10 Tips for Reworking Online Discussions

Tips collected by Luke Konkol

We often hear that asynchronous online discussions “just don’t seem to work.” The reasons why run the gambit from feeling like busy-work for students to simply being too much to read. This post shares ten quick ideas (in no particular order) instructors might consider to tweak their online discussions and make them a better experience for instructors and students alike.

1. Make reflection and drawing connections central

We often drop a prompt in a course assuming students know why it’s important—sometimes the prompt itself is even “why is this important?” But if the purpose of discussions is to serve as the mortar between the bricks of your course content, feel free to say so. Add a sentence or two at the start of your prompt saying, “In the last unit, we discussed concept X. In our readings for this week, so-and-so builds on that idea in the context of Y.”

2. What are the objectives?

How is this discussion tied to particular course objectives? Make this explicit, too. This may even influence the depth and breadth of the discussion. Are you having students discuss because one of your objectives is to engage in a certain type of scholarly discourse? Or are the prompts content-based?

3. Use rubrics

Rubrics make your job easier if you grade discussions. More importantly, they make what you expect students to do more transparent. How much weight do you put on conventions? Where do you want students to look? Do you expect references to course materials? Outside materials? How important is the community-building aspect of these discussions? Or are they more like open essays?

Click on the headings below for some samples of discussion rubrics and reach out to CATL if you’d like a file you can import into your Canvas course.

Relevance: The overall relevance and development of discussion in your posts. 

  • 4.0 pts: Excellent
    • Posts are clearly related to the discussion prompts
    • Posts are detailed and on topic
    • Prompts further discussion
    • Clearly develops new ideas or builds on them
  • 3.0 pts: Good
    • Posts are clearly related to the discussion prompts
    • Posts are detailed and on topic
    • Prompts further discussion
  • 2.0 pts: Satisfactory
    • Posts are clearly related to the discussion prompts and mostly on topic
  • 1.0 pts: Needs Improvement
    • Off topic or not clearly related to the prompt
    • Remarks lack depth
  • 0.0 pts: No Post
    • No posts made or posts are disrespectful

Quality: The overall quality of the posts made

  • 3.0 pts: Strong
    • Comments are appropriate, thoughtful, reflective, and respectful
    • A good argument is made and supported
    • References course materials appropriately
  • 2.0 pts: Satisfactory
    • Comments are appropriate, thoughtful, reflective, and respectful
    • An argument is made
    • Has an understanding of course materials
  • 1.0 pts: Needs Improvement
    • Comments are respectful
    • Post shows minimal effort (e.g. "I agree…")
    • Missing an understanding of course materials
  • 0.0 pts: No Post
    • No posts made or posts are disrespectful

Community Contribution: Contribution of posts to the learning community / overall discussion.

  • 3.0 pts: Strong
    • Represents a developing class culture
    • Motivates further discussion and encouraging of classmates
    • Creative approach to the topic / presents new ideas
    • Responses are frequent and thoughtful
  • 2.0 pts: Satisfactory
    • Represents a developing class culture
    • Attempts to motivate further discussion and encourage classmates
    • Creative approach to the topic Responses are thoughtful
  • 1.0 pts: Needs Improvement
    • Posts are essay-like or do not go far beyond recounting course materials
    • Responses are minimal
  • 0.0 pts: No Post
    • No posts made or posts are disrespectful

 

Adapted from Dr. M. Rowbotham (SIUE) 

Subject knowledge and integration of material

  • Excellent (2.0): Discussions reflect integration of required readings and supporting the key issues and topics of material. Discusses your reaction to the content; cited appropriately in post if needed.
  • Proficient (1.5): Sound grasp of material. Some discussion of your reaction to content: appropriately cited.
  • Sufficient (1.0): Familiarity with most material and principles in the discussion. Lacks substantive use of readings. Minimal discussion of your reaction to content. Absent citations.
  • Needs Improvement (0.5): Poor grasp of material and principles in discussion. No discussion of your reaction to the content.
  • No Post (0): No post made or replies are disrespectful.

