Registration Delay and Instructors for Labs & Lecture

First in a series of “What I’m reading” posts these are articles I’m working my way through in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL).  Here are the highlights for me:

    • “Registration Delay and Student Performance” – interesting assumption “The amount of time a student delays in registering for a course is a measure of diligence that in turn correlates with his/her final mark.” Limited application at MCUG.
    • “Does it Matter if Students Have the Same Instructor for Lecture and Lab Sections? An Analysis of Introductory Biology Students” – spoiler alert – no it doesn’t matter. Interesting article b/c of focus on liberal arts college. This piece caught my eye: “Finally, one cannot ignore fear as a motivating factor. Tenured professors have less to worry about if they let their attention to a single lab section slide than does an adjunct teacher whose career advancement may depend heavily on proving that he or she can teach his or her only lab section effectively. Notably, there was only one instance in which a professor’s perceived effectiveness in the labs dropped, and this drop occurred the year after the professor was granted tenure.” (p. 11)

My takeaways:

  • Would be interesting to see the impact of late registrations due to delayed add/drop timelines impacts student learning.
  • Research in the 2nd paper looks like professor H made a significant improvement in his/her teaching. Would be interesting to track these metrics for a longer term and wider range of faculty.

 

Home Directory Migration Project

In the Fall of 2016 Information Technology Services with support from the Academic Technology Group set to work on a huge project: migrating 20+ terabytes of storage from on-campus network servers to the cloud. Perhaps one of the most onerous pieces of this project as well as the biggest opportunity (always be positive!) was that it had to be done by each individual user. My role in this project was largely to view the transition (and support it) for the academic side of the “house”. One of the first proactive steps I took was to reach out to Assistants to VPs in Old Chapel to explain the project, provide assistance in their transition so that they could then provide assistance to the Administrators. During this session, I was reminded of the importance of making all sorts of connections at the college and always being open to suggestions and opportunities for improvement. As we were finishing the session several of the assistants pointed out that the best way to get this information to the faculty would be through the Faculty Chairs meeting. I gladly took them up on the suggestion and was thrilled when they fit me onto their next meeting agenda.

What followed was more meetings, appointments, one-on-one and group sessions to help everyone move their data, answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and sometimes – just serve as a sounding board for frustrations. It was a big task for many and being able to provide adequate support was sometimes a challenge. I lead an initiative to provide in person group trainings by designing a web site very similar to the one that we used to launch Canvas. The Home Directory Migration web site provided users with a way to access documentation, review frequently asked questions, and sign up for work sessions.

Home Directory Migration

Home Directory Migration

Canvas Launch Initiative

When the College decided to transition from Moodle to Canvas as our learning management system (LMS), we knew that a unified communication and training plan would need to be put in place quickly. My role in this effort was to take the relevant information from the pilot and the most important communication points for the launch and aggregrate that data in one place. Hence our Canvas WordPress site was born.

I designed this site with the user in mind and considered what the most sought after pieces of information would be. The site included a section to request a consultation on Canvas, tips to avoid student confusion, ways to request help with migrating a Moodle course to Canvas, as well as a registration link for Canvas training sessions. The training sessions proved to be very popular and I was able to alter training content and presentation order based on the response of earlier training session (an example of putting formative feedback into action!).

As the transition drew to a close my next to final step was to transition any help info into our ITS Wiki so that content was fully searchable for users. Soon we will take the WordPress site offline as the last of our “transitioners” finish their migrations.

Tech Hurdle #1: Moving your iMovie Project

Students are often assigned video storytelling projects using iMovie or choose to use iMovie for multimedia projects because it is familiar to them. It has a somewhat lower bar in terms of ease of use over Premiere – however iMovie projects are also far more challenging to move from one computer to another. This becomes a significant hurdle for students who do not have their own Mac laptop with iMovie installed. In these cases – as well as for back up purposes – it is essential to understand how you can “bundle” your project so that it can be moved to different storage locations.

I’ve created the screencast below to walk you through this process. It was created on 10/18/17 for iMovie version 10.1.7. Closed captions are available for your convenience.

WordPress Designs and Event Management

Over the course of my time in the Academic Technology Group at Middlebury I became the go-to person for helping CTLR and faculty in general to set up event registration sites in WordPress. Since these opportunities began to present themselves to me in more and more frequent consistency I began to use them as a way to test out the configuration settings on new themes activated on our Middlebury server. This process both helped me to more fully understand WordPress functionality as well as the ways in which themes can be used to manipulate and display content in a variety of ways.

