First.
Julie Edwards: And yeah, start letting everybody in. We're in a practice session. Does that matter? It does. Once I hit start webinar, it should. Yeah, I'll connect with you this afternoon. Okay, that sounds great, Julie. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Welcome everyone. I see some of you starting to join us.
Julie Edwards: We'll get started here in a few minutes, but feel free to hop over to the chat if you would like, and say, Hi, let us know where you're from. We do publish the Chat Transcript after the webinar with the blog, with the recording and the
Julie Edwards: slides, because when we have this many librarians in one room. There's a lot of good information that goes back and forth. If you don't want to use the chat, you don't have to, but you're certainly welcome to pop over there and say, Hi! If that feels comfortable for you.
Julie Edwards: Hello! Oh, from North Dakota snow on the way Amy, I'm in Montana. So it's coming to you from us because it is blowing sideways here right now.
Julie Edwards: Hi! Florida.
Julie Edwards: opposite end of the spectrum I'm assuming.
Julie Edwards: Hey? North Carolina!
Julie Edwards: Cincinnati attempts in the seventies. I will trade you. hey? Biloxi?
Julie Edwards: Oh, Amy loves Montana. I'm so glad I do, too
Julie Edwards: sunny and Palm Bay. That sounds lovely
Julie Edwards: so nice to see so many of you joining us. Welcome, Hi! Louisiana
Julie Edwards: greetings! We will get started here in just a minute, just giving everybody a little time to come in and get settled.
Julie Edwards: Hey, Arkansas! Hey! Alaska!
Julie Edwards: Nice to see
Julie Edwards: got we got Alaskan, Florida. So our opposite corners of the of the country covered.
Julie Edwards: Nice.
Julie Edwards: Welcome, everyone!
Julie Edwards: Hey, Bellingham?
Julie Edwards: Alright! So we are right at the top of the hour. It's noon here in the mountains, as I said, and so we will go ahead and get started. My name is Julie Edwards, and I am a librarian.
Julie Edwards: an instructor, instructional designer with niche Academy. Thank you so much for joining us today at this webinar on effective interaction and online courses connecting students with peers, instructors and content to support learning.
Julie Edwards: We will get started with the webinar in just a few minutes. But I do want to do some of our standard housekeeping first. I would love to introduce you to Niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning platform to help you create and deliver effective training and measure success.
Julie Edwards: So our software is the perfect tool for libraries. If you're looking to increase your E resour usage, deliver information, literacy, instruction and measure student success and provide training for patrons and staff, including student employees.
Julie Edwards: If you are interested in finding out more about our platform chatting with a member of our team, or hearing what your colleagues and other libraries have to say, I will drop a link to our website in the chat, so you can check us out there.
Julie Edwards: We are recording this webinar, and I will make the recording, the slides and the Chat Transcript available on our blog in a few days. Once we get all of that prepped, you'll all get an email from me when that is ready. So you can just sit back and enjoy the content. You can turn on closed captions in Zoom, if you would like to do that.
Julie Edwards: The chat is open. Please feel free, free to continue chatting with each other. But if you have a question for Melissa, please put that in the question and answer box of zoom, so that we are sure not to miss it, and I will do my best to moderate those questions at the end of the webinar.
Julie Edwards: So this webinar series is part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together and providing continuing education in the library world. I really am happy that you have joined us today. I'm a former academic librarian. I often choose webinars based on. What do I wish I had known when I was practicing at the university. And this is one of those. So thank you for joining us.
Julie Edwards: Our presenter today is Melissa Wong. Melissa teaches courses in instruction, e-learning, higher education, and reference
Julie Edwards: in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-champaign, my library school. I always have to throw that in where she is consistently recognized. On Ui Uc's list of teachers ranked as excellent by their students
Julie Edwards: mit Ctl. And in 2,012 she was recognized with the campus award for excellence in online and distance teaching. She is the co-editor of reference and information services and co-author of the open access, textbook instruction in libraries and information centers and introduction.
Her book, Instructional Design for Lis Professionals, is a guide for faculty teaching graduate courses in library and information science she has presented with us many times before, and I am absolutely delighted to welcome her back with that, Melissa. I will turn it over to you.
Melissa Wong: Thank you so much, Julie, and good morning to everyone, or good afternoon to those of you who are in other time, zones. II work for the University of Illinois. But I'm actually based in Los Angeles. So it's just the tail end of the morning for me here.
Melissa Wong: Okay, so this is a I think a moderately sized webinar, which is kind of exciting. I really welcome folks to use the chat as we're going along. I try to keep an eye on the chat and sometimes respond to people's comments. But if you have resources to share or your own teaching strategies to share. Please
Melissa Wong: please feel free to do that in the chat. I love that. And then, as Julie said, she'll capture that chat and share it with folks afterwards. So if we've got lots of great ideas, we'll have a chance to, or we'll be able to review them after the fact, which is always really nice.
Okay, so
Melissa Wong: today, we are going to talk about the role of interaction in supporting student learning and motivation in online learning. And then look at strategies for increasing interaction in our teaching
Melissa Wong: our kind of general agenda is to talk just a little bit of introduction to thinking about modalities for online learning, and then I'm going to share with you a framework for interaction. And then we'll talk about some really concrete strategies for working that into our courses, and then hopefully have a little bit of time for QA. At the end.
