Student feedback: What it can and can’t tell us

Posted by: Associate Professor Andrea Chester, Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor, Learning and Teaching, Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

As we move towards the end of semester we begin the process of collecting student feedback via the Course Experience Survey (CES). Student feedback on teaching is a complex topic and it typically raises a range of issues for academics.

Get any group of teaching staff together to discuss student feedback and you will be guaranteed a lively discussion. In addition to the many hours clocked up in our staff rooms on this topic, it has generated thousands of articles examining the validity of student evaluation tools; the best time in the semester for such feedback; how to most effectively close the feedback loop and how to communicate with students about changes made as a result of their feedback.

Copyright © RMIT University. Photographer: Margund Sallowsky.

Previous tomtom posts like this one and this one have effectively captured the ups and downs of the process and both make mention of the importance of putting the CES in context for students.  The phenomenon of “survey fatigue” too (as we know from our own lives) is a risk in any drive to increase response rates, particularly as we move to online administration of the survey.

There is one issue, however, on which there is widespread agreement: student feedback is only one source of information available to us about our courses and our teaching. Triangulation is crucial. This means complementing student feedback with information from:

• assessment tasks, giving due consideration to the learning your students demonstrate
• peer observation, such as via Peer Partnerships, in which you invite colleagues to experience your teaching and provide feedback and your own reflections on what seems to work and not work and why.

The CES can provide us with useful information, but we do need to remember what it measures, namely student experience. In his useful summary of research on student evaluations, Terry Doyle (2004) reminds us that while student feedback can provide valuable information, there are a number of aspects about which students are not well qualified to provide feedback including:

• if the teaching methods used were appropriate for the course
• if the content covered was appropriate for the course
• if the content covered was up-to-date
• if the assignments were appropriate for aiding student learning
• if what they learned has real world application
• if what they learned will help them in future classes
• if the type of assistance, help or support given to students was appropriate to the learning goals of the class
• if the difficulty level of the course material was at an appropriate level.

What Doyle also provides here I think is a structure for a teacher or lecturer to speak to towards the end of her or his course. A quick reminder about each of the elements above would also be an appropriate introduction to students before they complete their survey.

Copyright © RMIT University. Photographer: Margund Sallowsky.

Before making changes in response to student feedback, we need to be confident in the validity of the data provided and this brings us to response rates. This semester the Survey Services Group has developed a reliability band calculator. During the administration period of the survey (May 6 – June 2) you will be able to check how your own response rates are tracking against the reliability bands (good, sufficient and insufficient). You can check the response rates by program and school here (RMIT Staff login required). Contact your L&T group if you’d like to use a short presentation that has been designed by the Survey Centre to be displayed in a class so that students can follow the links and complete any outstanding surveys.

The RMIT Academic Expectations have set expected and aspirational targets for the Good Teaching Scale. In the coming years there will be more pressure on academics to provide reliable snapshots of the student perspective on their teaching. The vast majority of academics have always used the surveys as a tool for self-reflection.

I’m confident that we can continue a culture at RMIT that puts an appropriate emphasis on major surveys like the CES as one way in which we identify both evidence of excellence and areas for improvement.

Resources:

• Read more about Terry Doyle’s research into surveys and teacher effectiveness at his blog Learner Centered Teaching.
• For more on the CES, read this FAQ published by the Survey Services Centre.

Share your thoughts about the CES in the comments section below!

Wherever you go, there you are

Posted by: Ruth Moeller, Lecturer in Education and Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

Every time I pass the billboard for a certain university advertising an overseas student experience involving elephants, I get irritated. I don’t have anything against students, the university or elephants for that matter but really, how many students will actually go overseas as part of their studies? Although I agree that it would be a wonderful learning experience, I have difficulty with the premise that, for a student to be a global citizen, they need to study abroad.

(cc) http://www.flickr.com/photos/saparevo/

Don’t get me wrong, ‘They’ say that travel broadens the mind and ‘They’ are right. The opportunity to work or study offshore would enhance any student experience and a highlight of a student’s experience at university.

But in my opinion this should be the icing on the cake, not the main focus. ‘I went overseas, now I am global’ — I don’t think so. So to do justice to the idea of global competence, we need to think more broadly.

RMIT has a sophisticated view when it says graduates will be ‘Global in outlook and competence‘. What that commits us to is providing graduates with ‘…opportunities to acquire professional [and] cultural skills that enable them to engage thoughtfully and effectively with the great diversity of people and situations they encounter at work and socially.’

This is saying that there are personal and professional skills and knowledge that need to be developed in all of our students. As educators, we need to ask: ‘How do we do this?’

As a starting point, the question I think we need to ask is: What does an ‘internationalised’ student look like in my discipline? How can we claim our students will be global in outlook and competence if we don’t actually know what this means within our discipline?

