USC Center for Scholarly Technology November Faculty Forum 2014
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•544 views
Streamlining online course design for a better student experience with Katsuhiko “Kirk” Oda, Lecturer and Susan H. Kamei, Associate Director of USC's Spatial Sciences Institute Graduate Programs in Geographic Information Science & Technology.
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (20)
Similar to USC Center for Scholarly Technology November Faculty Forum 2014
Similar to USC Center for Scholarly Technology November Faculty Forum 2014 (20)
More from Educational Technologies
More from Educational Technologies (12)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (13)
USC Center for Scholarly Technology November Faculty Forum 2014
- 1. Center for Scholarly Technology Faculty Forum November 14, 2014 Streamlining Online Course Design for a Better Student Experience Spatial Sciences Institute Graduate Programs in Geographic Information Science & Technology Katsuhiko “Kirk” Oda, Lecturer Susan H. Kamei, Associate Director
- 2. SECTION TITLE | 2 Background Online Graduate Programs in GIST: spatial thinking, data acquisition, integration, analysis, visualization, application, and development Goals of working group (Kirk Oda, Karen Kemp, Jordan Hastings, and Susan Kamei): • Determine best applicable practices; • Develop faculty consensus for consistent use of Blackboard throughout the GIST Programs; and • Train and support fellow faculty.
- 3. SECTION TITLE | 2 Working Group Results 1. Constructed a master Blackboard course “shell” or template. 2. Proposed a common terminology to faculty for adoption. 3. Built consensus on best practices among faculty. 4. Developed concept of “creative collaborative” which allows for some course customization.
- 4. Constructing the master course shell (template) SECTION TITLE | 2 • Re-organized course contents and materials: • Simplified navigation menu links • Created “Announcements” as an entrance page • Introduced “Synopsis” (overview, introduction, objectives) • Created “Materials” and “Assignments” folders • Identified common terms • “Materials” terminology: notes, article, weblinks, handout • “Assignments” terminology: discussion, tutorial, paper, self-check • Introduced media • Self-introduction videos • Images, hyperlinks, audio, videos
- 5. Simplified navigation menu links (Before VS. After) SECTION TITLE | 2 Before After
- 6. SECTION TITLE | 2 Course Home as an Entrance Page (Before)
- 7. SECTION TITLE | 2 Announcements as an Entrance Page (After)
- 8. SECTION TITLE | 2 Weekly Materials on Blackboard (Before)
- 9. SECTION TITLE | 2 Weekly Handout on Blackboard (Before)
- 10. Weekly Overview and Objectives ~ Synopsis (After) SECTION TITLE | 2
- 11. SECTION TITLE | 2 Introduction of Concepts ~ Synopsis (After)
- 12. SECTION TITLE | 2 Weekly Materials (After)
- 13. SECTION TITLE | 2 Weekly Assignments (After)
- 14. SECTION TITLE | 2 Weekly Assignments cont. (After)
- 15. Building consensus among the SSI faculty members SECTION TITLE | 2 • Shared updates at monthly faculty meetings. • May 2014 Spring Faculty Retreat: • Presentation/Demonstration • Discussion • Commitment to convert to new format starting with Summer 2014 courses
- 16. SECTION TITLE | 2 Preliminary Student Feedback from SSCI 581 Question 1 (n = 25): The illustrations, videos and interactions were used in the right level. Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree nor Disagree
- 17. SECTION TITLE | 2 Question 2 (n = 25) • I liked the look and feel of the folders and items on the Blackboard course site. Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree nor Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
- 18. SECTION TITLE | 2 Question 3 (n = 25) • I could navigate the folders and items on the Blackboard course site very easily. Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree nor Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
- 19. SECTION TITLE | 2 Question 4 (n = 25) • The course content was appropriate and was presented in a structured manner. Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree nor Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
- 20. SECTION TITLE | 2 Question 5 (n = 25) • The course has improved my knowledge on the subject. Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree nor Disagree
- 21. SECTION TITLE | 2 Students’ voices Example of Pros • “I feel that the course is laid out very well on Blackboard.” • “I appreciate that all the notes in the Announcement section is also at the top of the Assignments section for each week. It makes it very easy to reference what assignments need to be completed.” Examples of Cons • “It took me a few tries to get comfortable with the Blackboard maze. I think it could be simplified.” • “Perhaps my ignorance, but getting to the week’s assignments or to the week’s discussion involves navigating several menus down in the site - explanation how to shortcut or bookmark would be great.”