Melissa Wong: I say hopefully, we'll have a little time only because sometimes II get
Melissa Wong: into answering questions in the middle of talking. And so the question and answer period might also be spread out a little bit.
Melissa Wong: Okay, so just kind of as a as a preface to what we're talking about today. Whenever I talk about online learning, I'd like to start defining some of my terminology to make sure that we're all on the same page, because there are so many different forms of online learning. So in the title of today's webinar. I said that we were going to focus on
Melissa Wong: courses. So thinking about a course as a credit course or maybe a professional development offering that meets over a series of weeks where instructors will have sustained contact with students. The course will probably include activities and assignments that students are required to complete for a grade or a certificate.
Melissa Wong: I know that many of us who are librarians also teach a lot of workshops in our library, and we can think about a workshop as a one time event that maybe lasts for an hour or 2 h in the library world. These are usually information literacy workshops or technology workshops or other kinds of educational programs. And
Melissa Wong: while a lot of what I'm going to talk about today does focus on courses with that sustained contact with students. I think we'll also be throwing out some ideas that you could apply to workshops. If you do that kind of teaching
terms of modality. There are a lot of modalities for online learning. Synchronous instruction is instruction that's provided in real time on a platform like Zoom. So
so today, we're engaged in synchronous instruction. Asynchronous instruction is when the materials are available in a course space. But participants can work through them on their own time and at their own pace.
A good asynchronous instruction always has some structure to it, like weekly due dates to help participants stay on track, and that usually also facilitates some activities like discussion forums where we'd like everybody to be focused on the same discussion Forum within maybe a week long period.
There are a few other forms of online instruction that folks may be familiar with. You know. So hybrid has a couple of different definitions early on in online instruction, we use hybrid to mean a synchronous or asynchronous course that included some kind of in person contact that was really popular in early online degree programs. Although I think a lot of programs have started to cut those face to face requirements as the technology has improved
these days. I also see the word hybrid used to indicate a class where learners are split between an in-person classroom and then an online zoom classroom and instructors are teaching both of those groups of students at the same time
Melissa Wong: high flex is another model that was discussed before the pandemic, but became popular during the pandemic. This idea of instruction, where instruction is offered in person. But there are options for students to do the work online instead. So maybe recorded lectures instead of an in class discussion, students can participate in a forum discussion.
Melissa Wong: I feel like there was a lot of interest in high flex during the pandemic as a way to continue providing instruction while people were in quarantine. I don't. I think that's a very difficult time consuming model. I don't see a lot of folks talking about it as much anymore.
Melissa Wong: And then we. We have flipped learning where students engage in some coursework on their own asynchronously, and then they come to class, and that class time is used for more active hands-on learning.
Melissa Wong: Much of what we discussed today could be applied to any of those forms of online learning.
Melissa Wong: But I am probably going to focus primarily on synchronous and asynchronous instruction, because in my experience, that is what most of us are engaged in. And so I think you'll see that a lot of my examples draw from synchronous and asynchronous teaching.
Melissa Wong: So how do people learn right like this is a fundamental question for us as instructional designers. And there is a really rich body of research on learning
and and that while that's a little bit more than we can go into today. One thing we know is that we cannot
Melissa Wong: pour knowledge into students. Learning is not passive reception. It's an active process in which individuals take in new information. So what they read, what they hear, what they experience, and they process it in order to make sense of that new information
Melissa Wong: integrate it with their prior knowledge, and then be able to retain it so that they can recall and use their knowledge when they need it, or transfer it to new situations. So learning is this very active process right? And I suspect all of us who have experience with teaching know this. Students need to engage with the course, content in some way in order to understand it and make it their own.
The framework that we are looking at today builds on this idea of active engagement with course content, and then wraps in how we learn by interacting with other people.
Melissa Wong: and then gives us, I think, a really nice framework for thinking about instructional design in online courses.
Melissa Wong: So the framework that we're looking at today is this framework for 3 types of interaction interaction with content
Melissa Wong: interaction with the instructor interaction with Peers.
Melissa Wong: What's kind of fun about this framework is? It was actually first proposed by Michael Moore in 1989. And if you think about the history of online teaching and learning
Melissa Wong: that would have been really early in the development of online learning?
But Moore suggested that effective online courses were designed around these 3 types of interaction content instructors, peers in 2,009
Melissa Wong: Robert Bernard and a group of co-authors conducted a Meta analysis that validated Moore's framework. And what they actually found was that, using all 3 types of interaction
Melissa Wong: had a number of benefits. It improved student motivation and persistence.
It improved student satisfaction. and it improved. Learning outcomes. To me this is like the trifecta of teaching right. So when we improve student motivation and persistence. Our students are more likely to engage with course materials and actually complete the course work.
Melissa Wong: when we look at satisfaction, they're happier while they're doing it. I think that's great. And then we look at learning outcomes right? Like what we really are there for, which is improving actual learning.
So it's to me a really exciting model. And yet in so many ways, it's it's a really simple way of thinking about our instructional design.
Melissa Wong: So as we think about interaction with content. How do students encounter and work with that course, content in ways that are going to improve their understanding, their retention, and their transfer to new situations. We think about interaction with the instructor. So students learn with guidance and feedback
Melissa Wong: from the expertise of the instructor that could be in a group setting like a class discussion, or it could be individually like feedback on an assignment. But students need to have interaction with their instructors.
