Category: Digital Learning

This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Sarah Bui.

Welcome back to Wander Wednesdays after last week’s hiatus! I hope you all have had lovely starts to the semester, and that they continue to be so as we move forward. I am happy to present you the final post of this series with as relevant a topic as I can think of: building community online. Sarah Bui has graced us once again with her insight and knowledge this week to discuss this topic.

Sarah Bui is a rising sophomore. She is double majoring in Media – Communication and Film Studies. She joined the DLA team her freshman year and specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, and many digital storytelling tools such as Knightlab Timeline, Story Map and  Canva. She also served as a Learning Assistant during the Camp Design program Summer 2020 and provided diverse perspectives as a student to help faculty in polishing their courses. In the future, she wants to expand her knowledge and skills about digital tools in storytelling and social media practices.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Sarah!

“It has been a month since this semester started, and I hope all of you faculty members are doing well with all interactive and engaging activities we built during the summer. There was much to be worried about for this semester, but I can tell that you are all more and more confident with what you are doing.

Learning online can be a very isolated experience. You study on your own, attend class on your own and do homework on your own. The feeling of disconnection discourages most students and hugely impacts their productivity in class. Therefore, building the online community within the space of classes is significantly important for each student’s learning experience. 

From what I experienced last semester (spring 2020), in the summer and in the last month, I want to share some faculty practices for building community that might be helpful from a student’s perspective. 

1. My professors let me know that they care about my learning experience. 

What I’ve really appreciated is that often in the beginning of a course, professors would send out prompt questions that let me share about myself and share what I expected from the course. The professors would also share what they expected from us at the beginning of the class, as well as before each assignment, which made the learning process much more enjoyable. Nothing is as difficult as working online when you do not know what to do and you don’t have friends there to ask.

Regarding in-class activities, I believe the best way to know if this activity or practice works or not is to do it, then ask students for their experience. After trying something new in class, my professor always encourages us to send them an email about how we felt about it. Of course, it is optional, but it makes me feel like my opinion in class and the course structure is valued. 

2. Often, something in the course seems to be insignificant but has a huge impact.

I watched many lectures in my online classes, and it could be really tiring. If we were in person taking a class, the professor would immediately recognize who in the class did not understand, or would maybe switch to another activity if everyone was overloaded with information. But this cannot happen with video lectures. This is where captions come to the rescue. I have the option to speed up the video to 1.5x speed so I can concentrate more, since my brain has to catch up with the speed, but I can fully understand by reading the captions. Studying by both listening and reading is a helpful way to memorize and process the information given. 

I had one online class during the summer which was quite intensive. In that class, my professor broke the long video into smaller sections and named them by the main topics they covered. In our homework, the professor would also refer back to these videos by saying, “You might need to rewatch [name of videos] in the module [week_] for this question.” This was often helpful if we covered many things in class and students later needed to review these topics for assignments and exams.

The amount of time to watch all the videos might be longer for students than only the length of the videos themselves. I often pause videos and in between videos to take notes (and it turns out that I take notes about everything–I realized that online class makes me more worried about missing important information). One of my professors prepared a list of questions and terms as a watching guide so I could focus on the main points of a long lecture and try to understand the key concepts, not just memorize everything in the video.  

3. Students may drop into office hours more frequently. 

Office hours play a vital role during this time. Personally, I feel more comfortable with online office hours since sometimes I just have a small question or want to discuss more about what my professor said in class. When we have in-person class, I find it harder to just come to a professor’s office for very small questions. Now I can just drop in with little commitment. There are so many things I thought I understood which I realized I did not after these meetings with professors. And sometimes, just talking to someone makes me feel more connected with my class. I believe there are many students who need more help with their studies right now, so offering office hours besides class lectures and meetings are a good practice to help them feel connected. 

4. Recorded meetings and discussion notes are helpful resources.

One thing I love about online class is that everything is recorded. Even though I try to take notes very carefully, I cannot take notes and participate in the discussion at the same time. There are many interesting ideas that we talk about in class that I cannot remember or didn’t have the chance to participate in. Going back to these discussion notes and recorded meetings helps me recall the class materials better. 

5. Feedback is significantly encouraging. 

Feedback is always helpful, and an online environment is no exception. Discussion boards and student responses to materials are good strategies to engage students in class, but it is often more encouraging if we know that our professors in fact read them and value our opinions. Sometimes, I feel myself less likely to contribute to a discussion if my professor only marks it for attendance points and I can’t be sure if they read them or not. In one of my classes, the professor highlights some interesting points of our comments and replies to them with some questions which help us to think further about the materials. I understand it could be exhausting to reply to all of the comments, but highlighting students’ good points is inspiring. It helps me believe that my efforts are recognized.

One thing I’ve learned so far is that online learning is not as scary and stressful as it seems to be before you do it. We all need to plan everything beforehand but be flexible for unexpected things to happen. As a bottom line, reach out to your students. Let them be involved in the building of the community of online classes. Challenge them, but give them the benefit of the doubt. Use your tools from the summer to connect students with one another, as it is so easy to feel isolated at this time.

As I wrap up, it is sad for me to say that today’s post is the last post on Wander Wednesdays. It was our pleasure as Digital Learning Assistants to have an amazing journey working with faculty members this summer and sharing our perspectives throughout to help build our online communities. On the behalf of the Digital Learning Assistant Team, I want to say thank you for everything you’ve done and are doing for your classes. We are proud of everyone and we believe together we shall overcome this challenge successfully and memorably.”

Sarah can be contacted via email: tbui@muhlenberg.edu. Thank you all dearly for your readership this summer and semester, and I wish you all the best rest of the semester possible. You can contact me at lehopkins@muhlenberg.edu.

This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Rachel Bensimhon.

