Purpose(s) of the Syllabus
I'm going to use this space as a place to start thinking about the syllabus: what it's for, how to use it best, and also keeping track of syllabus-related items I find online, like the latest discussion about trigger warnings etc. that's been prompted by Jonathan Haidt's Atlantic article: The Coddling of the American Mind.
Some Q&A about student choice, challenges, etc.
This is fun! I got an email inquiry from someone about my classes, and after poking around in this blog and other stuff that I have online, she sent me a few questions, really thought-provoking ones, so I thought I would post some answers here:
I assume you've taught onsite as well as online. How do you approach teaching differently in the online environment?
I haven't taught in a classroom since 2001, and I don't miss it at all. There are tradeoffs, sure, and some things I would be able to do in a classroom that I cannot do online... but there are far far FAR more things that I can do online but not in a classroom. I was never really all that satisfied in the classroom because of the number of students I knew I was not reaching; that's probably the most important difference: online, I have so many opportunities to connect with every single student. For me, that is a very important goal.
What are the biggest lessons you've learned about designing and teaching effective online courses?
In honor of the magic of the number three, I'll list three lessons:
1. I evaluate every aspect of a course in order to keep making it better and better: everything can always be made better, and I'm not afraid to give up on an experiment that is clearly not working. There are always other experiments to try!
2. I try to empathize with the students and see things through their eyes. With some students, I have lots in common, so that's easy, but there are other students who bring totally new perspectives and experiences to my classes, and those are the students who can most help me to do a better job.
3. I make sure that I enjoy everything about the class; that doesn't necessarily mean the students will enjoy everything... but at least I can be optimistic about that! If there is something I find boring or I don't enjoy, that means I need to change it somehow or try something else.
Your courses give students a lot of choice. How do you determine what degree of choice is appropriate?
I think about this a lot: it's not so much that you can have too much choice, but the challenge is how to present the choices so that students don't feel overwhelmed, giving them what they need to make good choices (i.e. either a choice that is really successful OR a choice that, while not a good one, leads them to make better choices in the future). So, I try to be really attentive to how I present the choices, and I also try to get lots of feedback from the students about their choices: how they make those choices, how satisfied they are with the results, what I can do to help as they make those choices, etc. That job would be a lot easier if students came to class EXPECTING to choose, but often they come expecting me to make all the decisions and tell them what to do... and overcoming that expectation is the biggest problem of all! In general, students do not get to make a lot of choices when it comes to school, so they are sometimes surprised and even frustrated — understandably so, because a lack of choices means they don't develop the self-awareness they need to make those choices confidently.
Also, how do you balance the rigor/challenge of different assignment options, and allow scope while keeping them aligned with your objectives?
I honestly don't have objectives. I definitely have hopes (but those hopes are very wide-ranging, amorphous, and they vary from student to student), but what I am really looking for is that the students will have what you could call "subjectives," the goals that they want to achieve. I see my role as encouraging them to define those "subjectives," and to strive to go farther and farther. One of the things I am really excited about this coming year is to make the idea of a "growth mindset" more explicit with the students, helping them to see how important it is for them to set their own challenges, rather than expecting me to play that role for them.
In your experience, what approaches have produced the best work from students? What kinds of tasks have led to students pushing themselves most in creative or intellectual directions?
It varies so much from student to student, but I have never regretted the choice to focus on creative storytelling instead of the traditional analytical essay. I prefer completely open-ended assignments so that the students' creativity can go in all kinds of directions, and I know that by sharing their work with each other, they can find inspiration that is much more powerful than anything I might say or do as the instructor in the class. As I mentioned in response to the previous question, I am hoping to make all of that a more explicit part of the class next year, making the "growth mindset" a theme that I explore in the class assignments and in the class announcements, and I know I will learn a lot from how the students respond to that and what they contribute. These are just some of the questions I want to pose for them, and I'm sure I'll come up with lots more in the next month: Growth Mindset Blog Challenge: Something new for Fall 2015.
=========
And some follow-up questions:
What is it about teaching online that makes you feel that you can connect more with students than in a physical classroom? What makes this environment preferable, in your experience, for learning?
This question is easy to answer since it is the focus of my one-and-only post at Medium, so I'll just link to that:
Devotedly Digital: Why I Love Teaching Online
Have you found any good methods for helping students develop a growth mindset (or self-awareness or a tolerance for ambiguity)? I'd love to hear if you have.
That is my big new project for this coming year! That has happened in my courses in the past, but I realized that it is important to make that more EXPLICIT, so that the students can really take charge of their "mindset management" as it were, just as I ask them to take charge of other aspects of the class. I'll be able to report back on how many of the students take me up on the challenge and what they do with it; based on that, I'll then decide if I should also weave some of this as something required in the course. I'll be adding to this list of challenges as I get new ideas all semester long, and I am hoping some other teachers will participate in this — one other faculty member at my school may be joining in with her students, which will be super: Growth Mindset Challenge.