Critical analysis of topic

  • Excellent (2.0): High level analysis; Provides useful feedback appropriately. Adds new ideas and/or relevant questions to discussion.
  • Proficient (1.5): Sound analysis of discussion. Provides feedback to group. Adds some new ideas.
  • Sufficient (1.0): Missed some of the main issues. Analysis is simplistic or sketchy. Little substantive feedback provided to colleagues.
  • Needs Improvement (0.5): Lacks analysis of topic. Provides unsubstantiated opinion and anecdotes. No feedback to group members.
  • No Post (0): No post made or replies are disrespectful.

Timely and complete participation

  • Excellent (1.0): Posts on time. Responds to questions and others with clear understanding of content.
  • Satisfactory (0.75): Posts on time. Responses show some understanding.
  • Partial (0.5): Post is late, or adds little to the discussion.
  • Minimal (0.25): Posts are too late to enable others to respond.
  • No Post (0): No post made or replies are disrespectful.

 

Adapted from Purdue University 

4 Points: 

  • 3-4 or more postings; well distributed throughout the week
  • Readings were understood and incorporated into discussion as it relates to topic.
  • Two or more responses add significantly to the discussions (e.g. identifying important relationships, offering a fresh perspective or critique of a point; offers supporting evidence).

3 Points:

  • 2-3 postings distributed throughout the week.
  • Readings were understood and incorporated into discussion as it relates to topic.
  • At least one posting adds significantly to the discussion.

2 Points:

  • 2-3 postings; postings not distributed throughout the week
  • Little use made of readings.
  • At least two postings supplement or add moderately to the discussion

1 Point:

  • 1-2 postings; postings not distributed throughout the week
  • Little or no use made of readings.
  • Postings have questionable relationships to discussion questions and/or readings; they are non-substantive.
  • Postings do little to move discussion forward.

0 Points:

  • No post made or replies are disrespectful 

4. Emphasize and recognize student labor

Depending on whether your discussions are high- or low-stakes and the frequency with which they’re required, it’s worth noting how much work students put into them to make sure it maps onto what you expect them to be doing. It’s worth doing an informal poll of your students to get a better sense for how much work they’re putting into discussions and what could be done to make them more valuable.

5. Divide that labor to achieve quality over quantity

Along with #4, you might also consider requiring fewer posts over the course of the semester, breaking students into groups, or assigning sets of ‘leaders’/‘original posters’ and ‘researchers’/‘respondents.’ One common problem in online fora is redundancy. This usually happens when the topics of discussion are limited to a few possible tracks coupled with a class size of any more than a dozen students. In cases like this, many “first posts” look the same and many “responses” fall in the “I agree” category. Dividing labor up in this way opens you up to set higher expectations with regard to what initial and responding posts should look like. One example is to have initial posters provide a précis or summary and one engaging, open-ended question to which their classmates respond.

6. Everyone gets feedback

While many situations make it virtually impossible for you to respond to everyone, discussions where everyone gets some feedback are ultimately more engaging. You might consider integrating this into the assignment by suggesting that students only reply to posts that do not have a response yet.

Another strategy is to respond less directly to multiple students at once. Consider checking in mid-week and posting a separate response addressing common themes or recurring ideas. Maintain the feel of an engaged community by ‘citing’ the posts you’re replying to in lieu of blanket statements. E.g., say “Verna and Cary raise a critical issue with regards to X” or “Randall, Leona, and Austin all note Graves’s concept of Y” as the lead into a posed question rather than simply “a number of you have asked…”.

7. Provide clear guidelines

It’s easy to assume online discussions are all the same because there are limits to the tools available to us, but a new version of an old joke applies: ask 10 instructors about online discussions and you’ll get 11 different opinions. It’s worth providing a stand-alone document explaining your vision for discussions in your course. What is the goal of your course’s discussions—developing ideas? Sharing progress? Providing critique? How do you want discussions to “feel”? Is this an informal community? A scholarly dialogue? A debate? What is the format—can (or should) students use emoji? Do you require citations? Course or outside readings? In short: What does an effective, constructive, discussion look like in this course?

This is also a good place to articulate your expectations for discussion leaders, share your rubrics, and guide students in budgeting their time based on what you expect.