I have tried to do this in my discipline, tertiary teaching. Using the Australian Qualifications Framework criteria of knowledge, skills and application of knowledge and skills, I started by imaging what I would expect if someone came to me for a teaching job claiming that they were ‘global’. What would I be looking for? In doing, this I developed a framework of the knowledge and skills that helps students develop their global competence and outlook.

Some of the knowledge I would expect includes an appreciation of educational philosophies and different education systems to get a sense of the expectations of their students and how these philosophies might be enacted in classes. An added benefit of this could be the help it gives them in finding employment opportunities and navigating the various educational systems that operate across the world. Also of importance would be knowledge of the cultural views of education; the role of student/teacher, group/individual in different contexts.

When thinking of skills I would include a proficiency with different teaching strategies and the use of technology to engage diverse learning styles and cultures as well as the ability to research resources in an international context. The skills that help them identify what is available for them in regards to enhancing and internationalising their curriculum are, as educators, the same ones that will help them localise their curriculum should they wish to deliver content offshore or to deliver at a distance to global learners.

In thinking about the application of knowledge and skills, on a practical level I would incorporate how to design assessment for diverse learners and contexts, as well as the strategies that they, as teachers, could use to make their students ‘globally aware’.

In a broader sense, I would expect that person to be able to listen to, appreciate and synthesise other points of view as perhaps the key ability to operate within diverse cultures and environments.

Now the question is, does this just happen? Or do I need to create learning opportunities for this? Miracles do happen, but usually student learning is based on hard work and good design and that is what I am going for.

As my course is being reviewed, I am currently working on ways to integrate the skills and knowledge required to allow my students to have a global outlook. I found an excellent set of resources The GIHE Good Practice Guide to Internationalising the Curriculum at Griffith University to help with the planning involved in internationalising a course. They encourage you to look at programs and courses holistically, integrating an internationalised approach into aspects of curriculum design, assessment, learning resources and extracurricular activities.

Being global in outlook and competence requires far more than boarding a plane. Recently on the blog (here  and here) we’ve showcased student mobility opportunities that focus on the learner and their discipline. Thinking about the knowledge and skills we want to instil in graduates to give them a global education (and how will they apply these in any setting) is crucial to a genuine engagement with the world.

Resources:

Griffith University: The GIHE Good Practice Guide to Internationalising the Curriculum

http://www.griffith.edu.au/data/assets/pdf_file/0006/345291/Internationalising-the-Curriculum.pdf

Curriculum Review Tools for QAA – Quality Assurance of Assessment, Part 3 – Assessment for internationalisation of the Curriculum.Duncan D. Nulty, Brona Farreley and Michelle Barker

http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/344384/Curriculum-Review-Tools-for-QAA-Part-3.pdf

Share your thoughts about a global outlook for students in the comments below!

A post from the archive: Native or immigrant – Exploring foreign territory in online learning

Did you know that there are over 80 teaching tomtom posts searchable and available through the tools at the right of the page?

You can also use the tag cloud and categories link to bring up relevant posts.

At this time of year you might be heading into the pointy end of your unit(s) and looking for advice on assessment (17 posts), student engagement (14 posts) or feedback (21 posts).

We’re always interested to hear what you’re wrestling with in the tertiary sector too – drop us a line at theteachingtomtom@gmail.com and request a topic or write a post for submission!

Native or immigrant – Exploring foreign territory in online learning

Posted by: Meredith Seaman, Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

There is sometimes a perception that ALL tertiary students have grown up with technology and are natives of the online environment, and that teaching staff, well, they just have to catch up.

I beg to differ…

Working with staff as they prepare for teaching, I come across a vast range of different styles and views in relation to using newer educational technologies, some keen, proficient and eager to experiment and others overwhelmed, nervous or disinterested.

A recent study found that there was significant diversity in both staff and students in terms of technical experiences and proficiency in Australia universities. Students were not always ‘digital natives’ and academics were not always ‘immigrants’ as has sometimes been claimed. Given my experience, it doesn’t surprise me that they found great diversity across ages and groups, and a wide range of perceptions about the advantages of using technology for learning and teaching. Even if we don’t buy into the immigrant/native analogy, both students and staff can at times feel foreign and lost. As reflective journals, lecture capture, web conferencing, twitter, blogs and video (some explored in recent blog posts to TTTT) become more common, more students and colleagues will be exposed to an increasing range of technologies in learning and teaching. So how can we support better learning and teaching through technology and enable both colleagues and students from a range of backgrounds and technical proficiencies to flourish?