Is there an assignment or idea from your courses that you're most proud of, that you'd be willing to share with me?
Oh, the Storybooks for sure: I've had those as part of both classes since the very beginning, and I also did that when I taught in the classroom (although it works better online when the Storybooks can more naturally play a leading role in the class online than in the classroom). I just did up a fun slideshow with some links here:
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Student Engagement?
And you can find out lots more at the Anatomy of an Online Course site, too. Not only do they make each semester really productive and fun for the students and for me, they also have amazing re-use value:
Storybooks: Student-Created Content for Long-Term (Re)Use
I assume you've taught onsite as well as online. How do you approach teaching differently in the online environment?
I haven't taught in a classroom since 2001, and I don't miss it at all. There are tradeoffs, sure, and some things I would be able to do in a classroom that I cannot do online... but there are far far FAR more things that I can do online but not in a classroom. I was never really all that satisfied in the classroom because of the number of students I knew I was not reaching; that's probably the most important difference: online, I have so many opportunities to connect with every single student. For me, that is a very important goal.
What are the biggest lessons you've learned about designing and teaching effective online courses?
In honor of the magic of the number three, I'll list three lessons:
1. I evaluate every aspect of a course in order to keep making it better and better: everything can always be made better, and I'm not afraid to give up on an experiment that is clearly not working. There are always other experiments to try!
2. I try to empathize with the students and see things through their eyes. With some students, I have lots in common, so that's easy, but there are other students who bring totally new perspectives and experiences to my classes, and those are the students who can most help me to do a better job.
3. I make sure that I enjoy everything about the class; that doesn't necessarily mean the students will enjoy everything... but at least I can be optimistic about that! If there is something I find boring or I don't enjoy, that means I need to change it somehow or try something else.
Your courses give students a lot of choice. How do you determine what degree of choice is appropriate?
I think about this a lot: it's not so much that you can have too much choice, but the challenge is how to present the choices so that students don't feel overwhelmed, giving them what they need to make good choices (i.e. either a choice that is really successful OR a choice that, while not a good one, leads them to make better choices in the future). So, I try to be really attentive to how I present the choices, and I also try to get lots of feedback from the students about their choices: how they make those choices, how satisfied they are with the results, what I can do to help as they make those choices, etc. That job would be a lot easier if students came to class EXPECTING to choose, but often they come expecting me to make all the decisions and tell them what to do... and overcoming that expectation is the biggest problem of all! In general, students do not get to make a lot of choices when it comes to school, so they are sometimes surprised and even frustrated — understandably so, because a lack of choices means they don't develop the self-awareness they need to make those choices confidently.
Also, how do you balance the rigor/challenge of different assignment options, and allow scope while keeping them aligned with your objectives?
I honestly don't have objectives. I definitely have hopes (but those hopes are very wide-ranging, amorphous, and they vary from student to student), but what I am really looking for is that the students will have what you could call "subjectives," the goals that they want to achieve. I see my role as encouraging them to define those "subjectives," and to strive to go farther and farther. One of the things I am really excited about this coming year is to make the idea of a "growth mindset" more explicit with the students, helping them to see how important it is for them to set their own challenges, rather than expecting me to play that role for them.
In your experience, what approaches have produced the best work from students? What kinds of tasks have led to students pushing themselves most in creative or intellectual directions?
It varies so much from student to student, but I have never regretted the choice to focus on creative storytelling instead of the traditional analytical essay. I prefer completely open-ended assignments so that the students' creativity can go in all kinds of directions, and I know that by sharing their work with each other, they can find inspiration that is much more powerful than anything I might say or do as the instructor in the class. As I mentioned in response to the previous question, I am hoping to make all of that a more explicit part of the class next year, making the "growth mindset" a theme that I explore in the class assignments and in the class announcements, and I know I will learn a lot from how the students respond to that and what they contribute. These are just some of the questions I want to pose for them, and I'm sure I'll come up with lots more in the next month: Growth Mindset Blog Challenge: Something new for Fall 2015.
=========
And some follow-up questions:
What is it about teaching online that makes you feel that you can connect more with students than in a physical classroom? What makes this environment preferable, in your experience, for learning?
This question is easy to answer since it is the focus of my one-and-only post at Medium, so I'll just link to that:
Devotedly Digital: Why I Love Teaching Online
Have you found any good methods for helping students develop a growth mindset (or self-awareness or a tolerance for ambiguity)? I'd love to hear if you have.
