Category Archives: Pedagogy

Preparing Future Faculty: An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching

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Our next couple of posts will address the preparation of graduate students who plan to enter the professoriate. Many universities offer training and other resources to prepare future faculty, and we’ll cover some publicly available options for those who are looking for additional opportunities for themselves for their students.

Screenshot of Coursera course description page for An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching.First up: a seven-week long MOOC, starting on October 6th: An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching. This course is offered by the CIRTL Network. Funded by the National Foundation for Science, the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning is a consortium of 22 research universities whose mission “is to enhance excellence in undergraduate education through the development of a national faculty committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse learners as part of successful and varied professional careers.”

CIRTL embraces three core concepts, which it calls Pillars: Teaching-as-research, Learning Communities, and Learning-through-Diversity. Johns Hopkins is a CIRTL member, but even if your institution is not part of the consortium, there are resources on the CIRTL website that are available to all. The MOOC is open to everyone. Further, although CIRTL is specifically “committed to advancing the teaching of STEM disciplines in higher education,” much of the information it makes available is applicable to teaching in any field. Likewise, the MOOC, offered through Coursera, will “start by exploring a few key learning principles that apply in all teaching contexts.”  The syllabus notes topics such as Principles of Learning, Learning Objectives, Assessment of Learning, Lesson Planning, Inclusive Teaching, and Writing to Learn that provide foundations to good teaching for any subject.

The course description provides more detail:

This course will provide graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) who are planning college and university faculty careers with an introduction to evidence-based teaching practices. Participants will learn about effective teaching strategies and the research that supports them, and they will apply what they learn to the design of lessons and assignments they can use in future teaching opportunities. Those who complete the course will be more informed and confident teachers, equipped for greater success in the undergraduate classroom.

You can watch the intro video as well.  Then, sign up and start preparing yourself for your first teaching assignment.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: Screen shot https://www.coursera.org/course/stemteaching

 

 

 

Creative Student Assignments: Fast-Paced In-Class Presentations

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Students given presentation to a class.

CC Photo by Creative Services: http://spirit.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/student-presentation-ncc.jpg

In our teaching and learning center we talk to a lot of faculty who are seeking to give students assignments that provide authentic learning experiences as well as offer variety over the course of the semester. Instructors like the idea of having students do projects and present the results during class, but often find that the end results are uninspired PowerPoint presentations full of text-heavy slides. One solution is to have student give presentations using one of the popular fast-paced styles such as Pecha Kucha 20×20, Lightning Talks, Ignite Events, or 24×7.

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese word meaning chit chat (listen to various pronunciations by native Japanese speakers).  PechaKucha 20×20 is a presentation format developed by Tokyo-based architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in 2003. The concept is to show 20 images, each for 20 seconds, thereby delivering a talk in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The images advance automatically as the presenter talks along to the images. Klein and Dytham sponsored PechaKucha Nights, informal gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, work, and thoughts in the PechaKucha 20×20 format. These events are now held world-wide.

Lightning Talks use a similar format, and evolved in the tech world at Python and Perl conference in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The format varies but typically is limited to 5 minutes, and slides may or may not advance automatically. Barrie Byron, a self-described communications professional and experienced presenter, offers a description of lightning talks and some tips for execution on her blog. She describes a format where slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. Byron notes that the format tests resilience and oratory skills. “A good lightning talk is insightful, inspiring, thought-provoking, useful, humorous, controversial, or enlightening. Lightning talks are almost always fun, for both the speaker and the audience.”

According to Wikipedia, Ignite Events are typically organized by volunteers and have been held around the world. Participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format. The event has the motto, “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” The presentations are meant to “ignite” the audience on a subject – awareness, thought, and action are generated on the subjects presented. At an Ignite event each speakers gets 5 minutes, and must use 20 slides with each slide advancing automatically after 15 seconds, forcing speakers to get to the point, fast.

24×7 presentations, another variation on the theme, allows 24 slides in 7 minutes. Variations allow for slides to advance automatically or manually.

The advantage that these short, structured formats offer is that they help students focus on their key points and important content. Their presentation style matters. The fact that the slides are only visible for a short period of time means that any text used must be short and to the point. Organizing an end of the semester presentation event using one of these methods will challenge your students to get to the point, practice their delivery style, and provide an informative and entertaining performance for you and your class.

