When Are Those Assignments Due?

What time are assignments due for your class? Most learning management systems (LMSs) have a default time of midnight. But do assignments need to be submitted by midnight? Why is that the magic hour?

I'm on a mailing list from Faculty Focus, a resource for instructors in higher ed. Today's email had the subject "Cinderella Deadlines." I thought that was clever enough to click the link to this article: Cinderella Deadlines: Reconsidering Timelines for Student Work. It's good stuff, and it echoes much of what I do for my own courses, most of the time.

Why have assignments due at midnight? It's not like I'm sitting there waiting to get started on the grading at the stroke of 12, after all! So why not reimagine due dates a bit?

For my face-to-face courses (and the hybrid-flexible courses I'm teaching this semester) I set my assignments to be due by class time. If class starts at 9:25 a.m., assignments are due at 9:25, right? Makes sense.

So now I'm reflecting on my practices for online courses. I generally an approach more like the "due dates are arbitrary and give a nudge for the procrastinators" (like me.) What I mean by this is, I know often need a deadline as a student, or else the tyranny of the urgent means other things will crowd out the assignment in question. So I do have due dates...but I'm generally pretty easy on these. If a student doesn't have the work in at a particular time, does that mean they didn't learn the concepts?

I know, I know...work habits and all that business. Yes, there are external obligations and students do need to learn to comply with those obligations. But in all seriousness...most due dates are arbitrary and are set for the teacher's convenience. 

My encouragement: use due dates in your LMS to set deadlines...but be gracious. I suspect most of us would respond well to a little extra grace in our own lives, yeah? So as long as there isn't some compelling reason that a particular assignment must be submitted by 9:25 a.m. (or midnight?), maybe a little flexibility could be a blessing for a student in your life?

Image by Rishabh Agarwal via Unsplash

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Learning Targets to Guide Your Teaching

You've probably heard the old saying, "If you don't care where you're going, any road will get you there." I think there is a lesson for all who serve as teachers in this in terms of setting goals for what we want our students to learn: if we aren't clear about our goals...any road will get us there.

But most of the time we do have goals for what we intend our students to learn! And this the key idea for learning targets: a well-framed learning target will help keep you on track as a teacher, and will also give clarity for students, so they will know what we are learning, and why.

In their excellent book, Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe describe an alignment process from learning targets to instructional methods to assessment vehicles. The big idea? Clear learning targets give clarity on how you will know if students understand (which informs your assessment vehicles), and knowing how you will know what students understand informs your instructional methods. Basically, learning targets are the key for everything else! Without clarity on what we are intending students will learn, how will we know if they have hit the target? How will we know what we should be focusing on in our teaching?

Image by Annie Sprat via Unsplash

Now, certainly clear learning targets are a benefit for all learning situations, not just distance learning! But in my experience clear communication is key to helping students manage the work of learning at a distance. Clear learning targets makes for clear communication about what they are learning, and why. So get in the habit of clearly explaining the target--why make students hurt themselves trying to figure out the main idea? It's much kinder of us to just tell them!

What makes for a strong learning target? You might use these principles to guide you...

Strong learning targets:

• Give a clear explanation of what students should know, understand, be able to do, feel, or believe.
• Are focused on what students do, not what instructors do. (Try starting them with, "I can...")
• Use action verbs to give direction for how students can provide evidence of their learning.
• Demonstrate awareness of both activity orientation and coverage orientation--the “twin sins" of design, as Wiggins & McTighe put it. (Walking that line of not just devolving into a series of activities that aren't connected to important learning and also not devolving into a series of topics to be "covered" with no time to actually understand them.)
• Ideally, allow for multiple pathways to mastery. (There might be multiple ways to learn something, and multiple ways to demonstrate that you've learned it!)

How to write a strong learning target? Here are a few examples to consider...

1. In a grammar lesson, perhaps the teacher has a learning target of, "Students will know how to identify the main idea in a paragraph." Now, this is an excellent skill that students should learn! But in light of the suggestions above, here is perhaps a stronger way of framing this learning target:

• I can summarize a paragraph’s main idea by writing one sentence in my own words.

2. In a history lesson, perhaps the teacher has a learning target of, "Students will read pages 125-128 of their history textbooks to learn about the causes of the American Civil War." Again, students should learn about the causes of the war, but this one perhaps leans into the sin of "coverage." A stronger way of framing this learning target:

• I can describe multiple sources of conflict that led to the start of the Civil War.