8. Disagree—or encourage others to do so

Many asynchronous online discussions infamously turn into “I-agree”-fests. Injecting a little pushback or instances of “how would the author respond to X critique” can help prevent this. Consider encouraging this on the part of students as well through a rubric or expectations guide (above).

9. Mix it up

Even the best-laid discussion plan can devolve into a quote hunt as the semester goes on. While it’s not the worst thing for students to learn what to look for when engaging with course materials, it’s worth mixing it up so students develop a wider set of these skills. Mixing up discussion leaders (above) can help, but, if you prefer to write your own prompts, consider a using a variety. Here are few types of prompts to consider:

Depart from what the key thinkers say and ask students for their own opinions. Invite them to support those opinions with evidence or articulate how they’ve arrived where they’re at.

  • How might you respond if …
  • How would you suggest …
  • What might happen if …
  • To what extent do you agree with …

Provide a prompt which zeroes in on a key concept or responds to particular passage or other source. Give students free reign to respond however they like within the subject matter rather than providing them an anticipatory suite of possible responses.

  • What was the contribution of …
  • How would … respond to the critique …
  • What does … mean when she says …
  • How is the notion of … related to …

Treat the discussion forum as a poll or conduct a poll of the class prior to opening the discussion and share the results asking students to respond.

  • Identify commonality or explain sources of difference
  • Compare poll results to those of another group
  • Describe whether the results map onto expectations given course topics
  • Use the results to drive opinion questions
Assign students précis or summaries of particular reading sections, materials, or current events they find on their own. Invite them to pose open-ended questions of their own in response.
Consider working with a colleague to add them as a TA in your Canvas course. Invite them to lead a discussion related to a topic about which they are passionate. This can be especially effective if it presents an interdisciplinary approach.

There are a number of ways to creatively integrate this type of discussion.

  • Working on a two-sided topic or ongoing academic debate? Integrate this into discussion by assigning sides or allowing students to pick one.
  • Rotate students in roles as respondents of a particular stance.
  • Have students take on the point-of-view of key thinkers or theorists and respond not as themselves but as those figures.
  • Have students create “character sheets” (think Dungeons & Dragons) for particular figures or generalized schools of thought and use those to simulate a debate.

10. Bring it back around

Discussions are most effective (and more engaging) when treated as means rather than an end in themselves. Much as you might provide feedback (above), consider ways you can draw from what students draw out as key points or issues in discussion during “class time”—be this synchronous sessions or asynchronous materials. Drawing connections between the course materials and student contributions helps to reinforce the relevance of their work and underscore the community-building piece which is so central to good discussion.

We’d love to hear from you!

Let us know how you do discussions. What strategies have you employed? What works? What do students like and what are some areas to avoid? Feel free to share sample prompts and success stories. Also let us know if you’ve done interesting things with online discussions that we haven’t had the space to cover here (like video-posts, word clouds, or wiki-building). Comment below or drop us a line at catl@uwbg.edu.

A clock with books.

Pedagogies of Care: Rethinking Student and Professor Workload

Article by Jessica Van Slooten.

The phrase “pedagogy of care” started percolating in my brain late last summer as I crafted a full load of asynchronous online courses and wondered how to best care for the students in my classes—and myself. What would a pedagogy of care look like, and how best to put this care into action?

I found that other scholars of teaching and learning were using this language to frame a number of student-centered teaching practices. One fantastic resource is the Pedagogies of Care website https://sabresmonkey.wixsite.com/pedagogiesofcare created by the authors in the “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” book series published by West Virginia University Press—folks like Kevin Gannon and UW System’s own Cyndi Kernahan, among others.

When I thought about where to start putting care into action, I decided that the first step was examining the workload in my courses for both students and myself. I wanted to acknowledge the real ways the pandemic shaped our individual and collective capacity for teaching and learning: increased competing demands outside of school/work, cognitive impact of ongoing stress and uncertainty, increased emotional labor that teaching during these times takes, among many other real impacts.

