For some people, writing is like pulling teeth, but for others, the prose just flow out onto the page. If writing is not a simple task for you, you can ask a generative AI chatbot to help you with this process without letting it do all of the work for you. In this way, AI can help not hinder your learning. In this example, you need to write a 2,000 word essay for your Women in American Society class about the role of women in government. Note: some of the text in these exchanges were generated from a variety of generative AI chatbots.
You have to do a ton of reading in college and it’s not easy to remember it all. Just re-reading the same content again is not going to help because it gives you a false sense of knowing the content by becoming familiar with it. Instead, you really need to think deeply about what you are reading, and then spend time spaced out over the following weeks trying to remember it.
This example uses chapter 4 from the Introduction to Sociology textbook from OpenStax. Claude is the perfect tool to use when you have large amounts of text to work with.
You are in an introductory statistics class and are feeling overwhelmed. You’re not a math person, but you need to pass this class. Can generative AI help you? In some ways it can. Large Language Models are based on language, not calculations, so don’t rely on these chatbots to provide correct calculations. However, they can help explain some of the concepts so that you understand the calculations you are doing. Here is an example of how to use an AI chatbot as a personalized stats tutor.
AI Chatbot Example: Increase Interest in Course Content
Sometimes, you just have to take a class as a requirement or there are topics that just are not very interesting to you. Can you actually increase your interest in course content? Try a conversation with an AI chatbot, and you just might!
There are several strategies to strengthen new memories as they are formed, including the use of metaphors, connecting the content to strong emotions, and ensuring strong sensory input during the learning experience.
As people hear about the emerging field of learning engineering, they are often confused about how this is different than what they may already be doing, especially as an instructional designer or learning experience designer. How can you tell which one you are practicing? Well, the surprising answer is that it depends on how you brush your teeth.
When talking about this confusion with Erin Czerwinski, the Simon Initiative Product and Community Manager at the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, she offered the analogy of dental care. Erin shared that it wasn’t until middle adulthood that she realized that the purpose in brushing your teeth wasn’t just to move the brush around your teeth for two minutes and call it done. Instead, she now brushes each tooth individually. She compared this to the differences between instructional design and learning engineering: instructional designers follow well-established and evidence-supported procedures for designing and delivering instruction, but they don’t necessarily use data and the learning sciences to maximize learner potential. Let’s unpack this metaphor a bit.
When I brush my teeth, I use an Oral-B toothbrush, which I selected after consultation with my dentist, dental hygienist, and my own consumer research. I gently move the spinning brush head around the entire surface of each individual tooth for 4 seconds before moving on to the next. After the two minutes are up, I rinse my mouth, then run my tongue over my teeth to feel the surface for anything I’ve missed. I then go back and clean up those areas. Making this change has affected my dental health: instead of multiple cavities every year, I haven’t had a cavity in many years. As an educator, I use the learning sciences to select evidence-based approaches to engage my students in learning activities, but I also collect data whenever possible to check their understanding and make modifications to my instruction based on the data. This has improved outcomes for many more of my learners.
I’m also an instructional designer. However, I have learned to adopt the learning engineering mindset and approach in my design practice. ICICLE, the International Consortium for Innovation and Collaboration in Learning Engineering defined learning engineering as:
“a process and practice that . . .
applies the learning sciences,
using human-centered engineering design methodologies, and
data-informed decision-making . . . to support learners and their development” (Goodell, 2022).
What this means is that I don’t just use traditional models of instructional design, like ADDIE, backwards design, formative feedback, differentiated instruction, etc. to determine how I will help learners achieve the course outcomes. Instead, I use all the tools at my disposal, including those mentioned above as well as searching for ways to instrument learning processes and gains to determine in the moment how students are making sense of course material and adjusting instructional design to accommodate the needs of a particular set of learners, with a particular set of assets and challenges, in a particular context, in a particular learning environment to increase learning outcomes for each student. Each learning context is unique with its own set of assets and challenges, so each course needs to adjust to the students who enroll and the system in which it is offered. We all have a mouth, teeth, and gums, but each is unique with its own actions and needs.
