Best Practices

Our last Comparing OER Repositories post focused on finding interactive materials related to chemistry. The results were mixed. The different searches revealed different breadths and depths of results, but no one stood out far above the others as the best option. With this post, we are going to run a similar series of tests, looking for thorough and extensive libraries, finding resources at college level (not just K-12), making sure that resources are reviewed. To get a sense of what’s available and where to find it, we will write a series of posts combing through four different OER repositories – OER Commons, Khan Academy, Connexions, and FREE – looking for three very different sets of material and evaluate the results as well as ease of use.

There are, as a quick search of this blog will show you, any number of websites available which aggregate OERs and educational course materials. However, as we often find with the internet, just because something is available doesn’t mean that it’s useful, and it can be difficult to sift through the sheer volume of available information to find what’s really useful for you. For college-level instructors navigating the world of OERs, some of the obvious concerns include finding sites with thorough and extensive libraries, finding resources at college level (not just K-12), making sure that resources are reviewed. To get a sense of what’s available and where to find it, we will write a series of posts combing through four different OER repositories – OER Commons, Khan Academy, Connexions, and FREE – looking for three very different sets of material and evaluate the results as well as ease of use.

The people at EdSurge are thinking the same thing as many edtech afficiandos -- with so many products and services on the market, wouldn't it be great to be able to test them out and find the right one without having to invest before you know what you want? This summer, EdSurge is going to try and help with their "Clear & Simple" trials program. The premise of the program is to let educators try out new edtech for 60 days completely free. Instead of a bare-bones "trial" version, the program allows the testers to access the full version, without any commitment to resubscribe or continue at the end of the 60 day test. All vendors participating in the program have signed on to the same basic terms.

Like most of EdSurge's programs, many of the programs in the Clear & Simple trial are targeted towards K-8 or K-12 educators. Many of them focus on tracking and assessing student mastery of Common Core standards, which are not easily repurposed for college uses. However, some of the programs such as Gobstopper and All In Learning, definitely have potential for the liberal arts blended classroom.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. This post will focus on MERLOT.

What exactly IS blended learning? The term (along with its analogue "hybrid" learning) is broadly used to describe individual courses or educational programs that combine "traditional" classroom-based teaching and computer-aided learning outside the classroom. This is a very broad umbrella, however, and I get many questions attempting to clarify what counts and doesn't count or what blended learning looks like on the ground in more concrete terms. 

The National Center for Academic Transformation has developed a taxonomy of blended learning models that might provide some clarity to those new to the subject and inspiration for faculty looking for ways to transform a "traditional" course into a blended one.

Thinking Context is a recent post by John Warner on his Inside Higher Ed blog, "Just Visiting," where Warner considers and discusses the implications of the language educators use. Regardless of whether or not the particular terms he discusses - peer review vs. peer response, workshop vs. laboratory, research paper vs. researched essay, etc - are relevant to your field and your classroom, he raises important points about the necessity of deliberate language in the classroom. These standardized education terms, as he points out, are often communicating more than we intend, and can set an unintended tone for assignments and activities.

While Warner's article is focused on the traditional classroom, his argument has interesting implications for the world of blended education, where the terminology is less established, less conventional, and more flexible. As we are beginning to arrive at mutually agreed upon and communally understood language, it's important to think through the implications of the terminology which is gaining traction.

If you would like to create your own interactive materials, Moodle offers several advantages. In addition to being relatively easy to use, even without coding ability, Moodle's extensive wiki "MoodleDocs" is full of instructions, explanations, and best practice suggestions.

Related resources:
Creating Quizzes on Moodle
Creating Flashcards on Moodle
Moodle Scheduler

WebWriting is a born-digital, open-access "book-in-progress" sponsored by the Trinity College Center for Teaching and Learning. It deals with issues concerning when, how, and why the web can be used for teaching writing by incorporating essay concerning basic but difficult questions about the risks and benefits of using the web, reconfiguring pedagogy to use online resources, and finding the right tools. The book also deals with specific issues like "How to organize simultaneous peer review with Google Doc" and "Balancing Public Writing and Student Privacy". The site is powered by WordPress's CommentPress Corp plugin, which allows users to interact with the text by leaving comments on sections, pages, or the entire document. The book also includes an annotated "Bibliography-in-progress," complete with links to the cited sources, which creates a small but concise resource library for users interested in the topics WebWriting approaches.

I was struck by two themes running through the conference presentations this year:

First, the importance of "closing the loop," or bringing the online components of a blended course back into the classroom in some way. Kristine Rabberman, for example, talked about the importance of opening class discussions with insightful observations, questions, or debates from her course's online discussion boards and blogs, as part of her strategy for fostering a deeper, sustained intellectual conversation online and in the classroom. This resonated with feedback we received on student surveys of courses that were part of the NGLC blended learning study project. Rightly or wrongly, students perceived online work that was not recognized in some way as being unimportant or ancillary to the course. Making these activities "low-stakes" (i.e., giving some points or credit for completing them) rather than "no-stakes" was one common mechanism faculty used to signal that online materials were important, but student survey responses and experiences faculty shared suggest that discussing students' online work in class as Kristine did or explicitly communicating how you are using student's online work to diagnose and address problems -- for example, by going over a problem you noticed students were having trouble with in online homework, might be as, if not more, effective. 

First, I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this year's Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference a success. Our in-house catering, conference, and housekeeping teams and my student assistants, Yichen Liao and Angela Rosenberg, did a stellar job of making sure we were well-fed and everything ran smoothly behind the scenes. The fact that they were able to do so immediately following Bryn Mawr's graduation celebrations (and for the students, weeks of exams) is a testament to their talent and dedication!

I would also like to thank our 15 presenters, who agreed to expose their teaching and their discoveries to public scrutiny, so that we all might learn from the experience. Recordings of their presentations and any slides and materials they've shared are archived on our conference website -- just click on the title of a presentation in the schedule to see everything associated with it.

The conference was a huge success, attracting about 100 registered guests from over 30 institutions, not counting many Tri-College faculty and staff who dropped into sessions as their schedules permitted. As always audience questions and comments and the informal conversations over breaks and lunch were one of the most valuable and interesting aspects of the event.