I mapped the most important values for me as a teacher. I decided to prioritize frequent communication with students to create presence and community in our asynchronous online courses. And, I wanted to prioritize timely feedback on student assignments. Given my course load and enrollment, this would only work if I had the space and time to do so.

To help figure out the issue of time, I consulted the course workload estimator 2.0, a valuable tool created by scholars at Wake Forest University. The creators of the calculator have figured out some estimations of how long it takes students to complete a variety of tasks. You enter information from your own course in the free, online tool, and it will estimate the time it takes students to complete these tasks. While the tool won’t work perfectly for all kinds of assignments, it does have some nuances that are especially useful for folks teaching reading and writing intensive classes; it recognizes different kinds of reading and writing and acknowledges that each kind takes a different amount of time.

When I first used the calculator, my courses were in the 12-14 hour/week range, and I wasn’t sure what to think. Was this acceptable? Too low? Too high? Rice University’s Center for Teaching Excellence includes an article “How Much Should We Assign? Estimating Out of Class Workload,” which provides advice for how to use a course workload calculator and make changes to your course. The authors claim that “there seems to be general agreement that the Carnegie Unit recommendation of two hours out of class for every credit hour […] is a perfectly reasonable expectation.” For a three-credit course, this would mean 6 hours of out-of-class work each week; adding in the time we would be in class if we were face-to-face brought the total to somewhere between 8 and 9 hours of work each week. Clearly, I needed to make some cuts to more courses to reach this level.

As I worked through how I would approach my class differently, I thought back to my first Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research project in 2011. In that project, I hypothesized that weekly blog posts would help students in my Women’s and Gender Studies classes learn important disciplinary concepts like the social construction of gender and intersectionality. After analyzing the data, I discovered that it wasn’t the quantity or repetition of assignments that determined their learning, but rather the concepts themselves—some concepts were easier to learn than others. I swiftly cut the number of blog posts, retooled other assignments to highlight these tricky concepts, and everyone benefited with fewer blog posts to write, read, and grade.

With these two data points—the course workload estimator and my prior research—along with copious reading about the perils of having too many discussion posts in online classes, I set on another path, guided by my ethos of care.

To further determine what concepts and skills to prioritize, I turned to my prior SoTL research in threshold concepts. This framework was developed by Ray Land and Jan Meyer in the early-mid 2000s. Their research suggests that each discipline contains concepts that have a number of features: transformative, troublesome, integrative, irreversible, and liminal, among others. (This extensive introduction and bibliography includes a useful description of these features). Learning these concepts transforms student learning and understanding. I find this framework helpful in determining essential concepts that build the foundation of my classes. Threshold concepts can be incredibly useful when streamlining class content and assignments to align with a pedagogy of care.

Luckily, one of the textbooks I use is structured around the threshold concepts model, and I was able to use it as a map through that class. For my other classes, I prioritized a handful of concepts and skills and paired readings and assignments with those skills, including regular lower-stakes assignments, and longer projects with various checkpoints throughout the semester.

Admittedly, there are some challenges with this approach depending on your academic discipline. In the literature courses I teach, it can be difficult to choose readings that won’t surpass the ideal 8-9 hours of total student work/week range. I’m still learning how to make thoughtful adaptations to workload around reading—for example, we recently decided as a class to cut one novella from our reading list in the major authors class I’m currently teaching. There are only so many Jane Austen novels one can thoughtfully read and analyze in a 14-week semester.

Finally, the course workload estimator helped me in another way; cutting the number of assignments allowed me to provide more detailed and quicker feedback to students, one of the values I identified at the beginning of this process. Rather than simply filling out the online rubric and provided synthesis comments for the whole class, I now added several sentences of personalized feedback for each student. I used these comments to connect to their ideas, offer additional questions and possibilities, and steer them in the right direction, as needed. Students regularly shared that this personalized feedback was important to them, made them feel like I care about them and their learning, and helped them improve. My pedagogy of care has, for the most part, succeeded in allowing students and myself to continue to learn during challenging times. This framework will continue to be useful in the transformed post-pandemic world, as I anticipate teaching in a variety of modalities in upcoming semesters.

This blog post is based, in part, on materials presented during the UW-Green Bay 2021 Instructional Development Institute.