That is my big new project for this coming year! That has happened in my courses in the past, but I realized that it is important to make that more EXPLICIT, so that the students can really take charge of their "mindset management" as it were, just as I ask them to take charge of other aspects of the class. I'll be able to report back on how many of the students take me up on the challenge and what they do with it; based on that, I'll then decide if I should also weave some of this as something required in the course. I'll be adding to this list of challenges as I get new ideas all semester long, and I am hoping some other teachers will participate in this — one other faculty member at my school may be joining in with her students, which will be super: Growth Mindset Challenge.
Is there an assignment or idea from your courses that you're most proud of, that you'd be willing to share with me?
Oh, the Storybooks for sure: I've had those as part of both classes since the very beginning, and I also did that when I taught in the classroom (although it works better online when the Storybooks can more naturally play a leading role in the class online than in the classroom). I just did up a fun slideshow with some links here:
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Student Engagement?
And you can find out lots more at the Anatomy of an Online Course site, too. Not only do they make each semester really productive and fun for the students and for me, they also have amazing re-use value:
Storybooks: Student-Created Content for Long-Term (Re)Use
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Student Engagement?
I talk about student engagement A LOT ... and what I mean by that is students creating and sharing their learning — in their blogs, at their websites, and in the comments they leave for each other as they read and respond to each other's work. Every student is different, and they each have something unique and wonderful to contribute to the class as you can see in this Flickr slideshow with snapshots of some Storybook projects:
(want music? just click play below!)
I could go on and on about the amazing things that happen when students unleash their imaginations and share the results with one another... but instead of reading my words here, I'd urge you to go EXPLORE and take a look at their work! Here are some links:
(want music? just click play below!)
I could go on and on about the amazing things that happen when students unleash their imaginations and share the results with one another... but instead of reading my words here, I'd urge you to go EXPLORE and take a look at their work! Here are some links:
- Storybooks from Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics
- Storytelling blog posts from Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics
... And I'm looking forward to participating in Power of Connections this summer in order to share and explore the potential of connected learning together with you!
Spreadsheet Magic: Randomizing Blogs
I was not sure if I should write up notes on how to build a randomizer in a spreadsheet, so I asked a few people and concluded that, yes, writing up some notes might be a good thing! So, here are some notes about how I create randomizers for my classes in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.
I use the spreadsheet randomizer for two purposes: to randomize my commenting at the students' blogs and to randomize the commenting group assignments for both blogs and projects. I'm guessing this is potentially useful for anyone running a class with a blog network, especially if (like me) you are short on time without a lot of time to comment on student blogs but want to do so fairly and/or if (like me) you want to get students introduced to as many other students as possible in the class by randomizing the comment groups each week.
SPREADSHEET STRATEGIES
I am going to explain how these concepts work in GoogleDocs spreadsheets. Presumably they work in Excel also, but you'll have to check and see. If you use Excel and have never tried GoogleDocs spreadsheets, why not use this as an excuse to give the GoogleDocs version a try...? Being able to access your spreadsheets on any computer sure is handy!
Here are a few key strategies to note:
Random function. It's easy to insert the random function in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet cell. Just type this in the cell:
=RAND()
You can then sort on that column and it will randomize all the rows. Trust me on this. It will look weird because after the sort, the spreadsheet randomly assigns values to the cells (after having sorted on the previous set of random values). But since that is after the sort, it's all good. If you don't believe me, pound away on a column for a few tries: sort A-Z, then sort again, then sort again. You will see the magic of randomness at work!
Hyperlink function. When you are first setting up your spreadsheet, you will probably want to use the hyperlink function to create the actual linked text. I create a column with student names, for example, and a column with their blog URLs. Then I use the hyperlink function to create the linked text. The function is:
=HYPERLINK(url, label)
I then do a copy of the column and paste-special-values-only because I don't really like live formulas lying around if I don't need them. Then I hide the columns with the names and the blog URLs; I can use them for other things later, but I don't need them anymore for the randomizer now that I have the linked text.
Sheets. I have met some people who weren't confident about using separate sub-sheets in a spreadsheet. Use sheets! I have one spreadsheet for my randomizers, and it has six sheets. I use the '3groups' data to help manage the IEblogs and the MFblogs as you will see below; having it all in one big spreadsheet is great.
Freeze header row. You may think you don't need it, but it's really helpful to create a header row and freeze it so that you always know for sure what you are dealing with in your spreadsheet. I colorcode my header rows for my different classes to help remind me just what I am looking at (purple for both classes, yellow for Myth-Folklore, green for Indian Epics).
Okay, with those preliminaries out of the way, here's how I randomize blogs that I look at, and here's how I randomize blog comment groups for the students.
BLOG RANDOMIZER
For the blog randomizer, I need three columns:
Don't re-sort after you comment on each blog; just work on down through the list commenting. The random numbers will regenerate every time you edit the spreadsheet, but that doesn't matter.