Melissa Wong: And then, finally, as we think about interaction with peers, students learn through mutual processing and problem, solving, by sharing their experiences and their perspectives with one another. And in general by collaborating with other students in the course.
Melissa Wong: Now, beyond that basic framework, there are kind of some interesting findings from this meta analysis. And so we are going to pause for a poll.
Melissa Wong: I put a link to a Google poll in the chat. If you could click on that. there are 2 questions and I'll give folks
Melissa Wong: a minute to answer those, and then we can talk about the results.
Melissa Wong: We'll take maybe another 30 s for the poll, and then I can share the results with you.
Melissa Wong: Alright. So you should be able to see my screen of our poll results here. It looks like in terms of the ideal amount of interaction in each area for content. We have a lot of votes for kind of moderate interaction, with content or high interaction with content. Same thing with the instructor pretty evenly split between.
Melissa Wong: moderate to high with definitely some votes for low.
and then in terms of interaction with peers. Looks like we've got a lot of votes for moderate and even more votes for the idea of high interaction with peers. And I'm going to tell you the answer here in just a minute.
Melissa Wong: But while we're on this,
Melissa Wong: in Google, let's just look at our other question. So then, which type of interaction had a bigger impact on learning. Looks like about 75 folks are voting for interaction with peers, and about 27% of folks are voting for instructor. So let's go back to the slides and talk about
Melissa Wong: the results. Okay, you should be able to see my slides again.
Melissa Wong: All right. So question number one, what's the ideal level of interaction in terms of interaction with content.
Melissa Wong: High levels of interaction with content had a bigger impact than even moderate levels. A moderate is better than low. Right? So essentially, we really want to
aim for high levels of interaction with content providing students with multiple opportunities and varied ways that they're able to interact with the course content.
Melissa Wong: Now, the instructoring peers is, I think, really interesting. In both cases we see that moderate levels of interaction and high levels of interaction have about the same impact on student learning.
So
Melissa Wong: while it doesn't say that high levels are bad.
Melissa Wong: it. What it does suggest is that even we can aim for moderate levels of interaction. And we're still getting that benefit from that instructor and peer interaction.
I think sometimes that is.
Melissa Wong: particularly when we think about and interactions with the instructor.
Melissa Wong: that for me makes me feel a little bit of relief that I don't have to have really high levels of interaction with every individual student for them to be getting the benefit of interacting with me as part of their coursework. Even a moderate level has about the same impact on their learning.
Melissa Wong: So we can really kind of think or be judicious, and how we use our time that way.
Second question, then, which is actually more impactful, interacting with the instructor slash expert or interacting with their peers.
Melissa Wong: interacting with their peers, has a bigger impact than interacting with the instructor. And there's a lot we could think about there. Why, that is the case. But we should keep in mind that this interaction with peers is
Melissa Wong: really significant in supporting student learning, their motivation, their persistence in the course, and their satisfaction with a course.
Melissa Wong: It to me also indicates that it it is not all on us as that. Again, expert instructor to be handling all of the interaction with individual students. Right building in good peer interaction really supports learning
Melissa Wong: and it. It is not all on us, and I love that.
Melissa Wong: So what I would like to do is taking this framework.
Melissa Wong: Look at some different areas. Of course, design and think about how we can increase different kinds of interaction.
Melissa Wong: And I will share some practical ideas from my own instruction. Things that I use in my own courses. But again, I really welcome you to share your own ideas in the chat. One thing I really love about webinars on instruction is the ability to hear from lots of folks about the different things that they're doing in the classroom.
Melissa Wong: Let's start with readings. Readings are pretty fundamental part of many courses and classrooms and readings are really important. They can provide background information for students.
it, which means, then we maybe don't have to provide all of that background information in a lecture. They can ensure that all of our students have a shared knowledge base, regardless of their prior experience with the topic. Readings are great for providing updated information or contemporary views on a particular topic. Right? So we think about textbooks often provide
Melissa Wong: really basic introductions or kind of background, information or history. If we can then pull in some newspaper articles or blog posts or scholarly journal articles that can provide us with more contemporary perspectives on an issue, right? Or, take a deeper dive into a particular perspective or implication, so we could then have a good discussion or debate in the classroom.
Melissa Wong: and so by their very nature readings
Melissa Wong: help students interact with content. The question for me, then, is, is there a way to increase some of that interaction with content, or make it more robust. And then, is there a way to use readings as a jumping off point for other kinds of interaction, like with peers and the instructor.
Melissa Wong: So some strategies that I use in my own teaching. one is providing reading guides, reading guides can be as simple as listing the readings for the week with a short summary or an indication of why you have assigned it. What students should be getting out of that reading, and then maybe some questions for reflection
that might guide students through thinking about the reading. Those are particularly helpful when students are very new to a topic and don't have a lot of background knowledge and often are, aren't quite sure what they should be getting out of a reading or or how it fits in to a larger area of scholarship.
Melissa Wong: can really help students understand and process material, and then be better prepared to use it in class for something like an activity or a discussion.
My instruction right now is pretty much all with graduate students in Las.
Melissa Wong: because I teach in a library school. And
Melissa Wong: my, even though I'm working with graduate students. they have some background in Las. They love reading guides. They they just love them, they find them incredibly helpful.
Melissa Wong: Yeah.