My teeth are different than yours. Sometimes they’re sensitive, so I need to use a prescription toothpaste that helps to conserve the limited amount of fluoride I have on my teeth due to my genetics and well water. Not everyone needs the same toothpaste. Similarly, we can’t just design learning opportunities as a one-size-fits-all product that every learner experiences the same way. Some students have shorter attention spans, slower processing speed, poor vision, more distractions in their environment, lack of interest in the content, or gaps in prerequisite knowledge. I look for ways to surface this information with my students so that I can modify the course to better suit their unique needs. This can be as complex as completing learner analyses and collecting data from the student information system, or as simple as adding an interactive question to a lecture video asking students to tell me how the concept I just presented relates to something they already know or what they want to learn more about.
Learning engineering is a systematic approach to understanding the entire learning context, the unique set of learners and instructors, specifying a particular challenge, and using the learning sciences to design appropriate learning encounters that are instrumented to illuminate the internal workings of the student mind. A dentist can easily look in my mouth to visually locate cavities, but sometimes they need x-rays to see inside or between teeth. Unfortunately, we have not yet invented a scanner that can tell us what students know, so we need to illicit their understanding in other ways. Instead of just using evidence-based instructional practices, learning engineering calls on us to use evidence-generating instructional practices. Effective learning is more about getting information out than it is getting information in. By asking students to share representations of their knowledge, whether it is simply responding to a multiple choice question, answering a deeper prompt verbally or in writing, or even building models of their understanding, we get to see their understanding and help them adjust, but there is the added advantage for the student of strengthening their understanding with effortful recall.
Learning engineering has helped me to identify missed opportunities in exchanges with learners. I see helping students to achieve learning outcomes as challenges to solve, rather than opportunities to impart knowledge. Rather than just creating a set of multiple choice questions to check whether students get the right answer, I now carefully construct distractors for each question that identify misconceptions. I use generative AI to help me develop these. Now, it’s not just whether the student understands a concept, it’s how they understand a concept or why they don’t understand it.
Do you just use the toothbrush your dental hygienist gifts you at the end of your annual cleaning? Do you dutifully move the toothbrush around your mouth because you’ve been told that you need to do this to maintain good dental health? Or do you carefully select the equipment you will use to make sure your teeth are actually clean? Do you pay individual attention to each tooth, check to make sure it is clean, and then remediate when necessary? The answers to these questions may just help you to determine whether you have the mindset of an instructional designer or a learning engineer.
References
Goodell, J. (Ed.). (2022). The learning engineering toolkit: Evidence-based practices from the learning sciences, instructional design, and beyond. Routledge.
Are you completely satisfied with your method of managing the research literature and your references? If your answer is not a resounding, YES, then check out this presentation on using Zotero to manage your references. Watch the recorded webinar below, or download the accompanying PowerPoint file to just jump to the clip you want to see.
Writing a literature review is hard work if you want to do it well. A good literature review does not just describe what different researchers have done or what others have claimed, but synthesizes findings from multiple studies and authors into a concise summary. The purpose is not to fully detail what others have done in relation to the topic , but to give an overview of the extant literature on a given topic (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010). Students who begin writing literature reviews often describe one study, then move on to the next. It can take a lot of practice to learn to pull together the literature into summary statements. I finally developed a strategy that works for me and I will share it here.
This strategy begins with careful note-taking, which I will cover in another post. These notes then need to be indexed so that they can be organized by construct or theme, rather than by author or study. I do this in a couple of different ways. If I take notes in a Microsoft Word document, then I will read through my notes, highlight passages, and then use the comment feature to add one or more keywords. To see an example of this, take a look at my notes on studying non-returning college students. You will see that I highlighted passages, then used Ctrl+Alt+M on my keyboard to add a comment, such as findings, variables, sample, response rate, or student characteristics.
