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, Tram Pham.

Welcome to the fourth week of Wander Wednesday! Only a few days left until the semester begins…If you haven’t yet, take a look at last week’s post featuring Lucie Hopkins on Pressbooks to catch up. This week, we are lucky to have DLA Tram Pham share her thoughts and expertise on using Canvas Discussion Boards in your online course.

Tram Pham is a rising senior, majoring in Finance and Business Administration. As a DLA, Tram has been supporting faculty and peers with building, customizing, and organizing their websites through WordPress, as well as being a resource in terms of students’ perspectives and technical issues (Canvas, Hypothes.is, G-Suite, etc.) for faculty throughout the Camp Design Online 2020.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Tram!

“This week, Wander Wednesday has come back with a very familiar topic: Discussion Boards. Compared to other digital platforms, the Discussion Board is a more familiar platform that is located in every Canvas course, which I believe we all have come across several times while building our courses. The Discussion Board allows us to create topics in order for the whole class to respond with their perspectives and answers. Moreover, peers can reply to each other, such as if they agree with an idea or want to follow up with it. In this past Spring semester, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to experience different uses of the Discussion Board, and I cannot wait to share it to all of you!

The overview of the Discussion Board:

To start with, before going online in Spring, I did not know how useful the Discussion Board could be as a learning tool; however, after we went online in the Spring semester and as my classes started using the Discussion Boards more often, I realized that there are plenty of advantages when it comes to involving the Discussion Board in teaching and learning. Besides allowing you to create topics and have students reply to them, the Discussion Board encourages learning among peers. In one of my Spring 2020 classes, instead of posting the answers along with the practice tests, my professor created a discussion board for us to help each other with answering questions. By doing so, we were motivated to work on the problems ourselves rather than taking the solutions for granted. Furthermore, as there are many ways to get to the final result, we were able to learn different methods from peers through discussing our answers among each other.

Another benefit of the Discussion Board that I want to highlight (and also my favorite part of the Discussion Board!) is that it assists faculty members in helping students with the class materials. Through this Summer cohort training, I am more mindful of both faculty and students’ time. Everyone’s schedule is different. That is why it is difficult to find a best office hour time for all students and faculty to gather. And this is when the Discussion Board comes into play. As I have mentioned above, having students support each other is one way to lift the burden off the professor’s shoulders. Faculty can create a discussion board for each week’s materials and let students post their questions there. Throughout the week, everyone can check the discussion board and help their peers with the questions. If there are questions that are unanswered, faculty can pick out the pattern and respond to them at the beginning of the class or record a video answering the questions (“asynchronous office hours”). Additionally, learning assistants of the class may be able to go through the questions and help answer those in their workshops. By doing this, there is less stress for faculty and students’ questions can be answered in a timely manner.

Nevertheless, I recognize that unlike in person or synchronous online discussion, the Discussion Board can be a bit “dry” and less exciting. It may be hard for students to feel motivated or energized whenever they have to work with Discussion Boards. For that reason, although the Discussion Board is helpful, I believe it will reach its “most beneficial stage” if it is used with other digital platforms. The Discussion Board can be a continuation of the discussion on Zoom or JamBoard. It can also be a “backup” office hour space for faculty in case a lot of questions need to be answered. By interchanging among different platforms, faculty can create flexibility and excitement for students in their learning journey.

Phew! I never thought I would have so many thoughts on the Discussion Board until now! If you ever want to find another platform to accompany the ones you are using, please try Discussion Boards out! I think you will like it! I understand the current situation is really frustrating and stressing you out, but please remember that we are here to support you through this uncertain time. We are all in this together! I truly appreciate all the effort and thoughtfulness that you have put into your teaching. If you have any questions or concerns (or just want to have a conversation), feel free to contact me at tnpham@muhlenberg.edu. Thanks for reading and you are all amazing!”

This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins.