My personal understanding of what it might be like to be in ‘foreign territory’ in an educational online context, comes from my own recent experience as a distance education student. Thrown in the deep end with two other students, who had had very minimal exposure to Web 2.0 technologies but were keen to learn, we were asked to use an emerging educational technology to develop and present an assignment about education and technology. A fellow team member suggested a wiki and we were off. In our case, the technical aspects (setting up and navigating wikispaces which was very new to the other students), and visual and instructional design aspects of the task completely took over from the content and intended learning outcomes of the assignment in our interaction as a group. On top of additional time constraints which we faced as mature aged students with young families and/or in full time employment, the challenges of working and being assessed as a group, the assignment almost derailed. We ended up using email to communicate outside of the wiki and got back on track. The difficulties weren’t because wikispaces was difficult to use, but because of the challenges in sustaining good group work and communication while interacting online in an unstructured, unfamiliar space, in this case with others we hadn’t even met.

I learnt a lot from this activity, and apply it in my work with teaching staff. Like Clare suggests in her recent post, there needs to be a clear sense of purpose as to why to adopt technology for a particular tasks, and clear attention paid to the motivation for students (to foster the kind of willingness and ‘good attitude’ which is so important to successful learning). For our assignment the benefit that we should learn about wikis for education to inform our role as educators was clear, yet it still felt like an unnecessarily add on to an assessment task, and very time consuming in itself. While technology can support communication between peers for distance students, the dry unfamiliar territory of the wiki was not ideal for this in our case. We tended to develop content separately, and then publish, rather than truly collaborate and develop ideas relevant to the assignment as a group. The superficial design and technical aspects unfortunately took over. Other tools, like chat or skype or google docs (or even email which we ended up resorting to) would perhaps have been better for timely communication and collaboration, and would have supported the development of the wiki. But the solution to such challenges isn’t using other tools or technology training (though time and support to learn new technologies is terribly important), but in good teaching practice and design.

So what did I learn about good teaching practice and design using educational technologies from that experience?

That we should:

• provide time for students to play and explore technologies in advance of the ‘meat’ of the assignment work

• provide clear structure/scaffolding to support how we were expected to work with the online tools (and most importantly AS A GROUP if that’s a key aspect of the task)

• make an explicit link between the learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and the process of developing new technical skills

and, the benefits of being:

• required to work in a group with different levels of ability, and with different individual strengths and weaknesses

• encouraged to explore new technologies

• able to experience the technology from a student perspective as an educator.

__________________________

More on recent research into ‘immigrants and natives’ and attitudes about technology in learning and teaching:

Educating the Net Generation: Implications for Learning and Teaching in Australian Universities
Open University research explodes myth of ‘digital native’
The impact of web-based lecture technologies on current and future practices in learning and teaching
Teaching, technology and educational design: the architecture of productive learning environments

 

How do we assess English language competence?

Posted by: Barbara Morgan, Manager, Academic Literacies & Maths, Discipline Services, Study and Learning Centre, RMIT University.

Click on the image to open a new window to RMIT’s Study and Learning Centre.

Lecturers often ask us what they can do to help their students improve their English. They face a growing number of students in their classes from a range of language and cultural backgrounds, prior education experiences and academic abilities who all want to succeed in their studies. It is not just in the classroom that lecturers articulate their fears as there is increasing concern about English proficiency across the sector in response to the recent inclusion of English language in the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) threshold standards.

At RMIT English language development is an important aspect of the ‘Work Ready’ graduate attribute.

The issue is how do we ensure that these crucial skills are developed over the course of a degree?  It seems that with increasing diversity we need to be even more explicit about what is expected and how to  go about it. The challenge for all tertiary institutions is that English language is developmental and context specific; university learning is a kind of apprenticeship into a discipline. This takes time.

So how do we overcome this barrier and teach this? One useful way is through the feedback we provide to students. Writing effective English language feedback for students can be challenging. Of interest to us all is that English language feedback is useful for all students and helps them to develop the capabilities required in their program.

For this purpose the Study and Learning Centre has developed a series of user friendly English language rubrics (for essays, reports, reflective journals, and oral presentations) to assist teachers to give practical feedback to their students on their English language and academic skills.

The rubrics aim to explicitly verbalise the implicit language and literacy requirements of assignment tasks. They do this through clear and simple explanations of the linguistic features of assignments and links to models on the Learning Lab. Staff can use the feedback provided in the rubrics to give students the specific advice they need to improve their language and literacy. Students highly value feedback from their teachers so we expect that use of the rubric could support positive GTS scores. Staff from the Study and Learning Centre are also available to directly work with you to customise the rubrics to suit your needs.

You can find the rubrics on the webpage English Language Development Project in the Teaching resources area of the RMIT staff webpage.  Please contact the Barbara Morgan at the Study and Learning Centre for more information (barbara.morgan@rmit.edu.au).

Share your thoughts on the nature of feedback or English language competence in the comments section!

Global in outlook and competence?

Posted by: Meredith Seaman, Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

Meredith interviewed Dr Jose Roberto (Robbie) Guevara from the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies about his long experience running study tours with students from a range of disciplines and found a positive story about collaboration and deep learning.

