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Designing Online Asynchronous Learning Experiences

6/21/2020

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In March we moved from face to face classroom experiences to emergency teaching. Teachers worked incredibly hard to move  instruction from brick and mortar classrooms to a distance learning environment. As I visited classrooms virtually and looked at courses in our LMS, I became curious to learn more about what factors might contribute to a successful asynchronous learning experience.

When it comes to asynchronous learning, there needs to be a shift in thinking about a student’s workload, there no longer is classwork vs. homework, there is only learning. Think holistically; how much total time do you have with students in a given week? How long will each task or experience take a student on average to complete? Rice University created a tool that can help teachers gauge the amount of time it may take students to complete assignments.

Student agency gives students voice and often, choice, in how they learn. It is important because it gives students a stake in choosing from opportunities provided for them and triggers a greater investment of interest and motivation. The design of the learning experience must include clear goals that learners are working to demonstrate mastery in. If learners know what their goal is and trust that their teacher is going to allow them to move towards that goal while offering feedback, students are more invested in their own growth.

Instead of having students download large files of text, consider creating playlists that include diverse content in a variety of formats. Include links to academic resources, news sources, popular culture, and other online resources. In Jennifer Gonzalez’s podcast “Self-Paced Learning: How One Teacher Does It”, she interviews Natalie McCutchen. In this episode McCutchen shares about how she converted her pre-algebra class to a completely self-paced system. Students worked on different skills at their own pace and moved through the curriculum as they showed mastery. I highly recommend listening to this episode as it provides some connections to asynchronous instruction.  A second podcast of Gonzalez's to add to your list is "Are You a Curator or a Dumper?" This episode offers guidelines, strategies, and tools to assist with the curation of content. (Personally, I feel students need to be taught the skill of curation.)
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Asynchronous assignments by design must be clear, coherent, and concise in order to provide a smooth, navigable experience. You don’t want your students spending more time figuring out instructions than actually engaging in the work. When designing an asynchronous assignment, ask yourself the following question: "Am I reducing the cognitive load on my students?" Wayfinding is a new term for me. Wayfinding forces educators to step back and look at how students will move from point A to point B.  Eric Hudson wrote "Hybrid Pedagogy". In it, Hudson does a nice job of explaining how important it is to design a learning experience that is easy for students to navigate.  Take a minute and click over and read it, I promise you'll gain some insight. 

8 tips to consider when designing asynchronous learning experiences:
  • Communication - checklists, calendar reminders, and instructor announcements can also help remind students to assess their progress. These reminders are necessary not because students have short attention spans or are unmotivated, but because the absence of a physical and face-to-face social interactions necessitates an alternative.   Establishing a system that provides reminders to students in the same way each week is critical. 

  • Organization - "chunking" activities and resources gives structure and a meaningful sense of fulfillment for the students as they work through them.  What tends to turn off students, the most is the never-ending list of things to do in a course. 

  • Consider creating a pacing guide that students can clearly follow. Here is an example. A calendar can be used in the same way, but a more narrative guide has also been shown to help students. 

  • Make sure there are items for students to read, watch, and listen to. Let students pick and choose. Break your unit or lesson into individual tasks. Then clearly label and distinguish between tasks by placing an icon or white space between them. Organizing tasks into a table also adds organization. ​Examples of icons you can use are below.  (All of these icons can be downloaded individually here. ​)
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  • It’s important to remember that learners enter online spaces looking for what they need to learn. You do not want the design of your page to interfere with or distract from that goal in any way.  Write concisely. Use images or other media only if it supports the intent of the page. Use no more than two fonts: one for headings and one for body text. (Top 10 Beautiful Google Font Combinations.) Adjectives you DON’T want to describe your pages are “crowded,” “busy,” or “overwhelming.”
  • Use the time outside of asynchronous tasks to connect one to one, or one to a few. Sometimes the feedback that you need to give students needs to be face to face.  You can use Google Calendar's appointment slot feature to have students sign up for small group times to meet with you during office hours or tutorial times. This video will show you how.
  • Establish a system for students to self advocate and assess their learning and request specific follow up help.  Click here to see a form that a student can complete to request additional support. (A plus for using a form is it also helps the teacher keep track of requests and have a record of who has asked for help and the resources that were shared.)
  • As you move through your course ask questions specifically about your role as the teacher, examples:
    • ​Is the timeliness of my responses helpful?
    • Are the types of responses you are getting helpful?
    • Is there anything else I could be doing to help you?
    • Were the directions clear, or were there points you didn't understand what you should be doing?​

