Small Teaching Online

Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

Flower Darby, James M. Lang

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119544913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Inklusive Bildung

Find out how to apply learning science in online classes

The concept of small teaching is simple: small and strategic changes have enormous power to improve student learning. Instructors face unique and specific challenges when teaching an online course. This book offers small teaching strategies that will positively impact the online classroom.

This book outlines practical and feasible applications of theoretical principles to help your online students learn. It includes current best practices around educational technologies, strategies to build community and collaboration, and minor changes you can make in your online teaching practice, small but impactful adjustments that result in significant learning gains.

• Explains how you can support your online students
• Helps your students find success in this non-traditional learning environment
• Covers online and blended learning
• Addresses specific challenges that online instructors face in higher education

Small Teaching Online presents research-based teaching techniques from an online instructional design expert and the bestselling author of Small Teaching.

Part I
Designing for Learning

Consider your entry into teaching, no matter your discipline. With the possible exception of education or teacher training programs, almost all disciplines fail to provide robust training opportunities for new and future faculty. Many research universities now offer opportunities for their graduate students to take courses in pedagogy or participate in teaching development programs, for example, but very few require it (Haras, Ginsberg, Férnandez, and Magruder, 2017, p. 56). We can hardly blame overburdened PhD students for prioritizing their research over their development as teachers, especially when faculty at research universities might not see teaching as priority in their own professional lives.

Likewise, professionals in the field entering the teaching force for the first time might be working full-time and coming to campus in the evening out of a desire to share their knowledge with the next generation, and have to balance teaching work with full-time jobs. Given the low rate of pay that institutions often provide to these adjunct instructors, schools might be reluctant to require teaching development activities as a prerequisite for the job.

As a consequence, most new teachers fall back on what we experienced as students, and what we observe our colleagues doing in the classroom (if we observe our colleagues in the classroom – teaching is a notoriously isolating business), as we develop our own classroom persona and methods.

So how do we learn to teach? We might have been given a syllabus from someone who has previously taught the class. Perhaps we then chose a textbook either based on what the previous instructor(s) used, or maybe based on our experience as students. Having selected the textbook, we proceeded to comb through any syllabi that we were given. We co-opted several elements, made adjustments according to our preferences, and established due dates for major assignments and exams. That may have been the extent of our big-picture planning. When preparing to teach my first literature survey course, I remember thinking to myself: Well, all 200-level lit classes have two papers due, a midterm exam, and a final exam. So I guess that's what I'll do. Looking back, it doesn't seem like a very intentional way to plan a course.

To be fair, once we've selected a textbook and roughed in the main assessments of the class, most of us then do everything we can to plan a cohesive course that equips students to succeed on those assessments. In all the years I've spent working with, mentoring, and developing college faculty, I've never met anyone who set out to create a random class with no sequential logic, no connection between readings and tests, no central organizing principle. We assign readings, videos, and other content that will prepare students to do well on tests, papers, and projects. We plan class sessions and homework assignments in a way that we hope will help students understand class concepts. We may even provide study guides, rubrics, and other materials to help students do well on our assessments. But while we have good intentions, there is frequently a lack of deliberate thought about exactly why we are asking students to do what we are asking them to do.

Because thinking about the purpose of classwork is so foundational to our teaching, in the next chapter we will take a closer look at backward design. This framework helps us bring intentionality to our teaching. Backward design may be new to you, you may have unconsciously been doing it all along, or you may be well acquainted with the approach. Whatever your familiarity with backward design, we'll consider how we can be more deliberate in the design – or planning – of our online courses, and how, using small teaching strategies, we can reinforce and make explicit our online course design for our students.

Chapter 2 explores how we guide and support students through our carefully designed online courses, ensuring that they have a clear view of the purpose of each course component. In a face-to-face environment, we have frequent, informal opportunities to remind students about the big picture of the course, and about how a piece of content or an assessment contributes to that big picture. We can intervene on a regular basis to check student understanding, respond to spontaneous concerns and questions, and support students through the learning process. Students in online courses can feel isolated from these essential learning supports. Chapter 2 provides small teaching approaches that will help students keep the purpose of the course, and all of its components, clearly in view. It also offers models that will help you monitor the progress of your students and provide you opportunities to intervene with support and guidance when they most need it.