- 22. Students’ voices: comparison between “old’ and “new” SECTION TITLE | 2 • Student experience in “old” course design vs. “new” course design • Dr. Kemp’s class • Students who experienced both “old” and “new” versions
- 23. SECTION TITLE | 2 Wrap-up Positive impacts: • More dynamic and interactive course sites • Improved students’ experience across courses • Increased instructors’ online pedagogical skills • Enhanced sense of faculty collaborative culture Fall 2014 – Spring 2015 work: • Continue “cloning” of master course shell for all GIST courses • Continue course-by-course conversion • Continue assessment of student and faculty experiences
- 24. SECTION TITLE | 2 Thank you! Kirk Oda (katsuhio@usc.edu) Susan Kamei (kamei@dornsife.usc.edu)
Editor's Notes
- Thank you, Carl. It is my great honor to be here with all of you today.
- Susan’s opening remarks By way of introduction, the Spatial Sciences Institute in USC Dornsife functions both as a research entity as well as an academic unit or department equivalent. We currently offer four online Graduate Programs in GIST: 16-unit Graduate Certificate in GIST, launched in Fall 1999 28-unit M.S. in GIST, launched in Spring 2008 16-unit Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Intelligence and 16-unit Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Leadership, both launched this Fall semester. We also have just launched this semester a GeoHealth track within Keck’s online Master of Public Health degree. To date, we have graduated 251 graduate certificate students and 67 M.S. students, and have approximately 250 students currently enrolled. In addition to our online graduate programs, last fall we started an undergraduate B.S. in GeoDesign major and a Spatial Studies minor, which is off to a promising start. To support these academic programs, in four years we have grown from a teaching faculty of 1 – our founding full professor and director, John Wilson – to a teaching roster of 12, tenured or tenure-track faculty affiliates of 11, and a staff of 8. In our online GIST Graduate Programs, we do not utilize TA’s and cap our course enrollments at 20. We conduct monthly faculty meetings, two-day comprehensive faculty retreats twice a year, with sessions developed and led by faculty, and an academic progress review of each student with all faculty and relevant staff after every semester. We only offer these graduate programs online; that is, we do not also have mirror residential graduate programs. So each course in our curriculum was conceived and constructed to be taught online by the program director, John Wilson, and specifically in the University’s Blackboard system as our Content Management System. Our M.S. in GIST curriculum now has 3 core courses, 10 elective courses, and a thesis course (a, b, and z). As our programs have rapidly grown and as we have added faculty, we have endeavored to keep our curriculum coherent and coordinated. For example, for those courses where we offer multiple sections, such as our core courses, we require that the faculty teaching the separate sections agree upon a common syllabus. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, as various faculty have taken ownership of courses over the past few years, we as program leadership and the faculty have come to three shared realizations: We do not engage professional or external instructional designers, and our faculty have varying experience and comfort levels in online instructional course design to “DIY” (some quite a bit – such as Karen Kemp and Jennifer Swift who have received Sloan-C certification; some not at all); our faculty also have varying degrees of awareness of how to take advantage of or maximize updated features offered by Blackboard; our faculty have different philosophies regarding course organization, some of which is based in the nature of the subject matters which they teach. All of this has led to us recognizing our students were not having a standard or consistent online experience as they progressed from course to course. At our Fall 2014 faculty retreat last November, we developed a major set of action items to address this. First, a working group was formed from faculty volunteers (Kirk Oda, Karen Kemp, and Jordan Hastings), with me. The working group decided it would: Investigate and determine those best practices in course design which could most easily and effectively be adopted by all of our faculty to improve the students’ learning experience and delivery of learning outcomes; Determine how best to demonstrate, share, and train fellow faculty; and Develop consensus among all the faculty with a plan for implementing changes to course organization, without the budget and involvement of external instructional designers. Kirk will now carry on from here, to share what the working group determined.
- Kirk: I will share with you the major actions that the working group has achieved so far, some preliminary feedback on our new course design, and lessons for developing faculty consensus. In our project, we obtained four major results. The first one was that we constructed a master Blackboard course template; the second one was that we proposed a common terminology to faculty for adoption; the third one was that we built consensus on best practices among faculty; the last one was that we developed the concept of “creative collaborative,” which allows for some course customization.
- In the beginning of our project, the working group worked with Carl Kuzmich of the CST to evaluate what Blackboard features we could standardize throughout all the GIST courses. We started with one three-week unit in our gateway core course, SSCI 581: Concepts of Spatial Thinking. After working with Carl as a group and with his individual consultation to me, we developed a “beta” of a new course design. I will introduce major areas we focused on to make improvements.
- The first improvement was that we reorganized and simplified the navigation menu links to emphasize important contents.
- The second improvement was an entrance page. Students used to see the Course Home page right after they logged into the course website.
- In our project, we set the Announcements page as an entrance page. This allows students to see instructor’s important announcements without any click.
- Next, we tried to deliver the course contents in a more structured manner. This slide shows my old page of weekly materials. This page includes all of the weekly materials including a handout, reading notes and assignments. For further information, students needed to open the attached pdf files.