I think this process has been successful as I find myself being sought out by more faculty members who are interested in sharing their programming more widely. I’m hopeful that my work is helping to make it easier for more faculty to hear about more programming options outside of their departments and divisions. Below is a showcase of the sites I’ve created so far. You can click on each option to view the live site.

CTLR Programming Events Site

CTLR Programming Events Site

John Tallmadge Workshop Page

John Tallmadge Workshop Page

Science of Learning in Action Institute

Science of Learning in Action Institute

Grading and Assessment to Promote Deep Learning

Grading and Assessment to Promote Deep Learning

Anne Trubek: Writing for the Public

Anne Trubek: Writing for the Public

Intentional Pedagogy, Intentional Teaching

Intentional Pedagogy, Intentional Teaching

Beyond the Academy: Writing Your Book for a Wider Audience

Beyond the Academy: Writing Your Book for a Wider Audience

Promoting Student STEM Skills Through Inquiry Instruction

Promoting Student STEM Skills Through Inquiry Instruction

Teaching and Writing Retreat

Teaching and Writing Retreat

 

Support as Project Management

In the summer of 2017 I was asked to serve as the “point person” for Professor Kirsten Hoving’s DLA project “Land and Lens“. Since this was my first time serving in this role, we pretty much set the rules as we moved along. My first role was one I had performed earlier in the year when I matched Kirsten with a digital media tutor named Kristin Richards ’17 who assisted in the design and customization of the WordPress site for the project. Since Kristin graduated in May, we needed to find another tutor to help Kristin as she finished her project. Rachel Kang ’19 easily stepped into this role and did a fantastic job.

Project Tracking for Land and Lens

Project Tracking for Land and Lens

Kirsten asked to meet on a weekly basis where we would review progress on the site, questions about the design/development, to-do items, etc. As the meetings took place I found myself serving in a quasi-project manager role as I helped to determine what work needed to happen where, who we needed to contact about what, and what were reasonable goals to attain within the following week. This was all tracked within a Google sheet where Rachel could check off items as they were complete. This became especially important as we changed the URL for the site which resulted in a lot of broken links and various other minor issues. They were not difficult fixes to complete, but it did require a tracking mechanism to make sure each one was addressed.

The final project is featured as a part of a museum exhibition described here.

Professional Presence Redesign

In the fall of 2017 Professor David Stoll approached me about redesigning his WordPress site to update it and make it appear less blocky. Here is a screen shot of the original site.

Publications Web Site

Publications Web Site

I set about setting up a prototype site where I adjusted the theme and utilized a different way to showcasing images in a slideshow format. Below is a screenshot of the resulting prototype.

Professional Web Presence Prototype

Professional Web Presence Prototype

Fall Faculty Forum Web Site

At the end of the summer of 2017 Associate Professor of Political Science Jessica Teets approached the Academic Technology group for help with a web presence for a new Fall Faculty Forum event. The forum is scheduled to be held on fall parents’ weekend in October, with an intended audience of parents, students, colleagues and community members. Professor Teets shared that she wanted to make sure the site was easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and provided information about individual faculty and their research, as well as logistics information for the event. Below is the design we came up with and you can view the live site here. Digital media tutor Pedro Bitar assisted with loading content and making edits as they were requested.

Fall Faculty Forum

Fall Faculty Forum

Try, Try Again

In this case study completed for EDU6319 How People Learn at Northeastern University I was able to examine the concept that “Practice makes perfect” through watching a middle-school student use a tool called “SmartMusic” to practice her flute music.

Prior to starting the case study I noted:

“Before interviewing or observing the student I wondered if an automated application could truly have an impact on student learning, and regardless of this fact, what the student’s feeling was about the application. As an avid user of technology I am too often disappointed by a tool that does not quite live up to my expectations. In this instance, I was thrilled to be surprised.”

Here is an overview of the case study.

 

As a part of the assignment I also analyzed the case study against relevant learning theories and principles. The full analysis is embedded below.

Digital Explorers

Digital Explorers is a digital literacy unit that I designed for 9 – 12 grade students to be delivered in an online or (ideally) hybrid manner. It was created as an assignment for the course EDU 6330, Digital Media Literacy at Northeastern University and was inspired by the work of Mike Caulfield’s Digital Polarization initiative and utilizes his only text “Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers” as the class text.

Here is a brief video overview of the project:

And here’s the full unit plan.