If I take notes using hypothes.is, I tag my highlights or annotations with keywords. In the example below, I highlighted a passage that said, “Three calls were made to each student over a period of around 4 weeks” (Aldridge & Rowley, 2001, p. 58), then used the annotation tool to leave myself a note that said, “multiple attempts to reach students in the evening hours”. To index this note, I added a tag “response rate”.
On the main page of your hypothes.is account, you can click on a tag to filter your annotations to just show the ones you have tagged with that label. In the example below, I clicked on “stereotype threat” and was able to see that I have three articles where I took notes using that tag. By reading through the notes I took from these three sources about stereotype threat, I was able to make a summary statement about this construct and cite three supporting works. Hypothes.is allows me to take notes and synthesize all in one, but it does not allow me to re-open files that were annoted on my local machine. Not all of my sources are available online, so sometimes I need to take notes in Word.
After indexing my notes in Microsoft Word using the commenting feature, I then create synthesis tables to sort and organize these notes. Click here to see my synthesis tables for the study of non-returning students. For example, as shown in the figure below, I copied my notes and quotations from articles about sampling and recruitment in studies of non-returning students into a table with the citation in the first column, details about their sample in the second column, details about recruitment strategies in the next column, the study method used, and their completion rate in the last column. With all of this data in a table, I was able to sort it and collect information about studies that used common methods.
When reporting on sampling strategies, I was able to pull together information from this table to state, “Some universities survey all first year students after the semester has begun and then correlate this data with high school statistics to provide early warning systems (Nelson & Thomas, 2012) or compare the data ex post facto between the students who return the next year and those who do not (Bennett, 2003; Coghlan et al., 2005; Heverly, 1999). “
Putting all of my notes into this table format helped me to see that response rates varied based on the method selected and the recruitment strategies used. I summarized this information in the following paragraph.
Recruitment strategies for encouraging students to complete participation in these studies varied widely along with their completion rates. Online surveys tended to have the lowest completion rates at a low of 7% for a school who contracted with a calling center to email and call non-returning students (Ninon, 2013) to a high of 28% when an announcement was sent in email, posted to the learning management system, and announced by instructors (Willcoxson et al., 2011). Surveys given during class time had a better return rate between 54% and 66% (Bean, 1980; Bennett, 2003), and phone surveys were even more successful in collecting data from a range of participants with participation rates between 48% and 86% (Aldridge & Rowley, 2001; Coghlan et al., 2005; Heverly, 1999; Institutional Research, 2007). The phone interviews that had the highest response rate (Coghlan et al., 2005) used a recruitment strategy of sending a letter from the Chancellor’s office to a stratified random sample of freshmen explaining the purpose and the importance of their participation, letting them know that they would be entered into a drawing for a $250 gift card for completing the interview. Phone calls were conducted primarily in the evenings on weekdays and included two rounds of interviews, with the first round conducted in the spring and the second round of just non-returning students in the summer.
In addition to the sampling and recruitment strategies table, I also made tables to organize my notes on why students report that they leave college, characteristics of students who leave, and interventions that have been tried. As I incorporate these notes into the literature review, I highlight them to keep track of which ones have been included and which are remaining.
If you would like to read the full literature review, you can access it online here: The Study of Non-Returning Students: A Review of the Literature. Learning to organize your notes can be very helpful in writing a high quality literature review. By indexing your notes using simple tools like the comment feature in Word or the tag feature in hypothes.is, you will be able to categorize your notes by theme or construct. Pulling together all of your notes on one topic will allow you to summarize the literature effectively, synthesizing what other research says. This will strengthen your literature review.
Do you have suggestions for writing a literature review? Leave them in the comments below.
As more colleges and universities suspend in person classes or make plans to, faculty are left with the overwhelming prospect of continuing to teach in a new modality, while many of these faculty have limited or no experience teaching in distance education. Join 3 experienced instructional designers who have supported the transition to distance learners for hundreds of faculty in the University of Maine System as we share some practical and uplifting advice for how to make decisions about what to do with your course. Our hope is that you will leave this session with a clear understanding of what your next steps should be, a sense of calm and confidence, and some practical strategies for how to make the transition and where to find the resources you need.