Welcome to the sixth week of Wander Wednesday! I hope that you’re all settling into the routine of the semester well, now that we are in week two. If you haven’t yet, take a look at last week’s post featuring Shu Tang to catch up with the blog. This week, I am happy to present the great Rachel Bensimhon and her expertise on the Domain of One’s Own platform.

Rachel Bensimhon is a junior, majoring in Media and Communication with a double minor in Computer Science and English. Rachel has been part of the DLA team since her sophomore year. As a DLA, she has supported students and faculty through digital workshops and the Camp Design Online summer cohorts. She specializes in digital scholarship research, Berg Builds domains, and WordPress. She has also developed various infographics, art assets, and websites (including this one) for the Digital Learning Team.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Rachel!

“Domain of One’s Own is a project that allows college students and faculty to build their own custom websites in an online space that belongs to them. The Digital Learning Center adopted this practice in 2016 and now provides every student and faculty member with the opportunity to create a custom domain under the banner of BergBuilds Domains. 

Domain building is my personal specialty as a DLA, and I find it really fun! I’ve been using BergBuilds Domains since the Spring of my freshman year to store coursework/creative projects, as well as to post reflections on various readings for the courses that require it. My domain (personal website) is divided into various subdomains, which host my classwork and projects from different courses. Through Domains I’ve been able to create a living record of my academic work and easily share it with others. With a little bit of basic WordPress know-how, I’ve also been able to customize the appearance of this record to my liking, so I’m in full control of the way my work is presented to the world. 

Moreover, this blog would not exist without the use of a custom domain: mine, in fact. I hope you enjoy reading everyone’s articles as much as I enjoyed building this site to host them!

Custom domains are an extremely effective way to creatively empower students in their academic work. Oftentimes, when students write papers or make creative projects for their classes, these creations have a very limited life. The student submits an assignment to the professor, and then that assignment is quickly forgotten, lost in a pile of papers or in the depths of an old disk drive. Custom domains have the potential to “resuscitate” these works that would otherwise be forgotten. After a semester of hard work, it feels good to have a record of work to look back on, and it’s nice to know that I can easily share my academic writing with others if I choose to do so.

Domains have also helped me practice skills that I’ll need in the future, especially when it comes to managing content, building websites, and designing online portfolios. This might be a good thing to incorporate in your class to help your students in the long-term/beyond the classroom, as they use their online work to find careers.

Custom domains are useful in these respects, and I think classrooms could make use of them a lot more. Only a few of my courses so far have utilized Domains; in my opinion, it remains an underexplored option for coursework. These days, everyone is a citizen of the Internet, and so it’s important for everyone to learn how to cultivate their own digital spaces and interact with the digital ether. Domains can be a great way to facilitate that learning process. Setting them up, managing directories/domains, and installing applications were all learning experiences for me and it took some tinkering and a process of trial-and-error to figure things out. As a result, I think it might be a good idea to integrate these Domains more closely with courses for first-year students so that they can build their domains early and take them all through their college career, as well as beyond graduation if they want to keep their domain. Overall, custom domains are a really powerful tool that can allow students to design their own digital spaces and to maintain a record of their academic growth. I recommend it to anyone who’s looking to add a fun new dimension to their courses!

If you have any questions feel free to contact me at rbensimhon@muhlenberg.edu. Enjoy Domains!”

This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Shu Tang.

Welcome to the fifth week of Wander Wednesday, and the first week of the fall 2020 semester! I sincerely hope all your hard work this summer is giving you all some peace as we launch into the uncertainty of an extremely new kind of semester. If you haven’t yet, take a look at last week’s post featuring Tram Pham to catch up with the blog. This week, I am happy to present Shu Tang and her thoughts on student presence in the online classroom.

Shu Tang is a sophomore at Muhlenberg, double majoring in Philosophy and Sustainability Studies. She joined the Digital Learning team in her freshman year. Shu is really interested in digital humanities and participated in the Muhlenberg digital scholarship pilot summer program. She works with other DLA members to manage the DLA social media accounts and create ideas for campus engagement on digital platforms.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Shu!

“This blog post will concentrate on student’s engagement in an online platform with their peers and professors. Usually, a discussion board, readings, comments, Zoom/Google meetings, any submitted assignment can indicate whether the student is engaged in the class. In different ways, students can participate in class and it helps professors to access their student’s class engagement. Some common platforms will be Canvas-discussion board, Google-shared drive, Jamboard, Google classroom, and email.

I took some online classes and I participated in digital scholarship research this summer. I think I had an active class collaboration experience during my summer classes. There are comments and replies to the discussion board and students who have their cameras open when we are doing synchronous meetings online. I love to reply to the comment of my peers, and I think it is a great way to learn and gain different perspectives. There is always interaction going on in the discussion session. Every time I feel motivated to engage in a virtual class is when I’m allowed to share my own thoughts, when there is flexibility and room for me to expand.

My professors set class interaction as a part of our final grade, and I think this could be one way to motivate students to engage in class. There are videos and articles to watch and read which could be more fun than listening to the lecture. In this way, students might be more motivated to engage in class. A professor encouraging diversity and giving room for the topic to develop will also be a factor that encourages engagement in class.

The course can also incorporate more interesting and interactive activities. In this way, there are less “boring lectures” and more diverse visualization. Some material I feel is less likely to engage me is material that is all the same kind of format. I think on a virtual base, different media could be used in teaching–for example, articles, videos, maps, timelines games, surveys. Different visualizations for material will make the class more engaging. Moreover, if there are stories and current events that can relate to the class material, that would encourage students to engage more in the class as well. We cannot neglect what happens around us.

I think for student presence, different visualizations on the materials, and current events that can relate to the material will encourage students to engage in the class.”

You can reach Shu at stang@muhlenberg.edu if you have further questions. Have a great week!