After considering how to intentionally design the course, and how to create structures that support student learning, in Chapter 3 we'll examine how to intentionally select technology and media tools for our online classes. The tools and media that we use comprise a huge part of the course experience, yet it's easy to fall into the same kind of default thinking that we were susceptible to when we first began teaching in person. Maybe your department chair gave you someone else's online content to use, so you just stuck with that content and the tools that were already in the course. Maybe you weren't so lucky; maybe you had no example to follow and little guidance, so you created an online course based on your best guess of what it should contain. Maybe you've taught online for a while but have fallen into a rut of using the same technologies that you've always used. Whatever your situation, we'll examine a series of small teaching questions that will help us think through what tools and technology we're using, and why.

Learning doesn't happen by accident. Successful and engaging online classes don't, either. Designing an online course is a large endeavor, but even large endeavors have to start small.

Chapter 1
Surfacing Backward Design

INTRODUCTION

I yanked open the door of the English building, only moments to spare before class was due to begin. Along with several students who were cutting it equally close, I hurried up the stairs to my First-Year Composition classroom on the second floor. Reaching the open doorway mere seconds before 8:00 a.m., I rushed into the room, gown flying behind me (well, not literally, but you get the idea) like Harry Potter's Snape bursting into his dungeon Potions classroom.

I slung my professorial-looking leather school bag onto the table in the front of the room and pulled out my green “Modern Class Record” attendance book, the one supplied by the English department to every graduate teaching assistant (GTA). I took my place behind the lectern, opened my authority-bestowing book, and proceeded to call roll. My sleepy (or bored) students – it was difficult to distinguish between the two – took turns responding with a mumbled “here,” or occasionally (for variety) “present.”

Having completed the housekeeping, I opened my college-ruled spiral notebook, the one in which I jotted down my lesson plan for each day. As I skimmed over my hasty and underdeveloped agenda, I drawled, “Let me seeee heeeeeere ….” while I tried to remember what we would do that day and why.

Every. Single. Day. Every single day of my very first semester teaching college, I began class with those not-so-inspiring words—or so my students told me at the end of the semester (I didn't realize I was doing this). The class met at 8:00 a.m., four days per week. And every day I would race into class, take roll, and say, “Let me see here,” while trying to figure out what the plan was. Not exactly a great start to my teaching career.

I've thought a lot about that semester. At only 22, I faced a sullen bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds every morning across the podium. That their sullenness might be related to my teaching only occurred to me later. It came as a shock to me that not everyone loved writing papers. Didn't everyone find joy and satisfaction in expressing themselves in the written word?

Somehow or other, I made it through that first semester. Prior to the first day of class, I and the other new GTAs had sat through a few days of training. After the semester started, we met every week to continue learning how to teach First-Year Composition. We'd discuss the content, the writing assignments, and sometimes even teaching methods. What we never discussed was the overall purpose of the course. What were the objectives of the course? Certainly we wanted students to become better writers. But better in what sense? For what purpose? To get jobs? Become novelists? Write better memos in their business careers?

Since I didn't have a clear view of the specific purpose of the course, I didn't have a clear sense of how all of its elements came together. The course seemed like a collection of different parts and practices – assignments, classroom activities, grading – that were each their own thing. But what connected them all? Why, for example, were the papers assigned and structured the way they were? What was the purpose of peer review? Why had the course readings been selected? None of this was apparent to me.

I suspect that many of us learned to teach college courses in the same way that I did: by the seat of our pants. Of course, flexibility and agility are virtues in our teaching, and every successful teacher must learn to improvise in the classroom. But that doesn't mean we should not also begin with a robust, systematic, and purposeful overall plan for the course. Having such a plan allows us to flex within the boundaries of our well-designed class, one that has developed answers to the kinds of questions articulated above.

Cue backward design.

IN THEORY

Imagine you are planning a road trip for your summer vacation. Do you hop in the car one day and mindlessly drive wherever the road leads? The more free-spirited among you might well try something like that. But most of us decide on a destination first. Where do we want to go?

Having settled on the destination, we make other plans to help us get there. We consider various routes for the trip. We research and select incremental milestones: Where might be a good place to break the journey for meals or exercise? Where should we stay overnight? We also have to make decisions about supplies we might need, the tools to make a successful journey. What do we need to pack? Do we need beach chairs and sunscreen for a trip to the ocean? Or are hiking boots and trekking poles needed for a mountain adventure?

Very few of us begin journeys without thinking about where we are going, how we will get there, and what we will need on the way.

In their seminal book Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe propose taking a similar approach to the design of educational experiences. They suggest beginning the process of teaching a course by thinking about the end first. If you're not familiar with this book, I highly recommend reading it before you teach your next class, as it provides many useful strategies for putting their theory into practice. You might also look at Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (2013), which takes a parallel – and eq...