Welcome to the third Wander Wednesday blog post of the summer! I hope you are all feeling ready and excited to jump into the fall semester in a few short weeks. This week, I (DLA Lucie Hopkins) have the privilege to share with you some of my own personal insights and experiences with the Pressbooks platform, with which I have both technical and academic experience!

I am a rising senior, majoring in Neuroscience and French & Francophone Studies. I have served as a DLA on a Pressbooks project with Professor Eileen McEwan with the goal of creating an online, open educational resource elementary French textbook. I also served as a DLA during the Camp Design Online program of summer 2020. I have technical expertise in Pressbooks and Voice Thread, and personal experience with successful (or not) faculty and student presence in an online format.

Without further ado, allow me to share my thoughts about the Pressbooks platform as an online learning tool!

Pressbooks is a simple online book formatting software that is popular for Open Educational Resources. It offers many tools that aid creators in adhering to the principles of Universal Design (found here: http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/The-7-Principles/) while constructing their online resources. Many Muhlenberg professors have taken advantage of this resource to use either as textbook material (see Prof. Leisawitz & Viale’s Elementary Italian textbook here) or as a collaborative tool in the classroom (see Prof. Mathews-Schultz’s poli-sci students cultivate a diverse book of research and arguments about the Political Year of the Woman here). Luckily, I have experience with both of these methods of using Pressbooks that I can share with you all today!

As a student, I participated in a Pressbooks project called “Paris à travers les pages” (Paris Through the Pages) with my FRN 427 classmates and Prof. Eileen McEwan. As a DLA, I worked with Eileen again on creating a textbook similar to Spunti (the Italian textbook), but for Elementary French. While Spunti was, to my knowledge, created from scratch, Eileen and I researched already-written Open Educational Resource (OER) French textbooks from which we could pull ideas and resources to create our own. What’s awesome about Pressbooks and OERs is that as long as you accurately understand the copyright agreement for the particular resource you’re using, you can typically share and utilize what’s in it freely (with attributions, of course!) and build off of it for your unique course ideas and goals. This project is ongoing for us, and we expect to make a lot of progress this fall as we work together with our first online elementary French class. I studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence last semester where Eileen is currently, so we’re aiming to incorporate new, day-in-the-life kind of resources about this region for the elementary students to get a more immersive experience in the culture and language. I could go on forever about the benefits of using OERs in the classroom instead of traditional textbooks, but I’ll just save us all some time and link you to the arguments made for Spunti in 2018 instead.

As a student, I really enjoyed exploring the Pressbooks platform as a new, highly creative medium for my ideas. I was halfway through college when I took the FRN 427 course, so I had become used to the typical essay format and process. While I still wrote my chapter of the book as I typically would a research paper, there was an added element of creativity that I really enjoyed when I had to then format it into the Pressbooks website and incorporate digital elements that I normally would not have the opportunity to use. As a part of the assignment, we were required to utilize photos, videos, or audio as supplemental elements to our chapter, attribute them correctly, and add “key takeaways” at the end–a Pressbooks specialty. It was a bit difficult at first technically, as I had never used the platform, didn’t quite understand the rules of OER and attribution of materials, and was sometimes frustrated by the finickiness of the formatting. However, working through these kinks led to a new skill on my resume and an expanded awareness of ways to express my ideas. Not to mention that my writing was now in the world as an OER, possibly to be used in French classrooms around the world, or even adapted and utilized by other scholars (a sentiment shared by a fellow student in this article about Muhlenberg OERs). This Pressbooks experience was an awesome upgrade to writing a research paper that I highly recommend.

As I said before, the platform itself is relatively easy to understand, but as students are typically used to Word documents as the medium for submitting papers, this new formatting can sometimes be difficult to work with, especially for those who are not particularly tech-savvy. However, we as a college are blessed with the wonderful Office of Digital Learning and all the student DLAs that are there to help your class with adjusting to the platform of Pressbooks! We were fortunate to have Jarrett and Jenna come to two of our classes to delve into the technical aspects of the platform and the rules of OER and copyright, which made the whole process as a student much easier.