- This slide shows a weekly handout in a pdf format. The handout includes information about an introduction, activities and assignments. Students used to open a pdf file to understand what they needed to do.
- In our project, we laid out the contents shown in a single pdf file onto the master site directly. The contents were reorganized into synopsis, materials and assignments. This slide shows a folder of weekly overview and an item of objectives. These are the part of the synopsis component.
- This slide shows an item of introduction, which explains important concepts with the relevant images and links to useful external sources.
- The second component is a folder that includes all the weekly materials. When we built this folder, we also considered terms suggested for consistent use across all the GIST course websites. Each instructor used different terms for indicating the types of materials. In response, we suggested the common terms. For example, please pay attention to each item’s title. The first item begins with “Notes;” the second one is with “Article;” and the third one starts with “Weblinks.”
- This slide shows the third component, assignments. Students will easily understand what they need to complete by simply visiting the page.
- For the Assignment folder, we also considered common terminology. Instructors used different terms to point to the same type of assignment. In some cases, the terms were confusing for students. For example, I used the term of “Reading Assignment” to point to essay-style papers. However, reading assignment also mean the other types of reading assignments. For example, they might be discussion and quiz. In response, we suggested common terms. These were “Discussion,” “Quiz,” “Paper,” and “Tutorial.”
- As we developed the template, we updated the rest of the faculty at our monthly faculty meetings, sometimes with very short demonstrations. Then for the May 2014 faculty retreat, the working group developed the retreat agenda, which included us explaining what and how we determined the applicable best practices to be, and showed them demonstrations from the SSCI 581 sample course. We allowed a lot of time for discussion and questions. The points of resistance from our faculty in adopting a template were (1) concern that we would “over-prescribe” and not allow for differences among the faculty member’s expertise and interest in pedagogical experimentation; and (2) the time and effort required to convert their materials. In anticipation of these concerns, Karen Kemp led us through a discussion whereby we developed and agreed as a faculty to the concept of the “creative collaborative.” By this we agreed that as a faculty, we commit to being collaborative in determining the subject matter in our course syllabi and in its presentation in Blackboard, while allowing for individual faculty’s need to tailor the course organization for the subject matter, to encourage individual faculty to personalize their course materials, and to support experimentation and adoption of new online pedagogical techniques. By the start of the Fall 2014 semester, Karen also reported to the rest of the faculty that her conversion process to the new format did not take nearly as long as she had anticipated, and that she found the new template to be useful and easy to use. The working group is answering questions and helping the rest of the faculty as they film their introductory videos, create jings, and otherwise renovate their course materials.
- To assess the impact of these changes, the SSCI 581 instructors conducted an online survey on course contents and delivery. The instructors asked their 41 students to participate in the survey. Then, 25 students submitted their answers anonymously. The first question was “the illustrations, videos and interactions were used in the right level.” Around three-fourth of the students responded to the first question positively.
- The second question was about a visual aspect of the course site. The actual question was “I liked the look and feel of the folders and items on the Blackboard course site.” The results told us that four students did not like the folders and items on Blackboard. However, most of the students responded to this question positively.
- The third question was about the usability of course site navigation. The actual question was “I could navigate the folders and items on the Blackboard course site very easily.“ More than three-fourths of the students did not find any issues in their navigation. On the other hand, less than one fourth of the students had difficulty navigating the course site. As for these opposite results, I obtained the relevant students’ opinions. I will introduce them later.
- The fourth question was about the course contents and the structure for delivering the contents. The actual question was “the course content was appropriate and was presented in a structured manner.” In the result, 22 students thought that the content delivery was appropriate. No student had an issue with the content delivery.
- The last question was about students’ achievement of learning outcomes. The actual question was “the course has improved my knowledge on the subject.” Fortunatelly, 24 students agreed that they improved their subject-domain knowledge.
- Here are a couple of examples of the student comments. The “Pro” student comments generally validated satisfaction with the course content delivery. In contrast, the “Cons” students had unpleasant experiences in their course site navigation. To improve this situation, we plan to provide instruction on the basic use of Blackboard.
- We also obtained students’ opinions in the other class. For example, Dr. Kemp also implemented a new design and structure. Her students told her that it was much easier to see all the contents.
- In conclusion, our working group developed a template Blackboard site, which embodied the best practices of online course design we deemed applicable to our courses at this time. This site also includes terminology suggested for consistent use across the courses. In our discussion with the SSI faculty, they agreed to adopt several practices for improving the course site design throughout the curriculum. In our next step, all the GIST course websites will be transformed into the new design in the spring semester. Thus far, our project has generated positive effects on four things. These are our course websites, students’ learning experience, the instructors’ online teaching skills, and our Institute faculty sense of collegiality.
- Thank you very much for your attention. Susan and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.