​These are a few of the key take aways that I have gathered as I have looked more closely at designing asynchronous learning experiences. The more I read and learn, the more I realize how much work it is to do it well.  If you have additional ideas and resources, please share them below! 
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A Focus on Instructional Design & Assessment

4/18/2020

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As we move through our Covid 19 distance learning experience, my focus of inquiry has turned to what role instructional design and assessment play during distance learning.  When you take away the carrot and the stick of earning a grade for engaging in learning, how do we motivate students to show up and engage in learning?  

  • Focus on the critical learning targets - scale way back
  • Make the learning intention clear.
  • Make the learning relevant.  Students should be able to answer the question "Why do I need to know this?"
  • Articulate the success criteria that will be used to determine when students meet a learning goal. 
  • Provide examples or good models for students to reference.
  • Offer choice in how it can be learned
  • Focus on feedback
  • Be clear about how you will know if students "get it" and not worry about quantifying their performance on a scale of 0 -100

By making student learning our primary focus and helping students share that same focus, the learning experience moves from knowledge transmission to active learning.  Teachers are the authors of their instructional design and should take into account the different ingredients when designing instructional experiences.  Think about something that you are good at.  More than likely, you were not always good at it. How did you get good at it? Look at the graphic below, were all or most of the elements below a part of your learning pathway to achieve the level of proficiency you now have now?
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How can teachers that relied heavily on the common lecture format find success during distance learning?  They must ensure that success criteria is established for earning credit for a skill or learning target. The success criteria must be clear, rigorous, and attainable. When students are working online and submitting evidence of their learning, teachers must make sure that they are assigning things that they can give feedback to the student on.  Feedback should be offered along the way to ALL students so that they know where they are in mastering the criteria.  It will also be critical to have additional resources or paths available to students who don't "get it" when others are ready to move on.  The graphic below designed by Stephen Taylor was adapted from Grant Wiggins work and touches on the different avenues effective feedback can take online.  Feedback needs to be a conversation and not a statement. John Hattie and Helen Timperley found that effective feedback answers three major questions asked by a teacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I doing? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) We must remember what the student does with the feedback is what matters.  
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Learning should be assessed formatively using digital tools in small checks for understanding along the way. These are low or no stakes experiences or practice assessments that yield feedback to students.  Check-out Retrieval Roulettes developed by Adam Boxer as a tool to use. The brain science behind retrieval practice is solid and this is an excellent tool to empower students. It allows them to spiral back through content knowledge.  

Generating opportunities for students to give you "summative output" can be done by student created products or student performance within an online testing environment. Check out 100 Things Students Can Create to Demonstrate What They Know or the website Exam.net.   Exam.net is free to use right now if your school is outside Sweden.  An additional resource for math teachers to look at is a post by Alice Keeler, From @mathdiana: Have Students Talk About Math. 
 (I prefer to call it a task not a test” – @mathdiana) 

During these difficult times, we will learn new and better ways to guide students along a learning pathway than placing a number on a paper.  I believe that growing and getting stronger in instructional design and assessment practices will transfer to improved learning experiences for students once we are back in our brick and mortar classrooms.  And this goes without saying, but if you have a solid relationship formed with students this is all going to be a lot easier!