RMIT has a commitment to offering students a ‘global passport’ seeking to develop in our students the necessary skills and knowledge to work around the globe. The

Dr Roberto Guevara. Click to navigate to Robbie’s staff profile page at RMIT.

potential benefits of student study tours in this context might seem self-explanatory: they can broaden student outlook; enhance employment opportunities; and tie in powerfully with the RMIT Graduate Attribute of ‘Global in outlook and competence’. In order to understand a bit more though, I decided to interview a colleague with long experience running study tours. What I found was that overseas tours can also be an opportunity for students to own their own assessment and develop life-long learning skills.

Background

The most recent tour Robbie led was to the Philippines in 2012 that was conducted together with partner institution Miriam College, to research and reflect on the links between women, migrant workers, and intenational justice issues. The 2012 tour was designed to coincide with the 2012 World Social Forum on Migration in Manila. Robbie has been involved in a number of study tours, taking Melbourne RMIT undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of disciplines (including International Studies, International Development, Criminal Justice Administration, Social Work, and Environment and Urban Planning) to the Philippines. The tours also involve collaboration with staff members from this wide range of disciplines within the School, and in 2009 with the Ngarara Willim Centre. The 2009 tour included homestays with a local indigineous community; effectively ‘immersions’ in local culture and issues linked to community development.

Miriam College and RMIT students during their collaborative Study Tour in 2012.

Over time Robbie has developed a few key themes or principles in designing tours like this one. Given the financial and workload challenges in setting up a study tour (teaching can’t always neatly fit into 12 credit points) he mitigates this with what you might call a ‘bang for your buck’ approach. He looks for opportunities to collaborate with other disciplines areas working with existing university partner institutions to form staff-student partnerships that can begin well before the students leave for the tour and that can endure or develop after their return.

The underlying principle is that of reciprocity, where both institutions achieve positive long-term outcomes, such as when the collaborations foster benefits beyond the immediate tour. This might manifest as a stronger student exchange program or a cross-discipline research partnership.

However, in Robbie’s experience study tours can be more than just about achieving student learning goals or strengthening institutional partnerships. Given the focus on international community development issues, often there are other benefits that happen spontaneously. Past tours have resulted in direct benefits to overseas community groups. In 2009 students helped to establish a scholarship program to support teacher training development for the local indigenous community. This was the need identified by the students.

Student experience

During the study tour, students are encouraged to reflect on the links between the concepts studied and the lived experiences of the people they meet. The 2012 tour, provided the students with numerous opportunities to critically reflect on the experiences of the Filipino migrant women they met at the Forum and how these micro-experiences helped deepen their understanding of the concepts and drivers of mobility and displacement.  This balanced the more academic process of writing analytically on the subject. Hearing migration stories first hand, being exposed to their personal resilience, added complexity and depth to their thinking and writing. Given the nature of cross-cultural challenges (in personal and academic space), Robbie encourages students to read extensively and think about their preconceptions as part of the preparation before the study tour. Ongoing support is provided, but these real life challenges are better preparing students to develop in that dimension of a ‘global outlook’. Feedback from students highlights a confidence and willingness to work in cross-cultural settings upon completion of their degrees.

Assessment

Students are actively involved in the assessment design and supported to develop their own personalised learning goals. This takes some courage on the part of both students and staff. Tasks include identifying a learning objective or research question informed by the literature but linked to their personal and/or disciplinary background. For example an undergraduate student in Social Work who is also a recent migrant to Australia would frame her learning objective differently to a postgraduate student in International Development with a background in accounting.  These personalised learning goals (with the students gathered into learning groups that are set up before the study tour) provide fertile opportunities for cross-disciplinary and context-based learning. This makes it necessary for students to keep a regular reflective journal that does not merely describe but critically reflects on their experiences. In 2012, each of the student groups conducted a formal presentation to staff and students of Miriam College, this provided an achievable and tangible outcome at the end of the study tour. The final piece of assessment involved a synthesis report that weaved the literature and the experiences of the student framed by their personal learning focus.

For Robbie, the depth of the assessment pieces submitted is striking because no two submissions are ever alike. In 2012, students prepared a portfolio of all their submissions (the learning focus question based on the literature, their journal entries and their synthesis report) to help them see their peers’ and their own learning journeys. Often students say that their learning focus questions have changed. By asking them to reflect and explain why their questions have changed, students are able to identify for themselves how the experiences have contributed to new ideas and have resulted in more relevant and focused questions. It’s a way for them to identify what new questions have come up by the end of the study tour which they then have to find answers to after a substantial time for reflection and additional research. This whole process is underpinned by ongoing discussions with the students at different stages of the study tour. The process highlights student ownership of the outcomes and over what they have learned.