Here are a few resources on presentations to help you and your students:

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: CC Photo by Creative Services: http://spirit.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/student-presentation-ncc.jpg

Post-Semester Reflection

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Woman in business suit with fountain pen looking thoughtful.

Now that your last class has been taught, exams given and grades turned in, it’s time to kick back and enjoy some rest and relaxation, right? Not to say that you haven’t earned it, but first it might be a good idea to add a third “R” to the mix. That would be reflection.

While the first thing the word reflection might bring to mind is the scientific definition, the Oxford Online Dictionary gives the second meaning as “Serious thought or consideration.”

The Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Washington (Seattle) lists among its resources a section on Self Reflection on Teaching.

“It is key to engage systematic reflection on your own teaching. Some easy yet consistent strategies for keeping track of your teaching are to annotate assignments, tests and class plans on an ongoing basis. This will help you keep track of things to keep and/or eliminate when you teach the class again. End-of-term summaries also help you reflect on your teaching and provide excellent fodder for the development of new classes and or improved versions of the same class.”

In Wilbert J. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers the author notes, “One key to improvement is reflection – thinking about what you want to accomplish, and what you and the students  need to achieve these goals.” [p. 6-7 in 11th edition, Houghton-Mifflin, 2002]

While the semester is still fresh in your memory, ask yourself some questions. What was successful? What wasn’t? Were your goals and objectives for student learning met? Do your assessments accurately capture student learning? What do you want to do differently the next time you teach this course?

If your classes went smoothly and students seemed engaged, there may be few changes to implement with the next iteration.  If you are feeling that the entire course was a disaster, Using Failure to Reflect on our Teaching, a post in the Chronicle of Higher Education ProfHacker blog written by Janine Utell, Associate Professor of English at Widener University in Pennsylvania, will help you to take something positive from the situation.

Utell offers strategies for assessing specific failings and finding remedies –looking at past successes can help you to solve current problems.  She writes: “If I can pinpoint a specific strategy that failed, I stop thinking of myself as a failure and can find something concrete to fix. I can use past problem-solving to remind myself of my strengths: I’ve fixed that before, I can fix it again. I can see, too, if perhaps a class going badly came from something that was out of my control. Every class has a life of its own. That means every class that fails, fails in a particular way. It also means that every class that succeeds does so at least in part because of a particular and providential confluence of our strengths and those of the students.”

Taking time for reflection now will prove beneficial at the end of the summer when the next semester starts.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft Clip Art

Summer Reading: Three Articles for Your Consideration

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Celebrating the end of the academic year and looking forward to some time for summer reading? It’s always good to have solid research to back up our teaching practices. Three recent articles highlight scholarship behind the claimed benefits of collaborative learning, improved student performance with the use of active learning, and taking notes by hand provides better cognitive retention than using a laptop.

Woman lying on grass reading a book.A tip from the Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list sent The Innovative Instructor to IDEA (Individual Development and Educational Assessment) and POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education). “IDEA is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide assessment and feedback systems to improve learning in higher education.” [http://ideaedu.org/about] As part of IDEA, POD produces “succinct papers” to address specific ways for instructors to employ innovative teaching methods. The POD Center Notes on Instruction is definitely worth a look.

POD Item #5 Formed “Teams” or “Discussion Groups” To Facilitate Learning Overall, reviews the research supporting the benefits of collaborative learning. “Learning is enhanced when the material to be learned is thought about deeply and also when related material is retrieved from memory and associated with the new material. When students have an opportunity to work together to learn course content, particularly when applying that material to a new challenge, both deep thinking and retrieval of associated materials are realized.” Specific tips are presented for implementing group work in a course, including setting clear expectations and monitoring group progress. Applications of group work for online settings are examined, and assessment issues are addressed.

Next, a study on lecturing versus active learning was recently highlighted in both Inside Higher Education and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The results of the research, Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Scott Freeman, Mary Wenderoth, Sarah Eddy, Miles McDonough, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Michelle Smith. The lead researchers are in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle.