Melissa Wong: And
Melissa Wong: another way I sometimes do. A reading guide is as a graphic organizer that helps students tease out particular ideas in a reading, and I have an example of that
Melissa Wong: here in the slide. So here's an example of a graphic organizer that I might give students to help them through a reading where maybe we are looking at a textbook chapter that presents a number of theories. And so I give them a essentially a table with lists that lists the theories. And then there's a space for them to write down the main ideas of each theory in their own words that really helps them with kind of
synthesis, and thinking about what they're reading, and then I will prompt them to come up with a couple of examples from their own experience.
Melissa Wong: And then,
Melissa Wong: what I do with this with this particular graphic organizer is, ask students to fill it out as their reading, and I say, bring it to class. I teach a lot of synchronous online classes, bring it to class.
When we get to class. We then move into breakout rooms, and I ask students to compare their graphic organizer with other students in their group.
Melissa Wong: So it's a way to confirm their ideas or ask each other questions for things that they might not have understood about the theory, they share their examples with one another. And then, when we come back to a whole class discussion. I have assigned each of those small groups, one of the theories, and they are responsible for presenting that theory to the class.
Melissa Wong: So it's they have to synthesize it, explain it to the rest of us, and it is just one more way, then, that we are working with our content. and it in. It gives us a lot of opportunities for peer interaction as they are talking and bouncing ideas off each other and helping each other clarify the material.
Melissa Wong: This graphic organizer, also very popular with my students. Other ways of of boosting interaction with readings. Asking for reflective writing, so that can be taking a couple of minutes at the start of class, or at the start of a discussion where students do a a brief, reflective summary of what they've read, or they think about a question that they have and add it to a question document. I sometimes do reflective writing as a forum post before class. So they write a one paragraph response
to one of the readings, and then they have to pose a question to the rest of the class. Those questions. I then pull down the line and use them in class to kind of start off our weekly discussion.
Melissa Wong: if you're interested in another form of sort of reflective writing that gets students to think about what they're reading, and also maybe make sure that they're doing the reading. There's this idea of a Monte Carlo quiz. And if you're interested in that, I put a link in the chat, it's kind of
Melissa Wong: it's like a roll. The dice, random selection of a reading and a prompt each week. So you can bookmark that it's it's a really fun idea.
Melissa Wong: Another option is a social annotation where the reading is available for students to access in something like a Google drive. And then
Melissa Wong: every student has to go in and make a comment on the reading. There are a couple of tools that institutions can subscribe to that support social annotation. If you're interested in those, I put a link in the chat from Cornell's teaching and learning department where they talk about a couple of social annotation tools.
Melissa Wong: I have also done this even with just a Google Doc of some kind of text. So I actually put my syllabus in a Google Doc and ask students to make a comment the first week of class.
Melissa Wong: so that can be really fun. You can think about reading based activities where students have to do something with what they read. So maybe that's an you know, having them prepare for an in class discussion, or maybe they
Melissa Wong: find an example of of a like pick. So an idea from the reading find an example in the real world, and then share it in a forum discussion or bring it to class to share with a small group.
Melissa Wong: Those can be really fun. One I use with my students is in my reference class. We learn about search algorithms and read them the work of Sophia Noble on bias and search algorithms. And then I have them go out and find an example. Either through their own Google search that that gives us some kind of biased result, or maybe something they saw in the news about how search algorithms are being used.
Melissa Wong: And so it it both ensures that they had to do the reading to understand the concept. But then we get to make a connection to the real world, and then we share it with one another. So once again, we're just bringing in some peer interaction.
Melissa Wong: I also use free choice readings. So, students, I might give them 3 articles and tell them, pick one. Read one of these. I might have them locate their own reading. So I'll say, you know.
Go search the library literature, and find find an article on X topic that you want to read and then share it with the rest of the class that can be really motivating, for students have a little bit of choice. There's also a strategy called a jigsaw, where you divide up the readings, small groups each read something different.
Melissa Wong: And then when you come to class, they essentially share it with the rest. What they learned with the rest of the class. So that can be a way to kind of cut the reading load a little bit, but make sure everybody gets the lessons learned. And again, it really
Melissa Wong: puts the focus on student to student interaction versus the instructor always being in charge of a conversation.
And I see a few comments here in the chat about some strategies folks use. So that's really great.
Melissa Wong: Okay. So lecture. I think lecture often gets a kind of a bad rap for being a passive form of teaching and learning. But lecture does have a lot of value. It is a good way to provide background information that students might not know. Can be a good precursor, then to an activity. You know. Sometimes it's more efficient to do a quick lecture than to assign a lot of reading for students to build up that background knowledge. It's a way to synthesize
Melissa Wong: multiple readings or multiple viewpoints for something that's really complex.
Melissa Wong: You know, kind of bring it together in a logical structure for students to understand. It can also be a great way to lead students through some kind of analysis, breaking down complex topic, making sure that students really understand the different aspects of that topic.
Melissa Wong: But it can be really passive if the instructor is just standing there talking and or online talking, and students aren't doing anything. I think that's particularly problematic in synchronous instruction where our students are sitting at their computers.
Right? And it's really easy to multitask. I mean, how many of us have gone to a webinar
Melissa Wong: and multitasked while we are listening to the webinar. It's
Melissa Wong: so tempting right like it's almost hard to resist, I think, in our, in our achievement, driven culture. Yep. I do it myself. II totally admit to being guilty of that.