Study tours may not have a place in every program or course, but for me this is a strong example of the assessment principle championed by David Boud, that ‘students themselves need to develop the capacity to make judgements about both their own work and that of others in order to become effective continuing learners and practitioners’.  It’s clear to me from my conversations with Robbie that it’s in these rich, self-directed scenarios that students really match — and usually exceed — what we as course designers and facilitators have designed for them.

Useful links:

Information on current Tours, Student Exchanges and Study Abroad opportunities at RMIT can be found here:

David Boud’s principles on Assessment Design, Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education can be found through the OLT site here. :

Share your thoughts on the value of exchanges, study tours and student-derived learning outcomes in the comments below!

 

Clapping erasers in a digital age

Posted by: Jon Hurford, Senior Advisor, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

This week, instead of a post, let’s save time with a quick four question quiz on the Basics of Blackboard (or any LMS) that you can take in your head. Ready?

Too late! The F-shape of my text means you’ve already scanned the word ‘quiz’ and who can resist a quiz?

A full copy of this handy matrix showing Bb tools against their pedagogical use and Bloom’s Taxonomy can be found in the resources section of RMIT’s Blackboard Interactive Tutorials.

Blackboard Basics Quiz

1) Do you use Blackboard to store and distribute course content? 

If you feel comfortable creating an item in Blackboard that holds course content (PowerPoint presentations, eReserve material, links to web resources, YouTube videos and e-books) you don’t have to read this week’s post as long as you answer the next three questions in the affirmative. This is like using Blackboard as a file cabinet.

2) Do you use Blackboard to communicate with students and enable them to communicate with each other? 

If you know how to use Blackboard to make announcements to all of the students enrolled in your course (or to groups within your course) and how to set up a discussion board where students can participate with you and with their peers about what they’re learning, you don’t have to read this week’s post as long as you answer the next two questions in the affirmative. This is like using Blackboard as a noticeboard.

3) Do you use Blackboard for any part of your assessment? 

If you use Blackboard for quizzes or the Turnitin function for e-submission of assignments you don’t have to read this week’s post as long as you answer the next question in the affirmative. This is like using Blackboard as a drop-box.

4) Do you manage the ‘look and feel’ of your shell and review your shell each time you run your course?

If you can alter the look of your shell and export items and content over to other shells and you answered in the affirmative to the three questions above you don’t have to read any further. You might like to visit RMIT’s Teaching with Technology page that I recommend at the end of the post though. This is like using Blackboard as your own online space or portal. 

For those of you who routinely do the four things above, you’ll probably be at the stage where you’re wrestling with some of Blackboard’s more advanced functions and you’re probably moving towards the model of a flipped classroom or wholly online delivery. Or you at least know how you could go down those paths.

The skills in the list above are what I think we could call a minimum set for RMIT teachers and trainers. If you’re still reading this and don’t have these skills I want to assure you that you could gain them from scratch in just a few hours. RMIT staff could start with the DevelopMe training (Blackboard Essentials) and in the College of Design and Social Context your Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching would be able to assist you with the basics and help you with implementing the right tool for what you want to achieve. The great thing about the DevelopMe training sessions is that you can bring along your own content and build your shell with the materials you will use in your course.

If you’d prefer to figure this sort of thing out by yourself Lynda.com has an in-depth tutorial, Blackboard 9.x Essential Training for Instructors, which is divided into subheadings and fully captioned and RMIT has Interactive Tutorials on Blackboard. These are screencasts that show you exactly what, for instance, embedding a YouTube video looks like in the myRMIT environment. You are asked to point and click along with the video so that you’re doing exactly what you would be doing in your own shell.

It’s always a risk in talking about educational technology that we overlook the rationale behind the use of these tools. So for the remainder of the post I want to concentrate on each of those four metaphorical functions (file cabinet, noticeboard, drop-box, portal). I want to explain the benefits that they offer to students and staff in boosting student engagement with your course or in simply saving you time.

File cabinet

Uploading your course materials online does involve time and preparation but it’s a clear winner in terms of what it provides both you and your students. A course logically arranged can put an end to handouts and printed materials for starters. You can have texts that students can access at any time, often in a format of their choice. Students can go through materials (or support/extension materials) at their own pace (or multiple times) and can get an idea of the scope of your course. You can see how the metaphor of the file cabinet begins to strain as a Blackboard shell might have a huge amount of resources (documents, images, links to resources). So as well as orientation materials and Frequently Asked Questions about a course that a late enrolled student can access, you might also have a documentary (that in the past would have been put on closed reserve or shown in class) which is viewed by students outside of class or e-books that students can read on their tablets.

Noticeboard

In Blackboard you can email announcements to the entire enrolled set of students that are then posted to the homepage of the course.  Simple, but effective. You can put links in your announcements that take students straight to the content you want them to interact with. For instance, you might remind them of the upcoming assignment and link to a recording where you have gone through what the task requirements are or a video where you discuss a model answer. Blackboard’s discussion boards also make peer-to-peer communication possible. It’s likely that you’ll have to lead the way for a while in these discussions, and Blackboard gives you a lot of options regarding the moderation of posts, but many lecturers have reported genuine ‘social learning’ taking place in their courses using discussion boards and some assess that participation.