All in all, if you are looking to utilize more online resources in your courses, shake up the writing process for your students, or create a beautiful, diverse work that can be shared with the world as an OER, Pressbooks is a simple, effective way to go about doing so.

If you have any questions, you can contact me at lehopkins@muhlenberg.edu. Thanks for reading!

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 to our second Wander Wednesday post! If you were here last week, welcome back, and if you weren’t, welcome! Take a look at last week’s post featuring Jarrett Azar ‘20 on faculty presence to catch up. This week, we are lucky to have Sarah Bui, a current DLA at Muhlenberg, share her insights on the value of Hypothes.is for students in an online setting.

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 summer 2020 Camp Design program and provided diverse perspectives as a student to help faculty in polishing their online courses. In the future, she wants to expand her knowledge and develop her skills with digital tools in storytelling and social media practices.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Sarah!

“Hello everyone, my name is Sarah. After my first year at college, I had a chance to explore many digital platforms that make my learning process much easier and more effective. For those of you who are thinking of a platform for your class that helps engage students into their course materials and discussion, I would like to introduce Hypothes.is. In this blog, I will discuss my experience of using it in my classes and why I find it very helpful in this online teach and learning environment. 

Hypothes.is is an annotation platform that allows you to annotate on various kinds of files such as articles, blogs, pdf files, books and ebooks. I was first introduced to Hypothes.is in my FYS class and then used it in my Documentary Research class. We used the program to add comments on the readings and articles. Besides that, I use Hypothes.is for myself while doing research, as it helps me to keep track of the citations on a pdf file. Additionally, I also have a group on Hypothes.is just for myself to note down any interesting ideas or articles I’ve found online. I can easily go back to these websites to see all my annotations while reading. 

Besides using Hypothes.is just for the comments of students, my professors would also add some guided questions for us to get the ideas of the readings better, as well as to develop our critical thinking to the next level. Most of my professors found it easier to keep track of students’ discussions in Hypothes.is in this way than on the discussion board in Canvas. 

With Hypothes.is, we can expand our knowledge beyond the reading with other interactive media resources such as images or videos. I have found it to be a really helpful platform for me to both add annotations and comments on the reading and to discuss some of these ideas with my classmates. I can also keep all the highlights for myself which is especially useful when I need the readings for my essays. It also helps me build a good habit of taking notes while I’m reading. Additionally, I feel the best way to improve my writing is through reading, so I always highlight good ideas or good word usages or sentence structures, and Hypothes.is helps me to keep it for myself.

One small problem with this program could be that all the files must be accessible on a web browser, so it might not work for traditional books. I have not found many other obstacles using this, since it’s really simple and user-friendly. It helps me a lot in my academic process. I really love using Hypothes.is!

And that is my experience using Hypothes.is and I hope it can somehow ease your burden in the process of building interactive courses but also trying to meet the academic requirements. I know it is a really frustrating time that we are forced to learn everything at the same time that we adapt to this terrible situation. But I hope all the faculty understand that you are not alone on this journey. There are many DLAs and students are willing to help you and we can learn and figure things out together step by step. We, as students, really appreciate every effort you put into your courses. 

Keep up with great work. You rock!”

If you want to hear more insights from Sarah about Hypothes.is, join us Thursday, August 6th at 9 AM EST for a Hypothes.is Workshop with Prof. Tineke D’Haeseleer. The workshop is for anyone interested in exploring social annotation as we all plan for the upcoming year. Check your email for more information and the Zoom link!

If you want a step-by-step breakdown of integrating Hypothes.is into your online course, also provided by Sarah, click this link. She can be further contacted via email: tbui@muhlenberg.edu.

