures
  • Do you ever wonder if students really listen to your audio lectures in their entirety? Or at all?
  • Provide guiding questions for students to answer while watching the lectures. Helps students actively engage with videos. or include a short, graded assessment after a watching a required video. This can help demonstrate that students have watched the video, thought about the content and can apply it to their context.
• Provide the framework
  • Provide a partial outline for students to complete while watching lectures or reading articles.
  • Such a framework can help students to build accurate connections with the structure. Used with an online lecture it can encourage active listening and focus processing of new information.
• Frequent Reminders of the Purpose of content and activities
  • Written instructions, video announcements and consistent weekly reminders help students clearly see the purpose behind course activities and assessments. 
  • These types of reminders can help students make the connection between what they are being asked to do and learning outcomes and make it feel less like ‘busy work’.
• Be flexible
  • Taken from specification grading strategy – build in one (or two) ‘oops tokens’ for a class. Students can turn in a token for deadline extension, opportunity to revise and resubmit, or make up an assignment, etc..
  • Reasoning- helps to convey empathy toward students.
• Giving Feedback
  • Divide comments on students work into two categories: ‘this time’ and ‘next time’. This time focus on assessing their performance on the current assignment and for next time with some instructions on how to improve for next time.
• Get creative with virtual office hours
  • Rebrand them to ‘happy hours’ or ‘coffee breaks’
  • Reduce frequency to a few times per semester, before exam, or after major assignment
  • Offer incentives
• Choice in online discussions
  • Provide multiple questions for students to choose from for a discussion.
  • Provide multiple articles for students to read and ask them to choose a subset of such articles and share their take aways from the article. This allows students to inform each other about the readings without having to read all articles.
  • Include a question about how the content for a particular module impacts them personally – their experience at work, or other changes they may have made as a result of the content.
• Personalize Learning Networks and fostering lifelong learning
  • Lifelong Learning Log or journal. Students write in this regularly, or weekly, to describe the actions they have taken to formalize and expand their PLN. (ie connect with people on LinkedIn, mentorships in community, volunteering in community). As students make connections with the course and beyond the course they engage with the course material in new ways.
  • Resource: Helping students develop Personalized Learning Networks, Bull, 2013.
• Avoiding instructor burnout
  • Edna Murugan and Noura Badawi use a term called ‘instructional vitality’ as a strategy for helping to avoid burnout and keep you engaged.
  • Resource: Online faculty can avoid burnout

This book, Small Teaching Online, referenced shared many additional books and resources that I’m hoping to dig into soon. I’ll share some here:

• Book: Thrive Online: A New Approach for College Educators, In Press. Riggs, 2020
• Book: The writers practice: Building Confidence in your nonfiction writing, Werner, 2019. And a podcast with Werner about his book.
• Book: How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, Joshua Eyler, 2018
• Book: High impact practices in online education: research and best practices, Linder & Hayes, 2018
• Tool: Hypothes.is – students can annotate any document on the web.
• Podcast: Teaching in Higher Education Podcasts

So important but often overlooked.

Pedagogies of Online Welcome