Drop-box

The advantages of using the Turnitin function in Blackboard (which comes with a full coversheet and generates a student preview and receipt) is something I’ve seen a quite few lecturers really embrace. As well as taking the load off professional staff and closing some of the ‘leaks’ of paper submission, the electronic submission in Blackboard is as simple as addressing an email for the students and provides a lot of benefits to the tutors and lecturers who grade and give feedback on these submissions.

Portal

This last one really ties most of the points above together. It’s interesting that the word portal goes back to the French and Latin words for gate and that we also think of portals connecting us to other lands or dimensions. In a sense, the ‘open web’  is that other land— it looms in all of our lives in the form of social networks, MOOCS, or whatever the web generates that seems more compelling than the window we have open at the moment.

For our students (as for all of us) this is only ever a click away. The challenge is to make a space on the web for your course that has that kind of life. It will be difficult to foster that life if you’re not an active participant in your own discussion boards or if you haven’t welcomed your students to your course or if you haven’t put contact details on your page.

Click here to open a new window to the Teaching with Technology pages at RMIT

There are many tools that are easier and slicker than Blackboard. Take a look at www.rmit.edu.au/interact for examples of how the start of the year at RMIT looks through the lens of a tool like Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram. You should get some ideas about how you could use these tools with your class.

But none of these are as powerful as Blackboard. A Blackboard shell can really be your curated space on the web. Yes, it is constrained to a set of enrolled users and therefore quite unlike the ‘open web’ or social media platforms, but there are advantages in those constraints — a point I’ll take up in a future post on the use of Facebook and other applications.

I can assure you that the skills you learn in dealing with Blackboard are valuable in themselves and are transferable to other platforms. Your skill at managing this particular ‘gated space’ can also make you think more deeply about the structure of your course; about what you offer your students in terms of resources.  It should make you think about how you communicate with your students and how you can encourage them to communicate with each other. In short, these are some of the new core of skills for the 21st century educator. Ideally they can extend our reach and enhance our proficiency to facilitate learning.

I’ve only touched on a small part of Blackboard’s functionality. I’ve avoided entirely the metaphor of ‘the blackboard’ itself: the tools in Blackboard which allow you to present material — that too will have to wait for another post. My title is also misleading. I needed a blackboard reference. But I will hint that just like physical blackboards, there are fiddly little administrative tasks that simply can’t be avoided and that trial runs are a must for most of Blackboard’s advanced features. ‘Blackboard’s chalk dust’ could be a whole other post.

In closing I will mention the great resources on RMIT’s Teaching with Technology page which provides good practice guides to the many supported tools in place here at RMIT.

Share your thoughts on Blackboard! We’d love to hear them in the comments section below!

A short break for Easter…see you next week!

Posted by: Jon Hurford, Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

(cc) MorgueFile.com (http://www.morguefile.com/creative/hotblack)

The tomtom will take a short break for the Easter long weekend in Australia, but we will be back with a post on Blackboard on April 4. In the meantime don’t forget that you can access all of our articles in the Archive.

- Jon.

 

Course Guides…does anyone care?

Posted by: Spiros Soulis, Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

As the academic year has been thrust upon us yet again, teaching staff have been preparing their Part B course guides…or have they? The course guide system officially closed on Friday 8 March and in the lead-up I provided support and feedback for teachers developing or refreshing their course guides.

And this is where I came to the realisation that some staff were not fully aware of the importance of the course guide and its relevance to other areas both internal and external to the University. Further, there seemed to be some very good course guides on Blackboard or handed out in class but the guide published on the system may not have been given the love and attention it deserved as the ‘official’ guide.

So in the last few weeks I met with a number of staff (in some instances long standing senior staff) who were quite prepared to leave sections like the Assessment Tasks with the barest of information: no assessment descriptions, no marking criteria, no links to learning outcomes. This perplexed me and when I questioned the content or lack of it well the floodgates opened:

“Ah the students don’t read these!”
“Nobody reads them….the system is horrible to navigate!”
“We have been told to just get them published…just put in the bare minimum.”

And then the bombshell: “Let me show you my course guide that I put up on Blackboard!” Lo and behold here was a course guide with all the trimmings…a detailed teaching schedule, assessment tasks clearly spelled out, references clear, detailed and current.

“But…but-” I stammered, “-nobody reads this!”

“The students do.” was the prompt reply.