First,
take a deep breath. With all of the anxiety surrounding the spread of COVID-19,
it’s easy to get overwhelmed and panic about how you will make it through the
semester. Remember what your goal is: to share your passion about your subject
with learners and help them meet your course objectives. You can still do this
even with disruptions to your schedule and meeting format and I will share some
suggestions with you here to do just that. It all begins with your goals.
Goals
Look back at your course objectives and student learning outcomes in your syllabus. What have your students already met? What remains to be addressed? Is there any flexibility with how these are met? Try not to get too hung up on following what you had planned for activities and assignments, as these are means to an end. You want to reach the same end but adjusting to distance learning will require perhaps rethinking the means. For each of those course objectives, you developed a strategy in your syllabus for meeting them by planning instructional activities, assignments, and assessments. Let’s look at how we can tweak that strategy.
In the table below, I have listed some common instructional purposes
with traditional activities for meeting these goals in class, as well as some
options for meeting these same objectives at a distance. This is not an
exhaustive list but is meant to get your creative instructional juices flowing.
As you will see, you likely are already doing some of the activities in the
distance option columns, so no need to worry about entering a foreign land.
Just begin where you are comfortable, and maybe try one or two new things.
Comparing In-Person and Remote Learning Activities
Instructional Need
In
Class Activities
Synchronous
Distance Options in Zoom
Asynchronous
Distance Options
Assessing and/or activating prior knowledge
Entrance tickets: Ask students to write down what they already know about the topic
Have a conversation about what students may know
Review earlier content/connections
Screen share a prompt or question while you wait for students to log in
Ask about previous knowledge in chat, for students to respond to
Create a guiding question or prompt before the content to help student contextualize
Create a checklist or a short video or text reminder of what was previously covered
Introduce students to content
Lecture
Presentation
Demonstration or whiteboard work
Reading
Lecture via Zoom
Screen share to present your PowerPoint
Use white boarding in Zoom or a document camera, and pen & paper
Read a passage over Zoom
Record an audio recording in 5-10 minute increments
Post written lecture notes
Create a presentation video
Add worksheets, or create a short video demonstrating a process
Assign Reading
Formative assessments and checking for understanding
Check faces for understanding
Clickers/Student response systems
Pop quizzes or quick-writes
Live survey
Use gallery view see student faces
Open “Manage Participants” to allow thumbs up/down for understanding
Use the poll tool in Zoom
Create a quiz in Google Forms for live results
Ask students to submit at least 2 questions they still have
Create a quiz in the LMS or in Google Forms
Student ability to engage with instructor and ask clarifying questions
Students raise hands
Students enter a question in the Chat panel
Open “Manage Participants” to allow the Raise Hand feature
Create a Q&A discussion forum in the LMS
Create a norm for students to reach out via email or messaging tool with questions
Give students a # to text with questions
Students exchange ideas with peers, engage in collaboration, reflect on content, and make connections with personal experience
Large or small group discussion
Pair and Share
Collaborative group assignment
Written responses or short projects
Large group discussion (be sure to review communication norms)Breakout rooms in Zoom
Links to collaborative Google docs/slides
Assignments submitted online
Discussion forum in the LMS
Small groups in LMS
Collaborative projects with Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets
Video-based discussion
Assignments submitted online
Students practice skills, with guidance
Worksheets
Graphic Organizers
Drafting
Hand-over-hand coaching and feedback
Worksheets and graphic organizers, shared in advance
Verbal guidance in large or small groups
Screen sharing drafts or collaborative Google Docs
Instructor coaching and feedback in breakout rooms
Digital worksheets and graphic organizers
Students share drafts, images, or recordings in LMS Groups or collaborative Google documents for feedback
Rubrics and detailed feedback is used, with multiple submissions enabled for revisions
Assessing student understanding and grading (summative assessments)
Papers
Presentations
Projects
Reflections
Exams
Breakout groups can work on Google projects and share out to large groups
Presentations
Individual projects and exams submitted online
Assignments, journals and exams submitted online
Group or individual projects and presentations submitted in Discussion forums
Modality Matrix developed by Anne Fensie and Heather Nunez-Olmstead.