Melissa Wong: So one of the things we might want to think about with lecture
Melissa Wong: is using some strategies to make it a little bit more interactive. Encouraging students to be maybe engaging in critical thinking as they're listening to the lecture, or finding ways to build in a little bit more peer interaction into a lecture.
Excuse me.
Melissa Wong: so one strategy is something called a lecture pause, where we just pause for a minute to let students catch up with their note taking or process information. Sometimes even 30 s of silence is really helpful for students. You can prompt some of that synthesis by asking them to write a one sentence summary in their notes, you know. So just saying, we're going to take 1 min. Everybody summarize what we've done so far in one sentence.
Melissa Wong: A think pair share. I I'm I'll explain really quickly what a think pair share is if folks are unfamiliar with that. So in a think pair share
Melissa Wong: you as the instructor, pose a question or a problem to the class, and then you give them a minute or 2 of quiet time to think about their own answer.
And then you ask students to pair up, and they share their answers with their partner. and that just takes another minute or 2, and then you bring it back to a whole class discussion, and you ask volunteers to share their answer to the problem or or their answer to the question that you have posed
Melissa Wong: in the online environment. If it's synchronous, you can just do really quick breakout rooms to pair people up. Or if I'm worried that few people are a little checked out right. I might do a group of 3. But the idea is again. It's just
very quick breakout room to compare your answers. What's nice about a think pair share is. It is a pause for critical thinking. And then you get students talking to one another. So you get this really nice peer interaction. Students who are more quiet often like to get to
Melissa Wong: kind of check or confirm their ideas with just one other student. It's a little bit, maybe safer feeling, and then they're often more likely to share their ideas with the whole class. It also ensures that everybody's had a chance to think about their answer, and then I find sometimes when I open it up for class discussion, I'm just getting responses from more people. It's not the same voices dominating the conversation again. So I love a quick think pair share. It's it's easy to implement. It's really quick.
Polls are great. You can do a quick poll that becomes then a discussion prompt. It can be a chance for a knowledge check to make sure students are understanding what you're doing in class.
Melissa Wong: I like using the chat a lot
in class. So I tell my students they can use the chat the whole time that I'm teaching, and that really supports idea sharing with one another. And it also kind of then idea shares back to me. I get a sense of how students are responding to what we're doing, and I can pause and answer questions, or, you know, pull out somebody's comment and start to build on it or pause for short discussion. So
Melissa Wong: I use chat a lot that way.
Melissa Wong: Another way to do that is even to set up some kind of back Channel document. You can use polling software like mentimeter for open ended questions where students can put in anonymous questions as you're teaching and again, it just kind of encourages students to be to be responding to the lecture, thinking about it, processing that information and then sharing their thoughts and ideas and questions.
And then, of course, you can always use something like exit tickets or minute papers to prompt some reflection at the end of a class, or at the end of a lecture.
Yes, to Kaya's point. It is really important to allow, wait time in discussion. We're actually gonna come to discussion to because it can
Melissa Wong: take students a while to start contributing right to feel comfortable. Yeah. And it can feel awkward right. But it also is it's still good to have that that silence
Melissa Wong: absolutely. Also, Kaya mentioned students replying in chat, I also in class. Well, let's move on to discussion. We can talk a little bit about discussion.
Oh, also, if you're interested in this idea of interactive lectures, there's a fantastic book called Dynamic Lecturing by Christine Harrington and Todd
Melissa Wong: starts with A. Z. And I'm sorry forget his last name. I put a link in the chat. It is chock full of fantastic ideas for making lectures more interactive. Many of their ideas are super short and easy to implement. And it is very research grounded.
Melissa Wong: Okay. discussion.
Melissa Wong: let's talk about synchronous discussions. And then we'll talk about forum discussions. so
Melissa Wong: discussions, right are are great. They encourage critical thinking. Can help us bring in world applications. Of course, topics can help us identify points of confusion and then offer clarification. They're a good opportunity for students to practice their communication skills. I do think that one challenge with discussions is that sometimes they can lag a little bit or not, all students will participate. I'm sure we've all had that experience.
Melissa Wong: So some strategies there again, to kind of thinking about like boosting this interaction in a discussion.
Melissa Wong: Again, I use pre writing a lot even a couple of minutes of reflective writing or asking students to share one thought on a jamboard or a mirror board can let students gather their thoughts, and it sort of salts the conversation with a bunch of ideas. Also can help you identify what? What
Melissa Wong: things are really interesting to students in a reading, or where there are points of confusion where students have questions.
As I mentioned earlier, I sometimes actually have students do that pre-writing in a forum, and so that way they have a little bit more time to think, and then I can do a quick scan of their ideas before class and and think a little bit about how I then wanna shape that class discussion. As a result.
Melissa Wong: I also sometimes give students a questions document. So I give them a blank document, share document. Ask them to type in one question that they have for that day's topic.
Melissa Wong: Takes us just a couple of minutes for to brainstorm questions, and it ensures that everybody got an opportunity to ask their questions.
and then I can skim through, see, maybe, where some common themes are kind of pick and choose the questions that I'm going to answer.
Melissa Wong: so that can be another nice way of of kind of getting that. A. A. QA type discussion going
brainstorming is great. I'll have students brainstorm as often just in the chat.
Melissa Wong: and then what I'll do is go back through what people have said, and and pick out a few things and say, oh, could somebody explain what this idea is? Or would somebody like to speak to that idea for us? So that again, just kind of get students thinking and seeing what their peers are thinking. Polls are great again for prompting discussion we've talked about. Think, pair share.