There is a world beyond the course and beyond the classroom. Some teaching staff (and I was certainly one of them) find it a nightmare to navigate the complexity and bureaucratic nature of universities today. There are so many central systems, like Learning & Teaching Units, Academic Services, Marketing, and the new world order in compliance, TEQSA. Now what do all these have to do with course guides, let me explain:

• The L&T units look at the ‘official’ course guides and from those, rightly or wrongly, judge the standard and quality of the course being delivered. Rightly or wrongly they may also judge the calibre of the staff member delivering it.
• Academic Services play a major role in coordinating the appeals process. Recent conversations with the Manager for Academic Services in one of the colleges highlighted clearly that almost all cases are around assessment. In most cases the school loses appeals because ‘official’ guides lack important criteria or a lack of information pertaining to assessment. Sometimes there is an inconsistency with what is handed out in class to what is found on Blackboard which is different again in the ‘official’ guide. Students call on help from Student Rights Officers who will point to every assessment regulation or course guide guidelines and show us where we went wrong.
• Marketing extract the information from the “official” course guide (Part A) to promote the course and program. In a number of instances this has caused not only bland and lacklustre information being published in glossy brochures but also misleading information.
• The course guide will take on a new prominence in light of the AQF, with course guides subject to TESQA auditing and review. As Professor Bradley pointed out in a 2011 issue of Campus Review, TEQSA will have powers to “…intervene at the course, student cohort, institution and sector levels and to scrutinise whole institutions as well as particular aspects of their operations…”

And finally a few tips on the system itself. Yes, it is cumbersome and archaic but it has some redeeming features. For example, the magical button called Copy Part B Values. I am still gobsmacked at how many staff don’t understand that this button can copy a previous semester’s course guide and paste it into the current semester. Get one course guide right and then with some tweaking of dates for assessment and updating references you can copy it over.

Beyond the mantra of compliance, the course guide system is there to assist and protect us by making explicit, as a public document, the course and assessment. For Semester 2 think about:

• using exemplars and existing resources designed to assist you with the course guide writing process
• sharing and receiving feedback on your course guides with your peers
• reviewing your assessment in light of the new policies
• becoming familiar with the course guide system and how to upload your information.

Share your thoughts about course guides in the comments below!

NB. The image in this post comes from MorgueFile.com, from user: mconnors.

2013 RMIT Teaching Awards

Posted by: Jon Hurford, Senior Advisor, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

Professor Margaret Gardner, AO, Vice-Chancellor and President and the recipients of the RMIT Teaching and Research Awards in 2012. Click here to see a list of past winners.

It’s already March which means there’s a little over two months before nominations open for the 2013 RMIT Teaching Awards. Here at the tomtom we’ve written about the awards in the 2012 posts below:

Meredith Seaman’s: Teaching Awards – worth the paperwork?
and
Kym Fraser’s Applying for a teaching award next year? Start collecting your evidence this semester.

These two posts form an excellent knowledge base for RMIT staff who are thinking about applying for an award.

What comes out clearly in each of the above (and in my conversations with past applicants) is the value most participants felt in the process of reflecting on their practice and the importance of having a narrative to your teaching that is backed up by evidence. To bring it back to what you might be doing this month in your classes, examples of assessments that you have run with actual student outcomes displayed (de-identified and used with their permission) can make powerful examples in the evidence you supply with your application. The use of visuals and materials supplied on DVD is an option applicants are increasingly taking advantage of to display the achievements of teachers and learners.

Importantly, the awards are also open to professional and support staff. We all know those who may not teach but are crucial to the success of our students and Category P7 is especially relevant to those members of staff.

As the DSC’s coordinator for the awards, (click here for the Business and SEH coordinators) I wanted to grab some of the mental real estate that might be available at this time of year to advise staff of some of the key dates, categories and a couple of changes to the process for 2013 through a short series of FAQs:

How do I nominate?

You can nominate a colleague by contacting your college’s coordinator. You can also discuss your own application. In the DSC, these nominations will be forwarded to the Schools’ L&T Directors/Chairs. These nominations open20 May.

I’ve heard there will be peer review of teaching for Teaching Awards?

Yes, but for 2013 this will be a voluntary process. There are workshops being run for interested staff on 18 March and 10 May. As the Learning and Teaching page on the pilot states: “For 2013, review of teaching is being piloted and will be available on a voluntary basis to teachers who plan to apply for an RMIT Teaching Award. On request, two trained reviewers will review the intending applicant’s teaching and provide reports. These reports can then be used as evidence to support a teaching award application.” So you can think of peer review as another piece of evidence, just like your CES data and professional references. For more information, click here.

What are the categories for the awards?