Then, the next time that you sort the random column, all the commented blogs will go to the bottom of the list because the random column is blank. Here's what the bottom of the list looks like after I sort the random column next time:
Pretty nifty, yes? Basically zero time spent keeping track of who got comments from you, so you can spend all your time on the commenting itself!
After you have cycled through all the students (and honestly, it takes me a few weeks; my focus is on commenting on their projects, not on their blogs), you can then type RAND() in the cells of the random column and start all over again.
GROUP RANDOMIZER
For the group randomizer, only one thing is different: I need a column for the group number. So, there are now four columns in the spreadsheet: the randomizing column, name, GROUP, and the blog link.
The idea is that I can use the randomizing column to sort, and then I paste in the group numbers from a separate sheet (1-1-1-2-2-2-3-3-3 for three people in each group). That allows me to copy the group number column with the blog link column to create the actual blog groups. Then, I come back to the spreadsheet, sort on the name column, and that allows me to create the alphabetical list of names showing each person their group number. You can see the results here: Sample Blog Groups.
For the project commenting groups, it's the same procedure although a bit more complicated for reasons just having to do with my classes (some students do Portfolios, some do Storybooks, etc. etc.), but I use a spreadsheet to create the random groups in just the same way!
Screencast
If you would like a screencast demo, check out the screencast I made for our DML2015 panel: Laura Loves Randomizers! The part about using spreadsheets to randomize starts at about 4:30 in the video:
I use the spreadsheet randomizer for two purposes: to randomize my commenting at the students' blogs and to randomize the commenting group assignments for both blogs and projects. I'm guessing this is potentially useful for anyone running a class with a blog network, especially if (like me) you are short on time without a lot of time to comment on student blogs but want to do so fairly and/or if (like me) you want to get students introduced to as many other students as possible in the class by randomizing the comment groups each week.
SPREADSHEET STRATEGIES
I am going to explain how these concepts work in GoogleDocs spreadsheets. Presumably they work in Excel also, but you'll have to check and see. If you use Excel and have never tried GoogleDocs spreadsheets, why not use this as an excuse to give the GoogleDocs version a try...? Being able to access your spreadsheets on any computer sure is handy!
Here are a few key strategies to note:
Random function. It's easy to insert the random function in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet cell. Just type this in the cell:
=RAND()
You can then sort on that column and it will randomize all the rows. Trust me on this. It will look weird because after the sort, the spreadsheet randomly assigns values to the cells (after having sorted on the previous set of random values). But since that is after the sort, it's all good. If you don't believe me, pound away on a column for a few tries: sort A-Z, then sort again, then sort again. You will see the magic of randomness at work!
Hyperlink function. When you are first setting up your spreadsheet, you will probably want to use the hyperlink function to create the actual linked text. I create a column with student names, for example, and a column with their blog URLs. Then I use the hyperlink function to create the linked text. The function is:
=HYPERLINK(url, label)
I then do a copy of the column and paste-special-values-only because I don't really like live formulas lying around if I don't need them. Then I hide the columns with the names and the blog URLs; I can use them for other things later, but I don't need them anymore for the randomizer now that I have the linked text.
Sheets. I have met some people who weren't confident about using separate sub-sheets in a spreadsheet. Use sheets! I have one spreadsheet for my randomizers, and it has six sheets. I use the '3groups' data to help manage the IEblogs and the MFblogs as you will see below; having it all in one big spreadsheet is great.
Freeze header row. You may think you don't need it, but it's really helpful to create a header row and freeze it so that you always know for sure what you are dealing with in your spreadsheet. I colorcode my header rows for my different classes to help remind me just what I am looking at (purple for both classes, yellow for Myth-Folklore, green for Indian Epics).
Okay, with those preliminaries out of the way, here's how I randomize blogs that I look at, and here's how I randomize blog comment groups for the students.
BLOG RANDOMIZER
For the blog randomizer, I need three columns:
- random column: see RAND function above
- commented column: blank or "commented"
- blog link: see HYPERLINK function above
Then, the next time that you sort the random column, all the commented blogs will go to the bottom of the list because the random column is blank. Here's what the bottom of the list looks like after I sort the random column next time:
After you have cycled through all the students (and honestly, it takes me a few weeks; my focus is on commenting on their projects, not on their blogs), you can then type RAND() in the cells of the random column and start all over again.
GROUP RANDOMIZER
For the group randomizer, only one thing is different: I need a column for the group number. So, there are now four columns in the spreadsheet: the randomizing column, name, GROUP, and the blog link.
Screencast
If you would like a screencast demo, check out the screencast I made for our DML2015 panel: Laura Loves Randomizers! The part about using spreadsheets to randomize starts at about 4:30 in the video:
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