I like breakout rooms also.
Melissa Wong: one of the nice things about breakout rooms? Is it create space for all of our students to talk
so even students who
Melissa Wong: might be quiet in a whole class discussion will typically participate if they're one of only 3 people in a breakout room. And, in fact, I keep breakout rooms relatively small for that reason, if it's a breakout room of 6, it's easy for somebody to sit quietly and listen. If it's a breakout room of 3,
Melissa Wong: it gets really awkward, right? They have. They kind of have to participate.
Melissa Wong: But I like breakout rooms, because then everybody's talking at least to one another, even if not to me. Those breakout rooms can be very task oriented like you have something you must do and report back, or they can just be loose. Discussion.
Melissa Wong: Sometimes with my graduate students. II say, we're gonna talk about the readings, sign up for the reading you want to discuss. I give you a few discussion, prompts to get you going, but it's fairly loose and unstructured.
One thing that can be really helpful if you're doing breakout rooms is to give students written directions, so I often use a shared document with directions so that they can see it when they're in their breakout room and and kind of stay on task, or remember what they're supposed to be doing.
Another strategy. That's really fun is a fish bowl. So this is where you have a small subset of students in the class.
Melissa Wong: be responsible for the discussion, and everybody else is a listener.
In a physical classroom. It's called a fish bowl, because you put those students in the middle in a circle, and everybody else sits around them and listens.
Melissa Wong: and I have an example of this here. So I'll introduce a scenario. In one case we're mimicking what it's like to be in higher education. And so then we split into small groups and each group is a department. They have to elect their department chair. They develop a proposal based on the scenario, and then they have a little bit of time to figure out like what their department thinks should happen.
Melissa Wong: And then, when we reconvene, I tell them we're having a department chairs meeting, and so everybody in the department isn't going to be at this department chairs meeting. Only our elected representative goes to represent you. And so they're sort of in this, the center and they're the only ones who can talk, and they debate the proposals and what they're going to do. And the remaining members of the class have to observe.
Melissa Wong: but what I tell them is, it's higher. Ed. Everybody has an opinion, and so
Melissa Wong: all of the observers can actually post comments to the chat like a peanut gallery. But usually I make it fun. I'll say, Oh, you you're you're tweeting
Melissa Wong: and so you you have to hash tag everything right, we do something like that. So that's really fun. And then what you do is when the scenario ends, you do a debrief so everybody can participate, and if you use fish bowls more than once, you can kind of rotate right? Who's in the middle? That kind of thing? But it can be it can be really fun and and kind of a different way, but it tends to get everybody again kind of talking and participating and listening to their peers
Melissa Wong: instead of the instructor being the center again.
Melissa Wong: right. And it. It is a really great way to reflect some of those real life situations like the workplace where people do go to committee meetings and represent their department right? And and what's interesting is the people who were in the Fish Bowl who got to do the talking. I guess maybe they're the fish they'll afterwards say, I felt a lot of pressure because suddenly I was responsible
to my entire group sort of for their well, being right like I. Now I'm suddenly the department chair. And it's not only about me, it's about my department and other people said I was on the outside, and and you had to trust that our elected person was going to represent our viewpoints and represent our needs. Well.
so it's it's it's an it's a fun change of pace, particularly in that. Maybe a credit course where you've got a little bit more time.
Great comment to hear from Kaya about a share document like a Google Doc. Yes, with breakout rooms, is it? Let students see what other groups are doing. What I sometimes do is follow up on that with what we call a gallery walk. So then we go through and either ask groups to briefly present their work, or we go through and just look at other groups, work and kind of chat about it. So again, it just kinda like gets the focus on interacting with your peers, seeing what your peers are doing.
Now.
Melissa Wong: those kinds of discussion tactics work really? Well, if you're teaching synchronously, if you are doing something asynchronous. Usually your discussions, then, are going to end up in the forums.
So
Melissa Wong: I love forum discussions. Right? They they are the place in asynchronous instruction where you are going to be able to have those discussions with students where students can have discussions with one another. I think it ends up being the center of peer interaction in a lot of asynchronous courses.
Melissa Wong: But they can start to feel repetitive if you've ever taken an asynchronous course yourself, maybe for something like professional development.
Melissa Wong: Sometimes you'll see where you know every week is the same. You do the readings. You post an initial response to the readings, and then you respond to 2 other people's ideas, and and week after week it's the same thing, and that can get
Melissa Wong: really dull. I think it can start to feel a little
Melissa Wong: performative. Right? Students like just go in and find someone to respond to. So what I like to do is try to really mix it up.
I'll still be really consistent that there's a forum discussion every week. The due dates are the same, right? Maybe initial post on Thursday responses due on Sunday. So it's very predictable for students. But within that, within the Forum I try to do something different every week.
So some
Melissa Wong: ideas that can work really well. Student led discussions. So I have students, pick readings or examples and post them and then lead a discussion throughout the week. I've done. QA. This can be really great. If students get to pose a question that other students then try to answer. If it draws on student experiences. So
Melissa Wong: one place I use it is in my instruction course. I ask students to share one thing that you struggle with in terms of kind of presenting and public speaking, or one
Melissa Wong: one, you know, fear that you have, and then what I do is ask them to respond with advice to one another. They give each other amazing advice about how to be better presenters and better teachers in front of the classroom. So that's a that's a really fun way to get them sharing their experiences and supporting one another.