Click on the following links to find out more about a particular category:

• The Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award
• Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and Research

• Category A – Teaching Excellence, Higher Education
  • A1 College of Science, Engineering and Health
  • A2 College of Design and Social Context
  • A3 College of Business
  • A4 Early career academic (Higher Education)
  • A5 Priority area – Teaching a diverse student body

• Category B – Teaching Excellence, TAFE
  • Category B1 TAFE Outstanding Teacher / Trainer of the Year Award
  • Category B2 Early Career Teacher / Trainer of the Year Award
  • Category B3 Outstanding Training Initiative of the Year Award

• Category C – Sessional Staff
  • C1 Outstanding Sessional Teaching Award (Higher Education)
  • C2 Outstanding Sessional Teaching Award (TAFE)

• Category P – Awards for Programs that Enhance Student Learning
  • P1 Widening Participation
  • P2 Educational Partnerships and Collaborations with Other Organisations
  • P3 The First Year Experience
  • P4 Flexible Learning and Teaching
  • P5 Innovation in Curricula, Learning and Teaching
  • P6 Postgraduate Education
  • P7 Services Supporting Student Learning
  • P8 Indigenous Education

What about team applications?

As long as all members are eligible, team applications are encouraged in categories A, B, C and P. Last year in the DSC, teams from the Schools of Art, Education and GUSS won awards.

Will I have to make a full application to the College?

No, in the DSC you will only have to address one criteria in your initial application. If you are selected as the College’s nominee you will be supported in writing the full application. There are also workshops scheduled for June to assist you in writing your application.

Okay, I’m interested or I know someone who would make a good nominee. What should I do next?

I’d love to hear from you. Getting an early start on the process can make it a lot more enjoyable. We can discuss what category might be appropriate for your nomination and I can put you in touch with past winners of the awards. Contact me to discuss the best use of your time in the upcoming months!

Do you have thoughts on the process of applying for a teaching award? We’d love to hear them in the comments section below!

Integrating library resources into your teaching

Posted by: Grazyna Rosinska, Liaison Librarian (School of Art, School of Media & Communication), RMIT University.

www.facebook.com/rmitlibrary
www.twitter.com/library_rmit
Link to Grazyna’s library subject guides

Last month, June Frost looked at some of the great physical resources and spaces on offer at RMIT and the information skills sessions run by library staff; if you missed it click here. I wanted to continue to look at this idea of developing information skills with a particular focus on just two services that the Library has acquired over the past couple of years, Lynda.com and the Kanopy Streaming Service. Both are available through the RMIT Library homepage through the ‘Databases’ link (or you can search for either as a keyword with our LibrarySearch function) and both provide you with high quality resources that you can link to course content or embed in Blackboard shells to allow easy student access. The real power of each might come from your own explorations and use of the materials though. Hopefully you’ll see uses for both as teaching tools and as professional development resources.

Lynda.com

Click on this image to go to the Lynda link for RMIT staff and students.

Lynda is a learning platform with thousands of sequenced and indexed videos available to all RMIT staff and students. The focus is on creative, business and technology skills so if you’re looking to start from scratch in a topic or maybe you’re brushing up on the latest version of a piece of software or a web tool, you’ll probably find relevant material on Lynda. Subject areas include:

• 3D
• Audio
• Business including Office and Google software
• Design
• Developer
• Photography and Video
• Web and social media

One thing that has impressed us in the library is the extensive tagging, time-coding and captioning of content. It means it’s very easy to dip in and find the answer to something. But it’s likely though you’ll stay to learn more as Lynda’s videos are delivered by engaging experts. The login you create with Lynda.com means that you can queue and track the courses you have viewed; you can use it off-campus and be working through a self-directed syllabus. So if we take an example that RMIT staff might be interested in, ‘Gmail for Power Users’, here is the course description:

In this course, Susan Metz shows how to personalize email, manage multiple accounts, and be more productive with the Google email service. The course offers tips and tricks for customizing Gmail to suit your needs; working efficiently with shortcuts; taking advantage of labels; integrating with Calendar, Google Docs, and social media; using voice and video chat; implementing time management in Gmail; and much more…

If you look at this course (screenshot at the right) you’ll find there’s a full transcript, and all of those topics with subheadings and the time the instructor spends on each topic. It’s easy to imagine how this could be a valuable self-study tool for staff and students alike.

Kanopy Streaming Service

Another resource that the Library has acquired is the Kanopy Streaming Service. Kanopy supplies audiovisual materials to tertiary institutions in Australia and New Zealand so right away you will be finding materials that have local context and/or local content. Instead of having a film or documentary on closed reserve as we would have done in the past, Kanopy allows high quality documentaries and films (just to give two examples) to be accessed by multiple students from multiple locations.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for there is a recommendation system where you can suggest a title to be acquired for RMIT. The screenshot below for instance shows a 25 minute video on the topic of critical thinking.  These videos can be linked through to your Blackboard shells or you can simply clip the relevant section of a longer piece.  If you’d like more information about Kanopy and Lynda head to Sourcing Online Teaching Materials at the RMIT website.

I hope that this has been useful in surfacing a couple of resources that are proving increasingly popular with academics and students. Don’t forget about the Library Subject Guides as a great starting point for discipline-specific information.

Share your comments about library resources and online materials in the comments below!