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How to Talk with Students About Suspected Academic Misconduct
Faculty and instructors follow up with suspected academic misconduct and when we do, we show we care about students and their learning the validity of the assessment the fairness of grades for all students in the course. When we don’t follow up, there are risks for students. If students are not made aware of their errors that constitute academic misconduct, they may make the same errors again. If students are aware of their academic misconduct, but there are no consequences, they may risk it again. If other students see that academic misconduct goes unaddressed, they can lose confidence in the fairness of the assessments. Talking to an individual student…
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Comparing two online quizzes: Formative Assessment
This post aims to compare the design of two online quizzes to determine how each design impacts student learning. Formative assessment is a process used to: Identify what students already know and where they need more support to reach the desired learning outcomes. Provide feedback that the student can use to increase learning before a final assessment. For example, using feedback from a draft assignment that can be used to increase understanding for future revisions. Evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction during the learning process so the teacher can adjust instruction to meet students’ needs. “You almost want kids to make mistakes on formative assessments because that’s how you figure out…
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Efficient Feedback
Struggling to learn something? Trying something complex or hard? There is nothing like feedback to help you learn well. For many of us teaching in higher education, however, providing feedback is an aspiration. We know it is important, but we struggle to provide it early or sometimes at all, particularly in large classes. Even when we have specifically designed an activity where students have an experience in an authentic context, we struggle to give timely feedback that students can use to improve their learning. Most of our feedback comes at the end when learning is done (e.g., final paper). It’s laborious, and we question if students are even using it. …
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Creating Efficiencies: Grading Discussions in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Perhaps you are using Discussions in Canvas as a supplement to your face-to-face class or using it in an online course. While students’ posts may provide evidence of their learning and allow for online engagement, giving feedback on the posts is a vital part of the process – and as you are no doubt aware, can be a very time-consuming task! Strategies to manage your marking load and provide timely, actionable, and specific feedback for students, seem to fall into three categories: 1) Lighten the load for everyone: Requiring weekly discussions may impact quality through posting and grading burnout; consider bi-weekly discussions or the option for students…
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Improving Student Feedback Response Rates in Remote Courses
By David Greaves, Teaching and Learning Enhancement Specialist When it comes to student feedback, more is generally better. When we have higher response rates, we know that more student voices are being heard and that the feedback an instructor receives is more complete. To ensure that student feedback processes are effective, it is important for all parties to do their part to encourage students to complete their feedback surveys. Unfortunately, our most reliable method of improving response rates – offering dedicated time in class – is no longer an option in many courses that continue to be offered remotely. This leaves us all with the question of how to improve…
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Personalizing Feedback with Canvas Audio Visual Tools
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba As instructors and teaching assistants, we invest a great deal of time in giving feedback to students to enhance their learning and improve their performance. Giving meaningful feedback involves describing what we experience when excellence catches our attention, building on the strengths demonstrated, and guiding learners to see what excellence looks like. Students generally appreciate feedback that is specific, detailed, constructive, and encouraging – and is given within a couple of weeks of assignment submission, before they’ve moved on to other learning activities and topics. In face-to-face (F2F) courses, feedback may be explanations or questions on written work, corrections with the class after a quiz or lab, or…
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Introduction to Teaching Online
If someone asked you “How is online teaching different from face-to-face teaching?”, the first thing you might say is that face-to-face teaching involves real time interaction between students and instructors (synchronous) whereas online teaching happens through a computer, with students typically working through course content like lectures and other materials in their own time (asynchronous). In an online environment students and instructors access the course at different times and from different places; therefore, it is necessary to deliberately build in opportunities to develop a rapport with students and guide them through the course so that they are successful. There are a number of strategies that are effective in online courses that…
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Posting Feedback and Grades in Canvas
Once students start completing quizzes and assignments in your course, you may start wondering how students access this feedback. You may also be wondering if you need to do anything to release the feedback. You may also wondering, to be frank, about a lot of things. Grade Posting Policy for an Individual Assignment By default, feedback, comments, and grades in Canvas are automatically shared with students as soon as they are generated. This means that as soon as you grade an individual student’s submission, these details will become visible to them. Students may even receive an email notification about this, depending on their notification settings. If you want to keep…
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Transparent assessment
Assessment practice is shifting away from comparing students to each other, or grade derived professor’s experiences and preferences. Increasing, it is focused on comparing students to a clear learning outcome or goal for the assessment that everyone in the class knows in advance. The process of clearly articulating that goal and what we consider good evidence of it is called “Transparent Assessment.” The goal of all transparent assessment is to ensure students understand what they are trying to achieve or learn, so they can be more effective partners in that learning. Our Learning Charter has three learning charter educator commitments related our assessment: Provide a clear indication of what is…
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Building Broad Minds: Active learning strategies for large classrooms
Building broad minds is not about back filling. Broad minds are the byproduct of encountering diverse ideas, thinking deeply about them, and integrating those ideas into our own worldviews and cognitive frameworks. In higher education, the opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of a wide variety of disciplines usually happens at the first year level. However, those are also often large courses where the primary method of instruction is listening to your professor speak. To actually get broad minds, our learning activities have to be active, even in the large classrooms where active learning strategies are limited by the room, and even when students are first encountering the subject…