3. In a science lesson, perhaps the teacher has a learning target of, "Students will build a paper airplane that can stay in the air for at least five seconds." This is a very difficult task! Is this the real learning target--the building of the airplane? This is likely the sin of "activitymania." A stronger way to frame this target might be:

• I can describe my design process for creating a paper airplane that can stay in the air as long as possible.

These are just suggestions, of course, but I hope they illustrate the principles listed above. Will crafting a strong learning target suddenly make you into a master online teacher? Perhaps not...but it's a step worth taking!

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Instructional Videos: Chunking Content

I'm thinking today about how we can better convey content to our students in instructional videos we might create. I'm hoping that this brief post can summarize a few helpful ideas.

First off, we have to help our students out. We know the content--we're the experts in this stuff, and sometimes we forget that the material is almost always new for our students. I think this is especially true for concepts that we've taught many times; it's old hat for us...so we think students must already have a working familiarity with the ideas as well, yeah? (Or maybe that's just me? I do catch myself regularly so I don't fall into this trap!)

Here's the key idea I hope to convey: if you're going to create instructional videos, right-size your video-based instruction for what students need and help manage the cognitive load while also maintaining attention.

What I mean by that is, we have to be sure we aren't over-taxing students' working memory. The analogy I sometimes use is that working memory is like a glass, and new information to be learned is like water being poured in. The glass can only hold so much water, right? So you can keep pouring it in all you want, but the water will just start spilling over the sides of the glass. Only so much can fit in the glass at a time...and then we have to stop pouring to let students take a drink. :-)

Image by Wallace Chuck via Pexels.com

In the same way, we have to "measure" our instruction to not over-tax students' working memory. There is only so much they can handle at a time. So breaking up instruction into logical chunks is a promising practice to help students engage the new concepts, work with them to understanding, and actually learn the material being taught.

I have four principles I'd like to share that I think will help you to chunk content in useful ways for creating better instructional videos. These are my synthesis of some of the research I've read on creating "better" instructional videos, but the terminology is mine. I'll briefly explain each one here, and I'd love to hear your feedback on these in response.

Principle #1: The Alignment Principle

• The key question: What is your learning target?
• Take aim! Focus your video on ensuring students will understand the concept you are teaching...so they will be able to hit that target!

Principle #2: The Pragmatic Principle

• This sounds sassy, I know...but do you want your students to watch that video you create or not? Seriously, if you're going to take the time to create instructional media...we want to ensure that students will actually benefit by watching that video!
• Tight, focused videos are the rule. I encourage you to put a hard time limit of not more than six minutes. The longer the video, the less likely students are to actually watch it! Six minutes or less, they are likely to watch the whole thing.
• Six minutes might not sound like enough time, and it truly might not be enough time for you. Never fear! It's okay to make several videos! Just break up the longer instructional segment into logical chunks--find those logical breaking points in the flow--and record several shorter videos instead. String them together with some interstitial activities (e.g., reflection, answering a key question, etc.) to give students the opportunity to work with the ideas in your presentation.

Principle #3: The Attention Principle

• The human brain thrives on novelty. Consider ways you can work in something novel that will draw students in and capture their attention.
• Humor, surprise, and dramatic tension can all help keep students' attention focused.
• Stories are a great way to grab not just their heads, but also their hearts--think about ways to infuse a storyline into your lesson.

Principle #4: The Human Principle

• This might sound funny at first, but hear me out: I strongly encourage you to be a real person with your students in the videos you create. What I mean is it's often tempting to record and re-record videos over and over again. I understand this drive very well! I want to come off polished and professional too, and all those "umms" and "aaahhs" drive me batty.
• My encouragement: fight that instinct! Unless you go completely off the rails as you are recording your video, try to do it in just one take. (Okay, maybe two...because practice does help...) But think of it this way: when you present in a live setting, you only get one go at it, right? I understand the desire to have the recorded version come off more polished, because of the re-watchability. (Trust me, I get this!) But I think being a real person wins out overall.
• I encourage you to aim for authentic professionalism, not perfection. Isn't this the truth in all of the courses you teach? You want to be an authentic, real person to your students...and you want to convey yourself professionally. We aren't perfect. (Okay, at least I am not perfect.) :-) We should't pretend otherwise.

So that's my advice. I hope that you might find this valuable--and that your students will find this valuable as well!