Melissa Wong: You could do a analyze a case study. You could set up some kind of debate. I like to do critiques. So I'll have students go find examples of something online, and then critique it for how well it adheres to professional practices, or I'll post examples of something, and then have students
Melissa Wong: offer a critique but still drawing on the readings, maybe for their critique. I've had students do policy proposals. So we read about something like virtual reference, and then they have to come up with a a short policy to ensure good quality, virtual reference services. But you could apply that idea to almost any topic area. I have a colleague who likes to do polls like a Google
Melissa Wong: poll like we just did. And then that's open. For a couple of days. She has students respond, and then she posts the results and has will have students do a discussion. So that's really fun. Cause you're using data from what you've collected in class
I like to also look for ways to bring in some
Melissa Wong: creativity and non writing
Melissa Wong: to my forum posts. And so I have them in one assignment. They create a meme. So I point them to an online meme generator, and they create a meme that captures their learning for the semester or an important idea from the course.
Those are really fun you get to see students being creative, you get to see them being funny. And it is really different than that more narrative writing that we so often do in academia and they really they off. Sometimes they have students who post more than one. They'll say I couldn't decide. And I'm just posting 3.
Melissa Wong: Alright. Okay. Great, right? Like. So that's fun. Little research summaries. Sometimes. Again, I'll have students go, you know, find 2 articles about
Melissa Wong: a group of interest.
Melissa Wong: Summarize what you learned. And so, instead of me assigning the readings they're they're looking for and picking their own readings and sharing a little bit about what they learned with other folks so that can be really fun.
Melissa Wong: I'm looking here, Kai is saying, yes, sharing something different. Right? An image, a video, a newspaper article. Anything like that can be really fun and bring in a real world connection.
Melissa Wong: okay.
Melissa Wong: Finally, let's briefly touch on assignments. So
Melissa Wong: you know, assignments are great because they are a chance for students to do some in-depth work with course content, or to develop
skills that they'll need in their future employment. It can often allow students to go beyond the assigned course, content to explore a topic that's of interest to them. If we think about something like the classic research paper. I think we're assignments can be really tough. Is
Melissa Wong: they often become something the student does.
Melissa Wong: and then only shares with the instructor. And then the instructor gives them a grade. And it's I'm not even sure students really revisit or really think a lot about the feedback that we give them. So when I think about
Melissa Wong: assignments in my courses, I like to look for ways to both, increase some of my interaction with students like ways to give them feedback that they're going to learn and grow from, and then look for ways to increase peer interaction in assignments. How can an assignment become a vehicle for meaningful interaction between students.
Melissa Wong: I like to use peer review a lot. Peer review is great because it means that students are usually doing a draft of an assignment, and then they're getting some helpful feedback from other students about how they might improve their work.
Melissa Wong: It also requires that students use their knowledge in new ways if they are critiquing someone else's work. And II see a lot of benefit to students when they have to do the critique. II actually sometimes wonder if they learn more by critiquing other people's work almost than they do from the feedback that they receive.
Right? Good peer review. It does need some structure. So I talk with my students about how to provide good feedback. I give them templates that we use for particular assignments. But
Melissa Wong: peer review is is one way to
Melissa Wong: provide some collaborative work without going quite to true group work which can be stressful for students. So I do list group work on this slide because it's kind of an obvious right? It it does foster collaborative learning.
Melissa Wong: But I do acknowledge it can be challenging for students, particularly in the online environment, where they may have trouble getting their schedules to mesh up and do some work together.
Melissa Wong: If you are interested in group work. There's there are definitely some guides you can find online about how to give it some good structure and accountability. To make the process a little bit smoother for students. But what I've actually started to move toward in a lot of my courses instead of true group work
is just creating assignments where they get to share their work
Melissa Wong: with the rest of the class in an authentic way. So I have started turning small research assignments into poster sessions. So instead of researching a topic and writing a paper that I read, they do their research and they create a conference style poster.
and then they share what they learned with the rest of the class, and we'll have like hour, hour and a half class period where students can sort of. We set up kind of moving between breakout rooms, and they can. They can see each other's posters and talk about them briefly and ask questions. And so again, it becomes this really authentic audience, and they get to learn from one another's research, which is really cool.
Melissa Wong: You can always do presentations. I do. Lightning talks in some of my courses. So again, it feels like they're preparing for an authentic audience of people who want to learn about this content. And it also is a great chance for them to just practice and improve their general public speaking and presentation skills.
I have also done student led seminars where students work together to do a little bit of research, and then they lead
Melissa Wong: a class session, or like a shortened version of a class session on a topic, so they often do a brief
Melissa Wong: presentation like a lightning talk, and then they will lead the class in a discussion or an activity that goes with their lightning talk, and I usually do those in just groups of 2.
Melissa Wong: And that way it's a little bit easier if you only need to coordinate with 2 other people versus maybe a 5 person group project. But again, they're doing research. They're learning. But they're able to share what they're doing with this authentic audience which is really exciting. And and also it's fun because it changes the dynamic of the class where I, as the instructor, am no longer the expert. They're the experts, and we're learning from them.