Teaching online can initially feel like herding cats if you haven’t planned carefully and accounted for some unique aspects of distance learning. Important things to consider include the digital divide, communicating expectations, tools, logistics, and videoconference etiquette. Let me share some advice as an experienced cat herder.
Technology Accessibility
Technology can be both a bridge and a barrier to access for
people, and this is an important concern when providing instruction at a
distance. Not only do you want to ensure that you are not creating additional
barriers to your course content, but this is now an opportunity to create
additional access that might not have been available before. Electronic text is
a fairly universal medium that can be read on a screen, printed out, or read
aloud via a screen reader. It can be accessed on a computer, on a mobile
device, through Wi-Fi, or SMS. Whenever possible, provide electronic text
equivalents of your course content and try to ensure that everything can be
downloaded at one go for students who have limited access to Wi-Fi.
Make the Implicit Explicit
Teaching online requires explicit communication. People new
to distance education often do not realize how much is implied in our everyday
interactions that can easily get lost in the translation online. Be specific
about what you want your students to do each week. Include activities that are
graded and those that you expect them to do even though they are not graded.
Many students really appreciate checklists to follow so they know they are
meeting your expectations. If you want them to submit something, be sure to
tell them where to send it and when it is due, including the date and time.
Start Small
You don’t need to learn a lot of new technologies to make
this temporary transition to distance learning. Faculty who have been teaching
online for years and have a toolkit full of resources have spent years learning
and compiling those resources. Be realistic about what you can accomplish in a
week. If you only know how to use email, begin there by sending out course
materials and asking students to email you assignments. If you are comfortable
with your school’s LMS, post your materials there, create assignment drop
boxes, and places for students to interact and ask questions.
Don’t make too much work for yourself. When you ask a
question in class, only a small percentage of your students respond. When you
ask a question online, every single one of your students will respond which
will vastly increase your workload. Plan carefully for what you want students
to submit to you so you can make the time to review it and provide feedback. Prompt
feedback is especially important for students at a distance as they can feel
disconnected and concerned about their performance.
Web Conference Etiquette
One new technology you might be interested in experimenting with is Zoom, or another web conferencing platform like Skype or Google Hangouts. If you plan to conduct your class synchronously, this will be a must. If you plan to conduct your class asynchronously, this can be helpful for office hours, study groups, and providing one-on-one support to students. Here are a couple of quick tips for participating in a web conference that you can share with your students:
Test your equipment and connection in advance.
Make sure your microphone (and video, if desired) is working.
Use a headset or earbuds if possible. This will
reduce the amount of audio feedback.
Practice using the app before the first meeting.
Find out where the mute button and chat are.
Stay muted unless you are speaking. The software
will automatically switch to your video feed if you make a noise, like cough or
if your dog barks.
If you are on camera, remember that you are on
camera. Please turn off your camera if you are eating, blowing your nose, or
walking around the house. This can be very distracting.
Follow a protocol for joining the conversation.
For example, use the Raise Hand tool in the Participants window, unmute and
wait for people to stop talking, or type, “Next, please” in the chat. There may
be a time delay so you can interrupt someone without realizing it if you just
start talking.
Be present. Try not to be distracted by other windows,
applications, or your surroundings.
Let others in your environment know that you are
joining a web conference, so they do not interrupt, keep noise to a minimum,
and stay off camera.
The Bottom Line
You can do this! What is the experience you want your learners to have? How do you want them to feel about your course content? How do you want them to think about it? What do you want them to be able to do? Maintaining academic continuity requires us to go back to the essential purpose of our instruction. You can lead your students to the same destination, but you will take a different path to get there. Reach out to the knowledgeable guides on your campus to help you plan the journey and be flexible about this expedition. Keep your focus on the destination—the learning outcomes. It may take longer to get there, some students might stumble along the way, and the experience will be different. Just keep calm and go online!