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Taking Students Seriously

One of the things I've been really grappling with is how to take students seriously. Part of this is the fact that I'm teaching an online course right now for future middle school teachers. It focuses on how to teach young adolescents, with all of their wonderfully weird developmental changes. These changes impact the way we approach teaching young adolescents, obviously. And one of the things I've been trying to convey to these future teachers is that we need to take our students' needs seriously. Want to be an effective middle school teacher? You should know some things about how middle schoolers are developing--physically, cognitively, socially, emotionally, spiritually...all of it! And taking their needs seriously means giving them what they need to flourish in your class. Yes, they need academic input--that's what school is for! But if it's only academic, without accounting for their physical, social, emotional, and spiritual needs...well, good luck to you in actually reaching and actually teaching those students!

And where my thinking is currently pointing? This approach of taking students seriously is probably true of every group of students! 

I'm mostly teaching undergraduates right now. They definitely have their own peculiar needs! And the graduate students I'm teaching have a different set of needs, because of their station in life and where thy are in their professional career.

Certainly this is not just true in a distance teaching situation, which is where I've been focusing my blogging this month. Obviously it matters in a face-to-face classroom as well! But I am thinking right now specifically about how to take students seriously when you aren't meeting up with them face-to-face. Here are a few ideas I've been trying in my own online teaching practice this semester:

• When I have synchronous meetings with students, I am trying to make sure to have an opening circle where we can just check in and see how everyone is doing. I don't compel students to share--this is at their level of comfort--but by making space where sharing about life beyond class is normalized, I think I'm taking students' needs seriously.
• I am using case studies and small group discussion extensively in one course. This allows for students to get to know a smaller group of their colleagues better (working in a small group) which will, I hope, build greater trust among them. The cases we are considering are "controversial" in the sense that they are designed to have multiple "right" answers, and I have some structures in place for the way I'm setting up the discussions to help students engage with each other around ideas. This means that even if they disagree with each other, they are disagreeing about content and not character. All of this to say, I think I'm taking students' social and emotional needs into account in the way I'm arranging for this learning experience to unfold.
• I am being even more flexible than normal with due dates. Let's be honest: most due dates are completely arbitrary and are about the instructor's convenience, rather than being driven by students' needs. I'm at a point in my teaching career that if a student reaches out and says, "I could use a little more time on this," I'm willing to extend the deadline with no questions asked. I know how much extra grace benefits me personally. I'm willing and ready to extend that extra grace to students as well.
• In my communication with students, I am checking my language to ensure I'm conveying confidence in their ability to learn, a sense of high expectations for the quality of work we will do together, and a clear message of support and encouragement from me--that I am for them and not against them. 
• I am intentionally looking for their input on how things are going in the courses they are taking with me. Soliciting feedback from students might not be a norm for you right now, but if you are open to hearing from students--and taking their comments about their experience in your class seriously!--you can learn a lot.

I hope that these suggestions give you some encouragement. What else are you doing to demonstrate that you are taking students seriously?

Image by Tim Gouw via Unsplash.

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Lecturing Online

Lecture is a staple teaching technique in higher education. All right, it's probably a staple teaching technique at every grade level. (Though in elementary grades we might prefer to call it "direct instruction" instead.) There is a time and a place for the teacher simply conveying the key concepts of the lesson to the students directly, and a lecture can be an efficient way to do this.

Image by Sergey Zolkin via Unsplash

The problem--for teaching online, anyway--is how we lecture. A live class meeting via webconference certainly can work for this. (Though I have a few reservations about this approach, and I encourage folks teaching at a distance to use webconferences judiciously.) Alternatively, a teacher might record the lecture ahead of time, and share the recording with students to view on their own time. As I generally am a proponent of asynchronous distance teaching (that is, not requiring students to all log in at the same time for class) you are probably not surprised to hear this! 

There are a few rules of thumb that you can use to make for a stronger pre-recorded lecture, however. Here are a couple of promising practices I would encourage you to consider:

• Using visuals is typically a good idea, but be thoughtful in the way you do this. I think many of us (okay...me...) use powerpoint to prop up possibly-shoddy instruction. I like HaikuDeck as a presentation tool because it helps me limit the amount of text I put on screen at any given time.
• If you are going to have text onscreen, don't just read it to your students. (Don't do this in a face-to-face lecture either, for that matter.) But do match your verbal presentation to the slides, if you're using slides! (We can't really focus on two different pieces of information simultaneously, so it's important that the auditory and visual messages match up.)
• Think about using a tool that allows you to show your face along with your visuals. This boosts social presence for you as a presenter--and can help students feel more connected to a real, caring human being who is presenting this lecture.
• I can't stress this one enough: Keep. It. Short. Seriously, some research I've read on this suggests that if the video is more than six minutes (SIX MINUTES!) in length, students won't watch it anyway--and then why are you creating the video?