About Jessica Van Slooten

Jessica Van SlootenJessica is an Associate Professor of English, Writing Foundations, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Humanities as well as Co-Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She has been actively involved in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SotL) to inform her own classroom practices. Her SotL interests include scaffolding student learning, designing meaningful assignments, and assessing student learning in Women’s and Gender Study courses and programs at two- and four-year institutions.

A smartphone showing a few social media icons

Supporting Students and Building Relationships through Alternative Communication Methods

Article by James Kabrhel

Facebook. Snapchat. TikTok. WhatsApp.

Any adult would be hard pressed to keep up with the number of social media apps that are released every year. They are like fad diets in a way, with each having a vogue and then fading into nominal usage as the younger generations constantly look for the next fun way to communicate with their friends. This kind of commentary makes me sound like a much older person, but it is very important to recognize that the typical methods current instructors used to communicate may not be the preferred methods for students.

I have been using social media since soon after the advent of smart phones. I do not remember who originally invited me to Facebook, but that website has had a profound effect on my life. I have shared many personal items over the years, including important events in my family, numerous pictures and videos of my son, and various comments on the world at large. After a few years using Facebook, I thought I would leverage it into a way to keep in contact with former students at the Sheboygan and Manitowoc campuses. Many of us have former students who have come back to tell us how they are doing, or to ask for a reference or letter of recommendation, or even general advice. I figured a Facebook group would be a conduit for students to engage with me that way. I did not count on Facebook falling out of favor with the younger generations. After a year or two, I stopped keeping up with it. Over time, even I did not use Facebook as much. There is a fatigue that sets in when you feel obligated to go to a place regularly, whether it is a real place or a virtual place. I am sure that students also feel the same kind of fatigue (especially when it comes to our classes, sad to say).

I teach Organic Chemistry to all three additional locations, so communication can be a bit challenging. I am based in Sheboygan so the other campuses do not get as much physical time with me. Several years ago, I had a group of Organic Chemistry students who asked me to join a Snapchat group they had created. I had never used the app before, as I had no need to, and other than Instagram, did not use social media much anymore. I did this because it allowed the students to ask me questions about course material directly, sometimes taking screenshots of their work, while allowing the whole group to see the answer. I had responded to student questions via email before, even getting screenshots that way, but email is generally slower for providing feedback, and as we have heard, students do not use email in the same ways that we do. They abandon modes of communication quickly, except perhaps texting.

The Coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the need to adapt communication methods, as it became very easy for students to fall off the radar. The normal lines of communication (direct phone calls, text messages, emails) will likely have limited impact in future years because many students will not bother to communication back via those methods. It will be using messengers connected to social media apps, like Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and many different apps that do not exist yet, that will allow for better communication.

There are some secondary benefits to establishing communication via social media, though those benefits also have risk associated with them. Students who communicate via these social media apps do so with their friends, which means they often share their personal lives too. That bleeds over into communications with me. This is often not an issue, and sometimes can be very helpful. More than once I have been able to provide guidance in a more personal and important matter for a student, when other members of their circle are not supportive enough. I have even been able to steer students towards support from the Dean of Students office and mental health counselors. This certainly shows a level of trust they have in me that goes beyond just a professor. From interactions I have had with some former students, I am part school advisor, career counselor, mental health counselor and even parent.

This is where the risk comes in. While I can say that most of the interactions I have had of this type are former students, sometime current students will ask for advice or support of a more personal nature, and that it really becomes a blurring of professional support and personal support. Using these apps also means that I can get messages at all times of the day or night. I tell my students that a quick response can be expected during normal hours, but I’m not checking in during the middle of the night. Some students can get used to instantaneously responses and could get annoyed or worried when I do not respond right away. I do my best to let them know that I have a life and family outside of campus and they cannot expect instantaneous responses all the time.

I have also shared a little more of my personal life with my students via these media, though I have never hesitated to talk about my family (in a general way) in class. The students become a bit more familiar with me in that way, seeing me more as a person and less as a guy who talks about chemistry a few times a week.