From the abstract: “This is the largest and most comprehensive meta-analysis of undergraduate STEM education published to date.” “These results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.” As for the significance of the report, “[t]he analysis supports theory claiming that calls to increase the number of students receiving STEM degrees could be answered, at least in part, by abandoning traditional lecturing in favor of active learning.”

From the April 2014 Psychological Science, The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, reports on the benefits students gain by taking lecture notes longhand rather than on a laptop. Although using laptops in class is common (and instructors complain about the distractions laptops present), this study “…suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.” “In three studies, [the researchers] found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.” The authors conclude “…that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Image Source: CC Spirit Fire on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spirit-fire/5733726521/

From MOOCs to MOCs?

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In January 2013, The Innovative Instructor wrote a post titled The ABCs of MOOCs, which attempted to provide an overview to the emerging and rapidly evolving phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses familiarly known as MOOCs. We have come a long way in a short time in regards to MOOCs. This post examines the evolution of the MOOC trend.

In an article by Laura Pappano dated November 2, 2012, the New York Times declared that 2012 was The Year of the MOOC. Within a few months during that year several companies had been formed by university partnerships (Coursera, edX, Udacity); University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan had been fired (and reinstated) in part due to her reluctance to rush onto the MOOC train (see: the New York Times, Anatomy of a Campus Coup by Andrew Rice); and Thomas Friedman, among others, had written about MOOCs “disrupting” the future of university education. Some pundits declared that brick and mortar universities were seeing their end of days.

But a year later, Clayton M. Christensen, a professor of business administration at Harvard, and coiner of the phrase “disruptive innovation”, presented a more nuanced view in an article co-written with Michael Horn – Innovation Imperative: Change Everything Online Education as an Agent of Transformation (New York Times, November 1, 2013).  “But for MOOCs to really fulfill their disruptive potential, they must be built into low-cost programs with certification of skills of value to employers. So far, only a few traditional universities have incorporated MOOCs into their curriculum, and only to supplement what they are already doing — like ‘flipping the classroom,’ with lectures watched from home.” And “As concepts and skills are taught more effectively online, it’s unlikely that face-to-face interaction will cease to matter.”

Certainly the promise of MOOCs – free education for the masses – seemed to herald an exciting new wave. Yet many of us in support roles in higher education questioned whether the reality would live up to the hype. Articles lauding the new revolution were short on economic analysis. MOOCs are being offered without cost to students, but are not without cost to develop. Getting a handle on the financial side can be difficult as production costs are often hidden. These include: faculty time for course preparation and delivery, videotaping and editing costs, time spent to “scrub” content for copyright issues, and faculty and/or staff monitoring time when the course is running. How many institutions can support large scale production of free courses with no monetary return on investment? For that matter, if Harvard or Stanford is already offering an introduction to computer science MOOC, does it make sense for Anystate University to do the same?

Moreover, the MOOC environment does not necessarily bring out the best in pedagogical practices. A lecture watched online may loosely equate with a face-to-face lecture in a large course, but neither experience is likely to top a small, active-learning-centered classroom experience.

It is not surprising that two recent articles took on a different tone. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Steve Kolowich wrote (April 14, 2014) an article titled 2014: The Year the Media Stopped Caring About MOOCs?. Kolowich identifies 2013 as the year of the MOOC backlash, and noted that “Coursera’s new chief executive, the former Yale University president Richard C. Levin, last month reiterated that the company’s MOOCs should be thought of as ‘additive to what universities are doing, not disruptive.’”

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed reported on April 17, 2014 that Udacity plans to begin charging students for MOOC course completion certificates, cutting MOOCs to MOCs (Massive Online Courses).

Diagram showing Gartner Hype Cycles

Gartner Hype Cycles. Jeremy Kemp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg

Gartner, Inc., a leading information technology research and advisory company uses a method called Hype Cycles to analyze emerging technologies. [See illustration above] Five phases in a technology life cycle are identified: 1) the technology trigger 2) the peak of inflated expectations 3) the trough of disillusionment 4) the slope of enlightenment 5) the plateau of productivity. It would appear from the recent press that MOOCs are experiencing the crash into the trough of disillusionment. It will be interesting to see a year from now if there is an upward trend towards enlightenment.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Jeremykemp at en.wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg

Resources for Peer Learning and Peer Assessment

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Students doing group workSeveral weeks ago our colleagues in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health presented the very informative half-day symposium Peer to Peer: Engaging Students in Learning and Assessment. Speakers presented on their real-life experiences implementing peer learning strategies in the classroom. There were hands-on activities demonstrating the efficacy of peer-to-peer learning. Two presentations focused on peer assessment highlighting the data on how peer assessment measures up to instructor assessment and giving examples of use of peer assessment.  If you missed it, the presentations were recorded and are now available.