Now you might be saying, "I can't give an entire lecture in just six minutes!" That might be true, but without live interaction with students asking questions, etc., you might be surprised how much more quickly you will present the material. Still, six minutes might be pushing it. So consider using chunking to help break up your longer lecture into shorter segments. As a benefit, I think it's easier to record several shorter videos and string them together instead of having to get it right in one long video: how stressful to be 20 minutes into recording a video lecture and then go completely off the rails! That takes some more editing to fix it, for sure. :-)

To chunk a lecture, think through the overall structure of the content. Where are the logical breaking points? See if you can split a 20 minute lecture into four 5-minute segments instead, and record them as separate videos. You can then put them into a playlist (I like YouTube playlists for this.) Or you might break it up something like this:

• Begin with an introduction video that sets the context for the lesson and prompts students to read something. (3 minutes)
• Go off and read the chapter/article/website/what-have-you. (As long as it takes them to read it.)
• Come back to a video in which you gloss over the main ideas and elucidate a few key ideas, giving examples to illustrate. End with 2 key questions that students should be able to answer. (5 minutes)
• Students write their responses to those 2 key questions. (5 minutes)
• Come back to a video in which you explain the answers to those two key questions, so they can check their understanding. (5 minutes)
• Use a video to introduce an assignment for synthesizing their learning. (2 minutes)
• Students do the synthesizing assignment. (As long as it takes them to complete.)
• Come back to a video in which you recap the key ideas from this lesson, and let them know when you'll have feedback for them on their work. (5 minutes)

While this is just a suggested lesson structure for an example, it might be something you could consider doing--or tweaking to make it work for you!

Here is an example of a playlist-based lecture I created some time ago to give advice on how to create better online discussions. It is a playlist of five shorter videos--it is about 15 minutes in total--that will automatically play one after the other. But the easy pause-ability of this approach makes it perhaps more appealing for students. Give it a watch, if you like:

The big take-away here, I hope is that you certainly can lecture, even in an asynchronous online course. But with a little extra planning and preparation, students will get the most out of this learning experience, which is what it's all about anyway!

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Offline Activities in Online Courses

One thing I've been thinking a lot about in this season of distance teaching is just how much screentime students of all ages are experiencing in their lives. I recognize that I spend a LOT of time in front of screens: I use a laptop for teaching, and preparing for class, and often for assessing my students' work (which they hand in digitally through our LMS.) I often have my smartphone in hand, and use this for both communication and distraction. I regularly find myself streaming something while exercising or relaxing. 

Online learners, by the nature of the work, often find themselves spending a lot of time in front of screens for their learning activities. I'm not apologizing for that, exactly...but I'm aware of it.

So I've been thinking about ways to get students away from screens too.

Certainly reading an actual book (like we did in the olden days of yore...and perhaps still do regularly?) is a good place to start, of course. Giving students a frame for their reading can be a promising practice. (As an aside...I think we can generally do a better job as educators in teaching students how to read different kinds of texts. I think many of us assume that students know how to read a textbook, but it's a different skill than reading a novel, for example. I digress...)

What else can students do offline? I'm thinking about ways to have students actually create physical things to demonstrate their learning, which they could submit via taking pictures, for example. Or maybe they could do physical things to learn concepts, and then share a photo or video to illustrate?

I don't have a lot of clear examples to share of this one, at least just yet...because this is a relatively new idea for me, and I don't have a lot of examples at the ready. But one I can share, though it's very context-specific for a course I taught during our emergency distance teaching adventure last spring...

I was teaching my Elementary and Middle School Science Methods course, which I've "always" taught as a face-to-face course on campus. It's typically a very hands-on course, where we do a lot of science together as a way of learning about how to teach science. When we pivoted to distance teaching, I had to re-imagine the course quite a bit to continue that hands-on learning experience. In the process of redeveloping the course, I gave students challenges to try, and then get photos or videos of their results.

For example, one challenge was "build a paper airplane that can stay in the air for at least 5 seconds." This is an almost impossible challenge--5 seconds is a really long time to keep a plane in the air! The point of this learning experience was NOT the actual plane flight. The point was to think like a scientist: to collect evidence, to make multiple attempts to solve the problem, to refine thinking through a process of design and iteration, and to practice intellectual honesty in reporting what we discovered. Students made an awful lot of paper airplanes, and had phenomenal stories to share about this learning opportunity.