Sadly, there is no one medium or one app that would allow us to communicate directly with our students instantaneously. I really wish that there was. We used to depend on email but that has completely fallen out of style with students, based on my experience. In the absence of that one direct communication pipeline, we have to get creative to make sure that we can engage and support our students in the ways that they need. That means getting a little more “social” and perhaps a little more personal.

What successes have you had communicating with your students? What challenges have you faced? Have you seen the shift away from email—and how have you adjusted? Let us know in the comments below!

About James Kabrhel

James KabrhelJames is an Associate Professor of Chemistry with research interests that are largely Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SotL) based, including the incorporation of pseudoscience-based projects in support of information literacy, and the support of student mental health in the classroom. James also actively develops Open Educational Resources (OERs) for use in the chemistry classroom.

Hands of students completing a cloud-shaped puzzle which reads "Online Collaboration"

Up and Running with Remote Group Work

A Case for Group Work

Group work can elicit negative reactions from instructors and students alike. Often enough, students groan about doing it and instructors dread grading it. The process is ripe for communication breakdowns resulting in stress from both perspectives. On top of this, the digital learning environment tends to compound these issues. Why then is group work so prevalent?

The answer is that, when done well, group activities help foster engagement and build relationships. Collaborative work helps students develop important skills like effectively articulating ideas, active listening, and cooperation with peers. Collaborative assignments correlate strongly with student success positioning them as one of eight high-impact practices identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Making group work a worthwhile experience for students requires extra consideration and planning, but the positive gains are worth the effort.

Designing Group Work for Student Success

How can we design collaborative activities that are a quality learning experience for students? Scaffolding makes sure students are confident in their understanding of and ability to execute the activity. UW-Extension has created a helpful guide on facilitating group work that outlines three key suggestions to get you started. First, be sure students understand the purpose of the activity, in terms of what they are supposed to learn from it and why it is a group activity. Second, provide support so students have the necessary tools and training to collaborate. You are clear how and when students are to collaborate or provide suggestions. You ensure students understand how to use the needed technologies. Finally, providing opportunities for peer- and self-evaluation can alleviate frustrations of unequal workload by having students evaluate their own and their peers’ contributions. As challenges arise, guide groups toward solutions that are flexible but fair to all members. When embarking on group projects, be prepared to provide students with guidance about what to do when someone on the team is not meeting the group’s expectations.

One example of this as you design your group projects is to ask yourself whether it’s important students meet synchronously. If so, how might you design the project for students with caregiving responsibilities or with full-time or “off hours” work schedules? These students may not be able to meet as regularly or at the same time as other students. See below for how this might play into assessing the group project. You might also consider whether all students need to hold the same role within the group, or if their collective project be split up based on group roles.

Consider how the group dynamics can impact student experiences. Helping students come up with a plan for group work and methods of holding one another accountable promotes an inclusive and equitable learning environment. Consider any of these tools to help your students coordinate these efforts:

Assessing Group Work

Equitable, specific, and transparent grading are crucial to group-work success. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence of Carnegie Mellon University has a great resource on how to assess group work, including samples. This resource breaks grading group work down into three areas. First, assess group work based on both individual and group learning and performance. Include an individual assessment component to motivate all students to contribute and help them to feel their individual efforts are recognized. Also assess the process along with the product. What skills are you hoping students develop by working in groups? Your choice of assessment should point to these skills. One way to meet this need is to have students complete reflective team, peer, or individual evaluations as described above. Finally, outline your assessment criteria and grading scheme upfront. Students should have clear expectations of how you will assess them. Include percentages for team vs. individual components and product vs. process components as they relate to the total project grade.

Tools for Working Collaboratively

Picking the right tool among a plethora of what is available is an important step. First, consider how you would like students to collaborate for the activity. Is it important that students talk or chat synchronously, asynchronously, or both? Will students share files?

The following suggestions include the main collaboration tools supported at UWGB. Click to expand the sections for the various tools below.

If you are interested in learning more about any of these tools, consider scheduling a consultation with a CATL member.