A previous post highlighted Howard Rheingold’s presentation From Pedagogy to Peeragogy: Social Media as Scaffold for Co-learning. You will need to bring up the slides separately – there is a link for them on the CTL page.

For additional material on peer learning and assessment the JHSPH CTL resources page is loaded with information on the subject, outlining best practices and highlighting references and examples.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft Clip Art

Two Keynotes – Part 2

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In the last post, I wrote about a keynote presentation by Philip Yenawine, the co-founder of Visual Thinking Strategies. A second remarkable keynote address came during a half-day symposium, Peer to Peer: Engaging Students in Learning and Assessment, sponsored by colleagues in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH).

Screenshot taken from Howard Rheingold's websiteHoward Rheingold delivered his presentation From Pedagogy to Peeragogy: Social Media as Scaffold for Co-learning remotely as seems appropriate for the person Wikipedia  describes as “… a critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing).”

Rheingold is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Communication where he teaches two courses, Virtual Communities, and Social Media Literacies. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Information where he teaches Virtual Communities and Social Media. He is the author of numerous books including Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, [2002, Perseus Books], and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online [2012, The MIT Press]. He has given a TED Talk titled The New Power of Collaboration.

On the bleeding edge in terms of technology and thinking about the power of the human mind, Rheingold has long been an advocate and advancer of the collaborative nature of networked communities and communication. Rheingold spoke to the audience at JHSPH on the evolution of learning from lecture-based to learning-centered, self-directed, social, peer-to-peer, inquiry-based, cooperative, and networked models.

He started in the mid-2000s with the Social Media Classroom, a wiki-based site that acted as a place for communication and served as an asynchronous element to a face-to-face class he was teaching. In the process students, working in teams, became co-teachers. He promoted the use of blogs, and mind maps that provided students with a non-linear way of looking at materials and making connections between things. In an effort to reach out to different learning styles, Rheingold presented the course syllabus as a concept map, a Prezi, and on the wiki.

Since then we have seen a proliferation of peer-to-peer learning platforms such as YouTube and Khan Academy, as well as self-directed, peer-supported courses such as ds[digital storytelling]106. Since January 2011 ds106 has been taught at University of Mary Washington (UMW) and other institutions as a course for credit but also has at the same time been open (non-credit) to participants from the web (learn more about ds106).

Howard Rheingold’s Rheingold U. is a natural extension of this phenomenon.  “Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I’ve learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include streaming audio and video from me and from students, shared text chat and whiteboard, and my ability to push slides and lead tours of websites.”

Rheingold asked, “What do self-learners need to know in order to effectively teach and learn from each other?” This question led him to the development of the concept of peeragogy (a collection of techniques for collaborative learning and collaborative work) and The Peeragogy Handbook: a peer-to-peer learning guide in the form of a wiki-based “textbook” created cooperatively. Of this Rheingold says, “I was invited to lecture at UC Berkeley in January, 2012, and to involve their faculty and their graduate students in some kind of seminar, so I told the story of how I’ve used social media in teaching and learning – and invited them to help me create a handbook for self-learners.”

Rheingold inspires us to rethink traditional teaching models, reminding us that not only do we learn best by doing, but also that teaching someone what we have learned reinforces our own knowledge.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources
Johns Hopkins University

Image Source: Screen shot from http://rheingold.com/

Two Keynotes – Part 1

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In the past few weeks I’ve attended a couple of professional meetings, a three day Visual Resources Association (VRA) conference in Milwaukee, and a half-day symposium, Peer to Peer: Engaging Students in Learning and Assessment, sponsored by colleagues in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH). Both meetings packed a lot of valuable information into the sessions and had enlightening keynote speakers.