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

Welcome to our first Wander Wednesday blog post! We are so excited to embark on this blogging journey with you all, and hope our insights are of assistance to your pedagogical developments and reflections. We are starting our first week off with insights from Jarrett Azar, a recent Muhlenberg graduate, on faculty presence in an online format.

Jarrett (’20) majored in Computer Science and Studio Art with a focus in Photography. He was part of the original DLA team in 2016 and has been a DLA throughout his time at Muhlenberg. As a DLA, he specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, Pressbooks, and other digital learning systems. Jarrett has worked on multiple Open Educational Resource projects on campus and was part of the Pressbooks learning community in 2019.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Jarrett!

“Positive faculty presence is important all of the time – in a pandemic or not – but it is particularly critical to cultivate when there is no (or limited)  physical space to come together. Students in an online course often feel less connected to you as a professor, their peers, and to the coursework. Working to create a consistent presence in your course goes a long way in bringing those students back to the level of connection that they would feel in person. In today’s Wander Wednesday, I am going to talk about faculty presence and offer a few considerations for teaching and learning online. 

Before we went online in the spring, I had lots of exposure to what faculty presence could be in online learning throughout my time at Muhlenberg. I took an online course over the summer of 2019, have been a DLA for 4 years and worked with faculty to develop online courses before this pandemic. I, like many others, got a deep dive into this topic when we all went remote in the Spring of 2020. This gave me and the other DLAs a firsthand look at what positive faculty presence in online learning looks like and how to create or diminish it.

Although there are many ways to create a positive learning environment in an online course, I am going to highlight three techniques faculty used in the spring.  The first practice is to hold a weekly zoom meeting where students are free to talk about how they are feeling and share what they have been doing/working on. This not only offers the students a space to vent, but also makes them feel like the faculty member is there for them. The second practice is to be flexible. You can be flexible in many ways such as being flexible around assignment deadlines, attendance, or even holding more office hours than you would during the semester. Flexibility is important because your students do not have the same lives and learning environments at home as they do at school. Speaking from experience, I have 2 siblings under the age of 5, so the home learning environment can get fairly hectic at times and I may not be able to complete or attend things in the manner that I would usually want to or be able to at school. The third method is to create weekly breakdowns for your students. I have heard from many peers that getting a message at the beginning of the week that outlines that week’s material and assignments went a long way in helping them stay engaged and on track. This provides students with a single message that they can refer to when they feel lost, and trust me, they will feel lost at times. These are just a few methods that really help to support students and help them to feel more connected within an online class. 

I also want to briefly touch on some things that could break that positive energy that you have created. Online learning is all about finding ways to break down the physical boundaries to learning, and Zoom can be a great way to connect, share, and create in short, interactive class sessions. One thing that I would recommend avoiding would be multiple synchronous Zoom sessions each week that all last over an hour. This is a particularly difficult way to digest the course content for students who are learning online. After the spring and summer, I’m sure we are all familiar with “Zoom burnout” and how hard that second or third meeting of the day can be. This is something students will certainly feel juggling multiple classes and Zoom meetings a day. 

Nothing here should be taken as fact, only as advice on how you might cultivate a positive presence in your course. There will always be an element of surprise in any course, and it can be nearly impossible to meet each students’ specific needs, but the DLA team has found these few small adjustments to learning online can make all the difference.”

Jarrett Azar, ’20

jarrettazar@muhlenberg.edu

In a recent episode of Gettin’ Air, ed-tech ruminator Terry Greene chatted on a late Friday afternoon with Jenna Azar and Tim Clarke about Digital Learning at Muhlenberg. While discussing a range of topics, their conversation centered around our work’s particular embrace of Digital Learning Assistants as pedagogical partners and co-creators in digital learning experiences in the Hive and beyond.

Gettin’ Air is a VoicEd radio show/podcast (voiced.ca) that features a growing collection of episodes with those working in open and technology-enabled learning. If you like podcasts and are engaged in open and digital learning, we recommend Gettin’ Air!