Canvas discussions are one option for student collaboration. Operating much like an online forum, discussions are best suited for asynchronous communication, meaning students can post and reply to messages at any time, in any order. If you have groups set up in Canvas, you can create group discussions in which group members can only see one another’s posts. You can also adjust your course settings so that students can create their own discussion threads as well.

Hypothesis is a Canvas integration that lets instructors and students collaboratively annotate a digital document or website. Hypothesis annotation activities can be completed synchronously, such as over a Zoom call, or asynchronously on students' own time. Activities can be created for either the whole class or for small groups and are a great way for students to bounce around ideas about a text or reading. 

Office 365 refers to the online Microsoft Office Suite, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Students can work collaboratively and asynchronously on projects using online document versions of any of these software, which updates changes in nearly real time. Microsoft Office 365 has partial integration with Canvas, allowing students to set up and share Office documents from within Canvas using the Collaborations feature. Students will have to log in to Office 365 through their Canvas course before they can use most features of Canvas and Office 365 integration.

Zoom is one of two web conferencing tools supported by the university, the other being Teams. The Zoom Canvas integration allows instructors to set up meetings within a Canvas course. Students can then access meeting and recording links from within the Canvas course. As such, it is generally easy to for students to access and use. One downside to Zoom is that it is a purely synchronous meeting tool, so students will have to coordinate their schedules or find other ways of including members that may not be able to attend a live meeting. Students that wish to set up meetings amongst themselves are not able to set up meetings with the Canvas integration, though they can use the Zoom desktop app or web portal and their UWGB account.

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool that combines web conferencing, synchronous and asynchronous text communications (in the form of chat and posts), and shared, collaborative file space. Students can create a new team in MS Teams for their group project or operate in a channel of an existing class team. Microsoft Teams also has partial integration with Canvas, meaning students and instructors can create and share Teams meeting links within the Rich Content Editor of Canvas (in pages, announcements, discussions, etc.).

Putting It into Practice

When we ask students to work collaboratively, it’s important we reveal the “hidden curriculum” by building in the steps they should take to be a successful team. As a starting point, asking students to answer these questions helps clarify the work of the group:

  • “Who’s on the team?”
  • “What are your tasks as a group?”
  • “How will you communicate?” (Asynchronously? Synchronously?)
  • “How will you ensure everyone can meet the deadlines you set?”
  • “If or When someone misses a meeting, how will you ensure that everyone has access to the information they’ll need to help you all complete the project on time?”
  • “When will you give each other feedback before you turn in the final assignment?”

For a ‘bare bones’ group assignment, take the above considerations on designing and assessing groupwork into account and create a worksheet for the student groups to fill out together. Create a Canvas group assignment to collect those agreements, assign it some points that will be a part of the whole project grade, and set the deadline for turning it in early so that students establish their plan early enough for it to benefit their group. Scaffolded activities that give students enough structure and agency is a delicate balance, but these kinds of guided worksheets and steps can help students focus their energy on the project, assignment, or task once everyone is on the same page.

Let’s keep the conversation going!

Do you have some tried and tested strategies for helping students coordinate and complete group work online? Send them our way by emailing: CATL@uwgb.edu or comment below!

Follow-up Resources for Academic Integrity Panel & Workshop

Many thanks to our panelists Bill Dirienzo, Nichole LaGrow, and Mark Olkowski for leading a conversation around academic integrity for our campus. Below are some clips from the panel that helped steer our discussion—feel free to comment below or email us at CATL@uwgb.edu.

Videos segments from the panel

Resources to Follow Up on Panel Conversation:

Since we had quite a few questions about online proctoring services, we wanted to follow up with some links to articles about proctoring tools and the artificial intelligence programs many of these companies use to verify student’s identity and flag certain behaviors. 

Here is some research around using proctoring tools a method for mitigating academic dishonesty and cheating in online and in-person assessments—though these sources also provide plenty of alternatives to using proctoring services as well. 

Here is the PowerPoint presentation (in PDF format) including some links out to resources.

Academic-Integrity-Panel

Here is a crowd-sourced collection of some strategies our attendees explored that seek to decrease one of the dimensions in the "academic misconduct" triangle.

If you’re interested in learning more about the resources that helped inform this panel and workshop, please check those out here.