I care about each one of my learners, and I tell them that, but how do I show them I care? Most of my students are nontraditional so they often face significant barriers to success in higher education. I want them to know that it is possible for them to succeed and I understand their challenges and want to help them. Many of them don’t believe they are “college material”, so I want to help them develop this identity and make them feel like they belong. To achieve all of these aims, I have to build a relationship with each learner. How can you develop a relationship with a student you only see once a week in person, or never if it is an online class?
My strategy developed by accident when I was trying to help my students develop their self-regulation. I recognized the importance of self-regulated learning in distance education and came across Paul Pintrich’s (1995) theory of self-regulated learning (SRL). He suggests that students regulate their actions, feelings, and thinking as learners and that the better they are at regulating these domains, the more successful they will be as students. To help students improve SRL in these areas, he suggests the following:
Students need to have greater awareness of their own behavior, motivation, and cognition.
Students need to have positive motivational beliefs.
Faculty can be models of self-regulated learning.
Students need to practice self-regulatory learning strategies.
Classroom tasks can be and should be opportunities for student self-regulation
(Pintrich, 1995, p. 9-11)
In his later work, Pintrich (2004) identified four phases of learning where students self-regulate: planning, monitoring, controlling, and reflection and added an additional domain of context. The table below from his article describes each of the areas and phases of self-regulation.
Table I. Phases and Areas for Self-Regulated Learning
Areas for regulation
Phases and relevant scales
Cognition
Motivation/Affect
Behavior
Context
Phase 1 Forethought, planning, and activation
Target goal setting
Prior content knowledge activation
Metacognitive knowledge activation
Goal orientation adoption
Efficacy judgments Perceptions of task difficulty
Task value activation
Interest activation
Time and effort planning
Planning for self-observations of behavior
Perceptions of task
Perceptions of context
Phase
2 Monitoring
Metacognitive awareness and monitoring of cognition
Awareness and monitoring of motivation and affect
Awareness and monitoring of effort, time use, need for help
Self-observation of behavior
Monitoring changing task and context conditions
Phase
3 Control
Selection and adaptation of cognitive strategies for learning, thinking
Selection and adaptation of strategies for managing, motivation, and affect
Increase/decrease effort
Change or renegotiate task
Phase
4 Reaction
and Reflection
Cognitive judgments
Attributions
Affective reactions
Attributions
Choice behavior
Evaluation of task
Evaluation of context
(Pintrich, 2004, p. 390)
I decided to take this table and add questions that students could ask themselves to regulate their learning and came up with this:
I share this file with my students each semester and tell them that I am going to help them with self-regulation to help them be more successful. Each week, they complete an exit ticket where they answer the questions from the last row “Reaction and Reflection”. I created a template in a Google Doc that I copy for each student and share with them privately. This way, only the student and I can see what they write and they can feel free to be candid. I can then read and comment on these, and they can comment back. The same file is used each week, so we have a running conversation that goes on the whole semester. Here is what the document looks like:
It takes about 2-5 minutes to read and comment on each one, so with a class of 20 students, I set aside an hour a week to do this. This is probably the most valuable hour in my whole week. I’ve shared this with faculty who have large classes, and they have their TAs help them read through the exit tickets.
The students really share a lot with me that I wouldn’t know otherwise. They tell me what they are learning, what questions they have, how they are feeling, lessons they’ve learned, and even suggest things about the course that I could change to make it better. I’ve implemented lots of changes in my courses on the fly based on comments students make in their exit tickets. I get weekly updates on the things that are posing a challenge to their success and I get to offer suggestions and encouragement. I really feel connected to each learner, and they feel connected to me. I tell them I care about their experience and their success in higher ed, and now they know I do.
If you do something similar, share it below! If you try this with your classes, please let me know how it goes.
References
Pintrich, P. R. (1995). Understanding Self-Regulated Learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1995(63), 3–12.
Pintrich, P. R. (2004). A conceptual framework for assessing motivation and self-regulated learning in college students. Educational Psychology Review, 16(4), 385–407. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-004-0006-x
