To encourage students to read each other’s work, Prof. Stein created “blog collectives” and required students to comment on the blogs of students in their collective.  An additional site was set up for the course that aggregated posts from all student blogs using the FeedWordPress plugin.

Prof. Stein used WordPress for general information about the course including assignment descriptions (see: Assignments > Montage vs Long Take Wars).  These assignment descriptions then contained links to Moodle assignment “activities” where students could submit their assignments.  The WordPress site was also used as a place where students could blog about projects and share the videos they produced as part of their course work (see: Categories > Montage)

Prof. Stein used Moodle to distribute readings, collect assignment submissions and as a place for online discussion and used Moodle’s grading functionality to grade assignments and forum posts.

This screencast is the first in a series based on an interview Alex Chapin did with Louisa Stein in the spring of 2011. 

What:

Who: Catherine Combelles, Assistant Professor of Biology

Class: BIOL0145 Cell Biology and Genetics

Technology Used: Personal Polling Devices (Clickers)

Number of students: approx. 70

Learning objective: To monitor the students’ understanding of concepts covered in lecture and promote peer learning and discussion.

Description of use: Catherine used the clickers for every lecture from day 1 to the last day of classes, and throughout the duration of each lecture. At the beginning of each lecure, she started with a question that tested their understanding of concepts from the past lecture or on their readings for the day. She would then pose between 3-4 more questions depending on the lecture content that day.

All of Catherine’s questions were prepared beforehand; she never created questions on the fly (although she would like to play with that in the future). She sometimes skipped a question if it became clear that it was not needed based on the students’ understanding. But typically, she asked all of the questions she had prepared. She would pose a question, let students answer on their own, then show the class how all students answered before showing the correct answer. If the answers were too spread out, without satisfactory agreement throughout the class, Catherine would have the students talk among themselves and convince their peers of their choice before re-answering. During the students’ discussion, she would walk around, listen, gauge what the learning issues may have been and answer or prompt further questions.  With the help of this peer learning, the goal was to get most of the class to re-answer correctly.

Catherine says that the toughest part in all of this was writing good questions. Otherwise, she felt it was a fantastic way to pace the lecture, break at key points, check on students’ understanding before moving on, and trigger discussion on tougher questions that might be subject to interpretation.

Assessment: This technology proved very effective and helpful. Catherine will use the clickers again next year. Students responded positively to clicker use in their evaluations.  They reported that the clickers were a fun way to stay engaged in lecture, raise quesitons and keep up with the material. There were criticisms about the quality of some of the questions, but the overwhelming feedback Catherine received was to continue using them.

This technology could potentially be used in a variety of lecture courses.  Catherine would be happy to be approached by anyone that would like to learn more about them.

Technologies

How Do I… » Data Collection and Analysis » Survey/Polls

Tools » Clickers

Receiving Assignments

Both Jason and James use email as the primary means of collecting assignments from students for the following reasons:

• emails are timestamped providing a simple way to ensure deadlines are met
• email provides a single place to archive records of all papers
• email ensures a definitive version of student work

Both ask students to simply attach their assignment to an email post and send it them. To help organize emails from students, they often ask students to include something in the subject line of the email that will flag the email as one containing an assignment.  For example they might ask students to put the name of the assignment in the subject line (e.g Assignment 1) perhaps even include the course code (fmmc0243).  This allows them to use “email rules” to filter these emails into a folder for later review. Both have similar workflows for compiling assignments for grading.  Each downloads papers to a single folder on their computer, opens the documents and does a quick check for the correct title and makes sure the word count was within the assignment guidelines.    For many classes, they would then send students an email confirming they received of the paper.

Grading in Microsoft Word/OpenOffice

Jason requires his students to submit their papers in .rtf format, a rich text format that is compatible with most word processing applications.  While Jason uses OpenOffice, similar features are available in Microsoft Word.  The document is opened and “track changes” is enabled (Tools > Track Changes).  Track changes allows Jason to add changes to the student’s paper in a way that preserves the original version for the student to compare.  Jason uses the commenting feature (Insert > Comment) to add comments inline.  For frequently used comments Jason has set up AutoText (Insert > AutoText) entries.  Jason will usually add additional comments as well as the grade at the end of the document.  Then he saves the document appending to its original filename “-comments-JM” and attaches it to an email to the student.

Grading PDF documents

James prefers to do his grading in .pdf format and has published detailed Essay Submissions guidelines.  James uses Adobe Acrobat, software that is not widely available on campus, but many of his techniques can be followed using freely available PDF tools.  For PC users he recommends Foxit Reader and for Mac users Skim (Macs also come with an application called Preview that is comparable).  Like Word, these tools also have commenting features that allow you to insert inline comments.  Some of these tools also allow you to create stamps of various colors and sizes that can be used for common comments. James has compiled a number of such stamps.