But what did they need to be on their computers for in this lesson? Just 15-20 minutes of introduction...and then 15-20 minutes to share their results, and hear from their colleague's in their groups to find out what they tried and what they learned.

Getting students away from their screens might be just what they need to keep things fresh in their learning!

Image by NeONBRAND via Unsplash

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Office Hours at a Distance

In my experience teaching in higher ed, few students take me up on office hours. Partly I think this is due to my discipline (Education)--it's probably more likely that students in other disciplines like Engineering, or Math, or History might capitalize on the individualized learning opportunities provided through office hours. 

The basic intent of "office hours" is that I set aside a few dedicated blocks of time each week in which I am hanging around in my office, ready and willing to work with individual students on their questions and concerns about course material. But is this a waste of my time if no students show up? (I can say with confidence that it is never wasted time...I always have something else I can work on if no students show up.)

One thing I've tried recently is rebranding office hours as "student hours." By explaining it to students as "I'm here for you, students, and I'm always glad to meet up with you," it seems like I've had a slight upswing in the number of students who drop by. But overall, it's still a small number.

I have a couple of colleagues who have taken a different approach: they encourage their students to just sign up for a time slot to connect. Some are using youcanbookme.com, and others are using the Bookings tool within Office 365--both work great for this sort of thing. You can designate available hours for students, and they can sign up for a time as needed. This eliminates that "sitting around and waiting for students to show up" (I joke...I'm never just sitting around!) because students are deliberately adding a calendar item for themselves and their professor in question.

And this kind of approach works pretty well for both face-to-face and online student hours: you can schedule a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting really easily this way too.

But how about for fully online courses? Honestly, in the almost 10 years I've been teaching online, I think I've had three (three!) students show up for a webconference meeting during my scheduled office hours. That seems like a pretty demoralizingly small number doesn't it?

But one of my professors-turned-professional-colleagues, Patrick Lowenthal, gave me an interesting idea. Patrick suggested that maybe office hours needs to be rebranded: "office hours" doesn't sound like something many students would want to attend. And perhaps even "student hours" doesn't work well for this. In one course I took with Patrick in my doctoral studies, he hosted "happy hour" (no drinks required) as an interactive online learning experience. We had "warmly-welcomed-but-not-required" webconferences several times during the semester--basically online office hours. But here's the thing: most students in the course attended. We wanted to be there! 

And so I've taken this approach into my own distance teaching repertoire now. I regularly now hold warmly-welcomed-but-not-required synchronous meetings for most online courses I teach. (This might sound like it's flying in the face of my last post, which argued for asynchronous learning, but I think this is an example of using webconferences judiciously.)

Here are a few tips for how I manage these meetings, which might give you some ideas of how you might incorporate these into your own online teaching:

• I explain the purpose of these meetings as clearly as I can: they are an opportunity to get clarity on key topics for the course, to ask questions about assignments and course content, and to build up our community of learning.
• I limit the meetings to not more than one hour. (This is key! Zoom fatigue is real...)
• I try to always have a brief agenda. My typical agenda looks something like this:
• Check-in/opening circle - how are things going?
• A brief lesson/update/further explanation of a key idea from class
• Questions and answers - about assignments, course content, etc.
• Closing encouragement - previewing assignments to come, giving group feedback, etc.
• Depending what is going on in the course at a given time, I sometimes invite students to share their work-in-progress for informal feedbacking from the learning community. This has been a mixed-bag for me; sometimes it goes really well, sometimes less well. I think that if I were to do this again in the future, I would have some clearer protocols in place for how we share and how we provide feedback. 
• Students are not required to attend these meetings, but I do want to provide equitable learning opportunities for all students in the course. In this light, I always record these live sessions and share the video with the students so they can catch up on what we talked about.
• Depending on the course and the group, I might have these kinds of synchronous sessions on a weekly basis (more common during the compressed summer term, where students appreciate the condensed support of a one-hour weekly meeting) or scattered throughout the term every few weeks (more common during a fall or spring term, where it might be more difficult to get everyone together regularly.) I don't think there is one right way to do this, and I'm continuing to experiment with what works well for this approach to "office hours at a distance."

In my end-of-the-term feedback surveys, I usually include some sort of item along the lines of, "What aspects of the course really helped you learn?" Many students specifically name these synchronous meetings as a key part of supporting their learning. While many students express their appreciation for the asynchronous structure of the course overall, they see the value in these optional live meetings for the efficiency, the immediacy, and the opportunities to develop relationships with their professor and their colleagues.

A screengrab from a meeting with some of my grad students this past summer.
(They really are the best!)

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)