If you have additional resources and ideas on instructional design, assessment and feedback practices, please share them! I know that I have only scratched the surface in my own learning. 
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Bloom's & Brain Rules Impact Instructional Design

11/26/2019

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​I just finished reading 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong; Strategies that Engage Students, Promote Active Learning and Boost Achievement by John Antonetti and James Garver.  There are so many things that I want to share from this book. The authors first look at Bloom's Taxonomy and the focus on learning in classrooms. In their thousands of classroom visits, they looked for evidence of how the level of thinking intersected with brain research. They sought to find out whether Bloom's Taxonomy was still relevant in today's classrooms.  In short, the answer was YES. 
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Fractus Learning [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

In 87% of the 17,000+ classrooms visited, students were tasked with low-level thinking activities. Antonetti and Garver identified four reasons that the abundance of learning was occurring at this level.
  • Teacher focused classrooms. Students passively receive information which they later repeat, reproduce or restate.
  • Professional development not focused on better instructional design or presentation styles and pedagogy that supports active learning.
  • Standardized assessments encourage educators to use rote instruction for students to have success in low-level tasks.
  • Students cling to being "right and done". 

How do we move the needle and get better in 87% of these classrooms? It's simple; we learn! As educators, we have to evolve in our practices and improve instructional design and incorporate advances in brain science into learning experiences. In the 17,000+ classroom visits, they found that the key to raising thinking in a meaningful way was to focus on the middle two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, application, and analysis.
  • Application - the human brain likes to gather information and then find ways to use it.
  • Analysis - finding patterns is one of the most natural ways for our brains to learn. 
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​I often hear focus on "the verb" to increase the level of thinking, but Antonetti and Garver point us towards looking at our Instructional design and what science tells us about how the brain learns. As a student, when asked a question by a teacher, I would give an answer if I knew it. If not, I'd more than likely sit and wait for the next person to provide the solution. If the teacher is in control of all of the questions, what impact does that have on learning?
"We have seen this phenomenon repeated in classrooms in which the thinking is pushed to the middle. students who are working through their own content patterns -yet do not have all of the answers- will voluntarily go and seek more information." Antonetti and Garver

​​So if this is how our brains are wired, how can instructional design help facilitate students towards engaging in learning that involves application and analyses? John Medina, a molecular biologist, published Brain Rules in 2008. His researched formed 12 big ideas about the brain that apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. (It's been 11 years since his rules were published and I have never read his work.)  The complete list of Brain Rules can be accessed here and here. 
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​http://brainrules.net/pdf/12brainrules.pdf

Brain Rules Introduction from Pear Press on Vimeo.

​Reading about Medina's Brain Rules led me down a path to learn even more about them!  
In the podcast Vrain Waves hosts Ben and Becky interview John Medina. Medina connects his research to both learning and teachers. (If you don't have time now to listen to the podcast, I highly encourage you to stop and add it to your playlist. It is SO good!)
​To improve learning experiences, we must not only strive to design instruction so that we push thinking to the middle, we must take into account what we now know about how the brain learns and responds.  Need an example? In 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't be Wrong, Antonetti and Garver shared an example of a simple vocabulary lesson they obsereved in a 4th grade classroom.  The lesson was learner-centered and had students working in the mid-levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.)
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  • The students were shown a group of images. (Brain Rule #10- Vision)
  • The teacher partnered students up and assigned roles. One student was to be the recorder and one was to be the reporter. Students were given 30 seconds to find as many patterns as they could in the three pictures. (Brain rule #4 - Attention)
  • At the end of 30 seconds, the teacher had pairs share out. Some of the patterns shared by students were; there all big things, there all things people didn't make, you usually find all of these things outside, they are all rough, etc. The students continued to share out until they exhausted the patterns that they had found. (Mid-level thinking here. Students are analyzing) 
  • The teacher asked if every group had found the pattern of size, and they had. Next, she had students switch roles in their pairs and then gave them 30 seconds to think of as many words as they could think of that mean "big". 
  • After 30 seconds students shared out more than 20 synonyms before the teacher heard the vocabulary word she wanted students to learn. That word was MASSIVE. When she heard it she identified it as a "cool word" and added it to the vocabulary list for the week. No need for students to be given a definition to memorize, they had told her what it meant.

These ideas and resources are just the tip of the iceberg of ways we can improve the experiences students are having in classrooms and teachers are having in their professional learning. The next time you plan instruction, how might you help activate learning by what science has taught us about the brain?  How might learners experience and process the content in a more meaningful way using application and analysis? 

Next up on my blog, I'll look into the levels of engagement in learning. Are there qualities present in instruction that increase student engagement?
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