And then, finally, I have a few notes about with assignments. How can we increase instructor feedback. Right? We do want good instructor interaction with our assignments. So I like to start with having really clear expectations for students. So clear assignment instructions, you know rubrics, examples for students. And the reason is
Melissa Wong: it helps students meet the expectations for the assignment, and then it allows me to focus my feedback on maybe more developmental issues or responding to their content. Not sort of oh, you misunderstood
Melissa Wong: the format of this assignment right? Or you didn't have enough sources in your analysis isn't in depth enough, because the expectations were really clear. I use rubrics and feedback templates to kind of speed up some of my grading and feedback processes. It just helps give it a structure. And I feel like it gives me more time to then write substantive comments versus just basic explanations of things in the feedback. I'm also a big fan of setting up
Melissa Wong: sort of templates for feedback where you can copy and paste. So I have sort of standardized feedback, and I copy and paste it into a student's assignment, and then I just maybe tweak it a little bit to personalize it for that student, but it speeds up the process of again. Some really routine feedback
Melissa Wong: and I feel like then allows me to use my time for feedback. That is more personalized, more substantial to that individuals work.
Melissa Wong: Another strategy I use in some courses is I post the answers to problems from the homework. So instead of having to provide feedback and say, Oh, this is incorrect, because the right answer would have been, I just say, you know this is partially correct, and the the full answer and explanation is publicly posted in a forum. So again, kind of saves a little bit of time. But then my posted answers are really thorough and provide really good
Melissa Wong: sort of expert guidance as an instructor.
Melissa Wong: Okay, we are almost out of time. I'm going to share one more resource.
Melissa Wong: that
Melissa Wong: is
Melissa Wong: This one comes from Louisiana State University. It is a document they developed during the pandemic with a bunch of really practical ideas for active learning when you are teaching online, and it covers synchronous and asynchronous as well as the physical classroom. But it has a lot of additional ideas for thinking about really setting students up for interacting with content and peers and instructors.
It's so good, isn't it? It's it's really I just love the way it's formatted
Melissa Wong: so many fantastic ideas. So folks are looking for either. A place to pick up ideas for yourself, or even something to share with colleagues. This is a really nice one.
Melissa Wong: and I think that leaves us just a few minutes for questions. I see one in the Q. And a.
Julie Edwards: Yes, thank you, Melissa. And yeah, if you have additional questions from Melissa, please drop them in the QA. And yes, you can see this one. How can we increase interactions with instructors or peers in an asynchronous online noncredit in information literacy instruction?
Melissa Wong: That's a great question. And I welcome ideas in the chat. I think it's really tough, right? If it's that kind of unrequired course that maybe one student drops into and and where students may not take
Melissa Wong: all of the modules right? one strategy might be something like sharing survey data like other people have said. And now prompting people to maybe
Melissa Wong: think about what.
Melissa Wong: how they might have answered, and why?
Melissa Wong: I do see those kind of standalone instruction modules that include prompts for reflection, so just encouraging people to pause and write down an answer to a question so that would into increase your interaction with
Melissa Wong: with content. And in a good way. It's also going to be hard if it's if it's one of those sort of drop in type tutorials
Melissa Wong: to really build an interaction with the instructor unless you're really committed to maybe having a a response box right where people can put in their ideas. And then you monitor it on a regular basis and email them back with some kind of feedback, but you'd really probably have to set that up to make sure you're on top of it as an instructor.
Julie Edwards: Great, thank you. I will leave some time for people to throw in any last questions. Per your instruction. This is great. A lot of people are saying that they found it very helpful.
Julie Edwards: which I agree.
Melissa Wong: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Oh, you know what? I had one. Yeah. And I think I had one other resource. I'm gonna
Melissa Wong: while we give folks a minute to think about questions.
Melissa Wong: Oh, I did see. I put these in my notes, Julie, so I can cut and paste them. And then once in a while I get going and forget that they're in my notes. If folks are interested in leading discussion.
I recently read this book creating engaging discussions, which is
Melissa Wong: a really nice guide. It's it's quite concise. but it talks about sort of what's the purpose of discussions, and then gives you different ways of thinking about organizing discussions and some strategies for getting students to participate a little bit more. So. I personally find sometimes discussions are one of the hardest aspects of teaching. And it there's a lot of nice ideas in that book as well.
Julie Edwards: Fantastic. Thank you.
Melissa Wong: Lots of things. Oh, yeah, let me put in. I made a passing reference to Sophia Noble. She is A scholar who studies bias in algorithms. Her major book is algorithms of oppression.
Melissa Wong: So I just put her the correct spelling of her first name there because it's
Melissa Wong: It sounds like Sophia, like SOPH. IA. But it's actually Sophia SAFI, YA.
Melissa Wong: Her work is amazing.
Julie Edwards: fantastic. Thank you, Melissa, so much once again, for all of this incredible content, so well organized, so clear for such a huge topic. You make it look so easy. Thank you, Julie. It was such a pleasure to be here, and I am really grateful for folks who shared ideas in the chat as well.
Julie Edwards: Yes, and thank you all for joining us. I will drop in the link once more to our upcoming webinars. We have some specific for academic librarians, including one in November, on academic librarian burnout, which I think many of us can relate to, and one in December, on using AI and chat Gpt, as an academic topic.
Julie Edwards: Yeah. So look forward to those. I hope you can all join us, and until then I hope everyone has a great
Melissa Wong: afternoon. Thanks again. Everybody thanks everyone.