Screen shot from home page of the Visual Thinking Strategies websitePhilip Yenawine, Co-Founding Director, Visual Thinking Strategies, gave the keynote address at the VRA conference. He opened with an active learning exercise where he had the audience examine an image of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X and make statements about what we saw.  I should note that the Visual Resources Association is “a multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments” so many of the attendees examine art-related images on a daily basis, and were, perhaps, a bit better practiced at the exercise than average.

Yenawine states: “Of the vast array of images available to us, art tends to be the most complex and as such gleaning meaning from it – in its many manifestations – is a challenge. Frustrated when data revealed visitors learned little from the many educational interventions offered by [my] talented staff at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, [I] turned to Abigail Housen, a scholar who studied “aesthetic thought”– how people use what they know when looking at art – to try to determine and remedy the problem.” [http://www.vraweb.org/conferences/vra32/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/VRAProgram2014final.pdf]

Yenawine and  Housen created a method they called Visual Thinking Strategies, and began introducing VTS into schools seeking to improve aesthetic development. “In longitudinal research studies, it was shown that, in addition to developing visual thinking, VTS programs promote creative and critical thinking skills. [Housen’s] research also demonstrated that students’ application of these crucial 21st century skills transfer to other subject areas across the academic curriculum.” [http://vtshome.org/pages/research]

Yenawine reported in his presentation that VTS discussions of art can be used to teach language, thinking, and social skills, but equally important is the development of visual literacy – defined as the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image.

So why is this program, designed for implementation in the K-12 sector, important for those of us in the Higher Education realm? In October 2011, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) introduced the Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education stating “[t]he importance of images and visual media in contemporary culture is changing what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Today’s society is highly visual, and visual imagery is no longer supplemental to other forms of information. New digital technologies have made it possible for almost anyone to create and share visual media. Yet the pervasiveness of images and visual media does not necessarily mean that individuals are able to critically view, use, and produce visual content. Individuals must develop these essential skills in order to engage capably in a visually-oriented society. Visual literacy empowers individuals to participate fully in a visual culture.”

In other words, it is never too late to become visually literate, or to think about how improving your student’s visual literacy might have a positive effect on their learning more generally.

The next post will highlight the keynote speaker from the Peer to Peer symposium.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources
Johns Hopkins University

Image Source: Screen shot from http://vtshome.org/

Flipping Your Class Humanities Style?

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We’ve had several posts on flipping your class at The Innovative Instructor. From the plethora of articles appearing recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, it’s clear that flipping is now the big thing in pedagogical approaches. Our experience has been that the faculty practicing flipping here at Johns Hopkins have been in the STEM disciplines. But what about the humanities?

Text reading flipping the classroom with the classroom upside downHumanities courses are often taught using a model of assigning readings outside of class and engaging students in discussions in class. Larger, lecture-style courses at the introductory level may have students met in smaller sections for the discussion component. Discussion of the readings is generally a key component to the learning experience in humanities courses. Does it make sense to have students view the lecture materials outside of class as they do for STEM courses? Would they do this in addition to the reading? Or would they read in class? What would be the benefit? Then what happens to the discussion? Rebecca Schuman, an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis and columnist for education at Slate and The Chronicle of Higher Education, examines these questions, and provides an account of her personal experience in partially flipping an introductory-level literature class in a post titled The Flipped Classroom.

Schuman sites a couple of examples (here and here) of flipping humanities classes. She speaks honestly about her reservations on flipping her class, but after hitting a point mid-term where her students didn’t seem to be doing the readings and in-class discussion were flagging, she made a flip. In class, students did close reading and worked in small groups on worksheets (like “problem sets” in STEM classes) she’d created. The results were mixed. Schuman writes:

Yes, the students did a more thorough job reading Shakespeare than they had with Dante. But we never had a chance to have the kind of discussion for which college was invented: the kind that happens when careful reading gets done at home, so there is time in class for everyone’s ideas to be challenged, everyone’s theories to be pushed and tested. Yes, they read carefully—but the reading itself took up so much of class that I felt their “end point” was still, in some ways, more cursory than a traditional class would have been.

