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Five Instructor Feedback Essentials
Providing student feedback is a key component of an instructor’s role and an important part of effective instruction. Research shows that ongoing feedback keeps students engaged and improves their morale, motivation, and learning (Best, et al, 2014). Yet, providing high quality feedback can be a time-consuming commitment, especially in courses with large class sizes or numerous written assessments. Instructors should keep in mind the tools, structure, and best practices that can help them provide feedback.
Increase Engagement Now
Whether you’re halfway through the term or just getting started, this post presents actionable, simple strategies you can implement immediately to increase engagement in your course.
Implementing Social Media
Many students use social media platforms in their daily lives, and “emerging evidence indicates that students express positive attitudes toward using social media for learning in general” (Baisley-Nodine, Ritzhaupt & Antonenko, 2018). However, there are also many concerns connected with using social media in an educational setting. These include issues related to a lack of familiarity with the platform, the potential for distraction, and privacy concerns. Therefore, it is important to carefully plan the use of social media in a course to address any potential issues or concerns.
No Sweat Alt Text
What is “alt text”? Alt text is descriptive text linked to an image, graph, or other visual content that allows users to understand the visual without viewing it. Any image online should contain alt text, but guidelines differ depending on whether the image is simply decorative or related to other content on the page.
Using PowerPoint in a Video
The familiarity and ease of PowerPoint make it a natural choice for creating instructional videos. After all, your energy is better spent on planning and recording videos than on learning a new tool. However, creating quality slides still requires significant time and attention to detail.
Backward Design
Backward design is, as the name suggests, a process for designing curricula, courses, and lectures by working backwards from big-picture learning goals. The concept, introduced by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005), suggests that instructors create assessments, activities, and course content that are explicitly aligned with the broader learning goals of the unit. This is different from the traditional content-driven approach to learning design, which focuses on course content first and only secondarily tries to align that content with learning goals.
Creating Learning Objectives
Learning objectives help inform students about what they will learn and how they will be assessed. Objectives are meant to align with course expectations. Therefore, any assigned exercises should be guided by the course’s specific learning objectives. Everything in the course should work together to ensure students master the course objectives.
Problem-Based Learning
Problem Based Learning is a teaching method used to facilitate student knowledge acquisition. This teaching method is often confused with Project Based Learning, which centers on students applying knowledge. The focus of Problem Based Learning is students acquiring the knowledge. Since the two methods use the same acronym, they are easily confused, but have different objectives for students.
Student Support in a Multimodal Course
Multimodal courses allow for exciting opportunities in course content and activities but can be, by design, less flexible than asynchronous courses and less predictable than synchronous courses. These opportunities thus come with needs for additional logistical support and flexibility, as students need both to be able to take advantage of the opportunities of synchrony and asynchrony equitably. How can you best support students in a multimodal course, providing guidance through multiple forms of interaction? This piece gives insight into what kinds of support benefit students in multimodal courses and how to provide them. We’ll end with five quick tips for supporting students that apply to almost any multimodal course.
Multimodal Models
Designing a successful multimodal course means, at each step of the process, considering what each format does well—structuring the course such that each piece of content, each activity, each interaction uses the most effective delivery method available. But what does that look like in practice? This piece describes three approaches to structuring a multimodal course. In each model, asynchronous and synchronous time complement one another and further module and course objectives. Where the models differ is in the relative importance of asynchronous activities in enabling students to complete synchronous activities and vice versa.