Schuman concludes that her experiment was an incentive for students to improve their reading habits outside of class for the subsequent book studied – they didn’t like the flipped class experience. Flipping a class makes a lot of sense for some courses, but it is not a one-size fits all. The pedagogical method should match the course objectives rather than be adapted because it is the latest trend.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources
Johns Hopkins University

Image Source: © Macie Hall, 2013

Multimedia Assignments

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In the previous post, we looked at a debate on the value of a certain type of student writing assignments. The upshot was that it might be in the best interests of students for instructors to model real-life research experiences and allow for presentation of research results in the range of media possibilities available to working professionals. Creating multimedia assignments for your students may have appeal, but for instructors taking the plunge for the first time, such assignments may seem daunting. You may be equating multimedia with video, and video with movie production, and imagining that students will somehow need to become budding Quentin Tarantinos in addition to learning all the course materials. And where is that video equipment going to come from?

Image showing icon-style examples of text, audio, still images, animation, video and interactivity.In truth, multimedia creation can output to a wide range of formats, including digital posters, audio-casts, timelines, visualizations, digital/online exhibitions, websites, blogs, presentation software productions, and video. Video can be produced using easy to learn and readily available applications. PowerPoint and Keynote offer low-tech solutions as there are options to save presentations as video files. Student don’t need a video camera for these – still images combined with timed transitions, animations, and music or voice-over recordings can make for very effective end products. For true video, many students have smartphones that are capable of shooting video clips for editing in iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker, or even on the phone itself.

Unless your goal is for students to learn advanced digital video skills, the slickness of the end product should not be the sole determinant of the grade. Rather, just as you would grade a text assignment, your assessment rubric should focus on the strength of the argument and supporting evidence. But, your first question should be whether a multimedia assignment is in alignment with your teaching objectives.

Mike Heller, Departmental Teaching Fellow (Music) at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, has created a two minute video on the five key considerations for designing multimedia assignments. These are:

1. Why create a multimedia assignment? What is the value added?

2. Be aware of the myth of the digital native. Not all students are technical wizards. Their experience and expertise will vary. It’s a good idea to start with lower stakes assignments to get students familiar with multimedia technologies before introducing a major project.

3. Don’t just teach the tools, teach the critical thinking. Try folding a traditional assignment into the multimedia project, perhaps by having students write an essay before adapting it into a video presentation.

4. Set clear goals by creating a concrete rubric. Without this you may find it difficult to assign grades once you receive the work.  Having a clear vision of your primary learning objectives will make it much easier when it comes to grading and providing feedback.

5. Communicate your teaching goals to your students. Distributing your rubric when you make the assignment is a good way to achieve this. By offering specific guidelines about the skills you want them to learn you insure that students are clear about the assignment.

In regards to the third point on teaching critical thinking as well as the tools, you may not have the expertise to teach some of the multimedia tools and that may determine the path you take in deciding how to frame the assignment. Look for resources on your campus.

Here at Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, we have the Digital Media Center  providing student support. See the end of the post for suggestions and links to specific free online platforms to support multimedia assignments.

Another tip sheet for creating multimedia assignments can be found at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Office of Instructional Technology – 10 Tips for Successful Multimedia Assignments.

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Technology to Enhance Learning Experience module – Five Steps to Creating Successful Multimedia Assignments – suggests that instructors “…[c]omplete the technology-based assignment yourself before assigning it to students. This will give you the most accurate idea of the amount of time and training involved, and the challenges that students may encounter. This will also enable you to develop a rubric for grading and communicating your expectations to students”

If the final products are going to be shared on public websites or otherwise publicly accessible, you will want to think about copyright issues. This can be a good opportunity to teach your students about copyright and fair use. Depending on your institution, there may be library staff able to provide assistance or other resources available, perhaps through the college or university office of legal counsel. We have a great LibGuide entitled Copyright and Fair Use: Trends and Resources for 21st Century Scholars here at JHU to get you started. 

Suggested Resources

Blogs – Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress
Timelines – Timeline JS, SIMILE  Timeline
Digital/Online Exhibitions – Padlet, Omeka, Google Sites, WordPress, Tumblr
Websites – Google Sites, WordPress

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: CC Kevin Jarret – http://www.flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/2856162498/in/photostream/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia