Making learning technology work

Posted on by Matthew Taylor

Sitting in the audience, I watch as the presenter prepares us for an activity using the online tool Padlet. They share a link and ask us all to post our responses to the web page. I’m just opening the Padlet when the Wifi in the room drops out…

A common fear when using a new tool in teaching is that something won’t work as you expect. Learning technologies bring with them many benefits such as new opportunities for and improvements in collaboration, feedback, efficiency and accessibility. Situations like that described above are thankfully not common, however this fear of the unexpected can still provide a barrier to their use. In this post I’m going to look at some simple things you can do to ensure that learning technologies work and give some ideas of how to adapt if any problems do crop-up.

Plan

When planning your session here are some things to consider:

  • Keep it simple. Use only one or two different technologies in a session. We list a lot of tools you might use for teaching in our A-Z of apps but wouldn’t recommend you use them all in one session. If you are not sure of the appropriate tool for an activity, contact tel@sussex.ac.uk and we can advise you.
  • Variation and spacing. If possible, plan gaps between the points at which the students will be engaging with the tool. Follow an activity using one tool with something low-tech like a discussion activity.
  • Prepare examples. Examples are important because they can help to clarify what you expect the students to produce in a tool, they provide a guide for students as to what is expected. If students aren’t able to post their own ideas for discussion, there is still something for them to discuss. 
  • Check your room. If you’ve not been there before, the ITS room facilities page provides a listing of what equipment is available in general teaching space rooms.
  • Think about timing. Can you run the activity over a longer period of time? For example, share a PollEverywhere activity before a live session starts so that people can engage early. This way you get advance warning if you’ve forgotten to activate the poll.

Test

Once your activity is planned it’s always a good idea to quickly test it. If you are working in Canvas the Student View will give you an approximation of how things will appear for students. This is particularly useful for identifying where resources are unpublished or inaccessible.

Outside of Canvas, one of the most useful things is incognito mode on your browser. This helps to check if it is possible to access or interact with a tool when not logged-in as you. I routinely use this when I’m setting up to check students will be able to post to a Padlet.

Communicate 

Before you start students on an activity, show them how to do it. This might be through a quick demonstration in class or by recording a quick Panopto screen capture. Also, importantly, tell them how to inform you if there is an issue. This is particularly important when using online breakout rooms and for asynchronous exercises. Often people will happily sit and chat or get on with other tasks rather than inform you something hasn’t worked. In Zoom breakout rooms there is an ‘Ask for help’ button. 

It’s a good idea to check-in with students throughout a session too. I often add prompts to my slides to remind me to do this.

A prompt slide for online webinars to check students are understanding.

Adapt

With any teaching, whether or not you are using a new technology, unexpected things can happen. For this reason it’s good to have in mind some ways that you can deal with possible scenarios. 

  • If one student can’t access an activity resource, can you group students together? 
  • If a large proportion of the class can’t access the activity it may be possible to take comments verbally and summarise/enter them yourself. 
  • If you can’t access the tool but the students can, nominate a student or students to act as you.
  • If no one is able to access the activity, run it asynchronously after the session instead.
  • Things won’t always work as planned but these tips should help to keep things on track.

Guidance from TEL

If you are trying a new tool do speak to the Technology Enhanced Learning team who can give you ideas on how to make the activities work as well as possible. Hopefully this gives you some confidence in going forwards with innovations in your teaching. For ideas, do see our Case Studies page and if you’d like to share your own example of innovative teaching at University of Sussex please do get in touch via tel@sussex.ac.uk.

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Posted in Learning Technologies

Writing effective multiple choice questions

Posted on by George Robinson

The quiz tool in Canvas is fantastic for creating multiple choice quizzes. There are currently two quiz tools available within Canvas, we currently recommend using the Classic quiz engine for graded assessment rather than the New quiz tool due to a lack of parity in features.

Multiple choice quizzes can be used to measure a wide range of knowledge, skills and competencies with your students and can be used to measure higher order skills such as problem solving and evaluation. Due to their nature they can also be an efficient manner of assessing students (as well as students being able to check their own understanding and identify their knowledge gaps) and interpreting results as a large number of question types within the Canvas quiz engines can be automatically marked by the system, removing the need for manual marking.

To define some terminology that is used within multiple choice quizzes, quizzes are composed of what are known as ‘items’, with each item being made up of a Stem and various potential answers the term Stem refers to the question itself, including any context or other content that may be related to the student within the question, then you have potential answers and correct answers, with the term ‘distractors’ referring to quiz questions that are incorrect. Below are some ideas incorporating best practices around designing your multiple choice questions.

Structure your items around learning outcomes

It’s important to attempt to align your quiz items with appropriate learning objectives, considering what it is that students are trying to achieve by taking the quiz, i.e. is it simply to assess their knowledge retention and basic recall, checking their knowledge comprehension or their ability to evaluate certain concepts or are you trying to achieve something else entirely? Having a number of multiple choice items that all focus on the same learning outcome can increase the reliability of assessment. The possibility for students to tackle a number of items in a quicker fashion than say an essay allows you to assess a broader range of your module material so use this to your advantage.

Avoid trick items 

Avoid the use of tricks such as ambiguous phrasing, double negatives, multiple options that look very similar or information unrelated to the required skills or knowledge necessary to answer the question. If trick items are used either accidentally or intentionally students are not assessed on their knowledge but rather on their ability to work out the ‘trick’ of the question. Students also report an unfavourable  view of these types of questions.

For a further exploration of what defines a trick question please see ‘An Empirical Study on the Nature of Trick Test Questions.’1

Keep language and vocabulary simple

Keep the language of the question as simple as possible.  Simplified language reduces the influence of reading ability allowing you to better assess something else from your students (unless the purpose of the assessment is reading ability. Avoid excessive wording or any irrelevant information, keeping Stems short and succinct. Try to word Stems positively rather than negatively and if you do need to use negative language such as ‘not’ or ‘no’ then emphasise them in bold text to help students read the question correctly.

All these tips are useful to ensure your questions are as accessible as possible and that you are not putting students with reading accessibility needs or those for who English is a second language at a disadvantage2.

Write good distractor answers 

When writing distractor answers focus on those that will sound plausible based on common errors or misconceptions in their understanding. Avoid making your distractions  sound far-fetched or dubious. It’s also a good idea to ensure all your distractor answers are of a similar length and language.  

Research seems to suggest that having three possible answers, one correct answer and two distractors, is best in most cases3. Writing more distractors can make a quiz harder for students and should be encouraged if possible, but the jump in difficulty from two distractors to three or four appears to be small and it can be hard to write more than two good distractor answers for a question, quality over quantity might therefore be recommended. 

Support and resources

In conclusion I hope some of the recommendations here will help you to write more effective multiple choice questions. If you want to start creating quizzes the Canvas guides below will help, but if you are teaching at Sussex and you’d like help or guidance with creating multiple choice questions then please do get in touch with TEL at TEL@sussex.ac.uk

Some Canvas guides on quizzes

References

  1. Roberts, Dennis M. “An Empirical Study on the Nature of Trick Test Questions.” Journal of Educational Measurement 30, no. 4 (1993): 331–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1435229.
  2. Abedi, Jamal, Carolyn Huie Hofstetter, and Carol Lord. “Assessment Accommodations for English Language Learners: Implications for Policy-Based Empirical Research.” Review of Educational Research 74, no. 1 (2004): 1–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3516059.
  3. Kilgour, J.M., Tayyaba, S. An investigation into the optimal number of distractors in single-best answer exams. Adv in Health Sci Educ 21, 571–585 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-015-9652-7
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Posted in Marking and assessment

What’s new in Padlet?

Posted on by Anne Hole

Padlet is a tool for creating online collaborative boards, that is very popular with teaching staff at Sussex. One of the best things about it is its versatility – with lots of layouts and ways of using it. We have information about Padlet on our website and have blogged about this before in posts on:

Another reason we love Padlet is that it keeps getting better, and there are some updates and new features that have been introduced this year which we want to tell you about.

New editor for creating and publishing posts

In the past, posts to Padlet were visible as they were created, and whilst that gave a sense of immediacy, some of us prefer to carefully craft a post before publishing it. With the new Publish button that is how a Padlet post now works. You enter the title, add any text and/or attachments, choose the colour of your post (the default is white) then click Publish to add it to the board. This Padlet guide on how to add a post explains in more detail.

screenshot of editor for drafting and publishing posts

New attachment picker

The interface for adding attachments to a Padlet post is new too. The icons for the most popular types of attachment are front and centre as you write your post – those allow you to upload files (including images), take a photo with your device’s camera, add a link or search images, GIFs, YouTube, Spotify and websites. Your most recent searches are displayed so you can easily access them.

screenshot of new attachment picker

If you want additional options the more button (3 dots) opens up a full list.

screenshot of full list of attachment options

You can read more about the new attachment picker on the Padlet blog.

Editable attachment captions

When you have found what you want to attach to your post you now have the option to edit the caption which appears below it, so you are able to contextualise your content and maybe give a bit more information. Padlet does not yet allow alt-text to be added to images, so a caption describing the image could be useful.

screenshot of image with editable caption field

Padlet realises that this could mean that someone could try to misrepresent the source of an image or the destination of a link, so they show the domain name too.

Scanning for malicious content

Another security feature that has been added this year is the checking of uploads and links for viruses and malware. We haven’t heard of any issues like this at Sussex, but it’s good to know that Padlet is scanning and blocking content when necessary. You can read more about how Padlet scans uploads and links on their blog.

Goodbye to Chat

Sometimes keeping a platform relevant and easy to use means doing less, rather than just adding new options and functionality. This year Padlet reviewed the layouts available and decided to retire the Chat layout. This was primarily intended for ‘backchannel’ conversations but was not well used and the Stream layout can be used instead.

screenshot of posts in a Stream layout padlet

Padlet news and support from TEL

If you want to keep right up to date with all new developments at Padlet then you can subscribe to the Padlet Gazette blog. 

If you are a member of staff at Sussex and would like to start using Padlet in your teaching at Sussex or discuss ideas please get in touch at tel@sussex.ac.uk. 

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Posted in Apps and tools

The rise of recognition apps

Posted on by Paolo Oprandi
Species identification from phone app

It is now extremely easy to identify just about anything on mobile devices through image recognition apps. From plants to insects, from foreign words to ancient texts, from rare paintings to state of the art buildings, from fingerprints to faces, there will be an app to help you identify what you are looking at. 

Many of these apps improve their accuracy the more they are used as they learn from users’ confirmation of the correctness of their matches. Perhaps what is different about some of these apps is that while they exist on smartphones, there is often not an equivalent on a computer.

Recognition apps do have many potential applications for education. In the natural sciences, the apps can help students identify species, in geography the apps can help identify places, in art history the apps can help identify drawings, in languages the apps can translate texts. They can also make learning resources more accessible. For the partially-sighted they can read texts, for those with mobility issues they can write texts, for those with impaired hearing they can provide text versions of audio.

But of course, identification apps do not only help the educational disciplines, they also provide source material and an area for research. There are plenty of philosophical questions that can be posed about the possibilities identification apps give rise to, such as surveillance and control. There are cultural shifts that such technologies create and political questions about what will be allowed and disallowed. But leaving aside the material for study they provide for one moment, in this post we look at the apps themselves and the technical possibilities they allow.

Audio recognition

Audio recognition technologies listen for sounds, and make informed guesses about what the smartphone is listening to. There have been different uses for education. For example, the technologies can be used for identifying similarities in sound tones and patterns. They can also be used to allow people to create text without typing.

Music

Perhaps the first recognition apps that I was familiar with were the music recognition apps. This technology listens to the songs that are being played and tells you their name and the artists. An early cross-platform player in this technology was Shazam, however now, many Android and iOS devices have built-in song recognition software. It can be used in teaching when asking the students to give feedback on a mood, song genre or even what instruments are playing using the similar songs features.

Speech

There are now many technologies that will translate speech into text. For example, Google is currently converting the words that I am speaking into text. I can tell the app to add a full stop or delete a word through text commands. Microsoft and many other products do the same. There are apps that work for every device (phone, tablet or computer) so long as you have an audio input. They are very useful if  you are finding it difficult to type.

Bird song

Audio recognition is not only for human created noises, it can also be used to capture any noise. For example, there are bird call and song recognition apps, which can help you identify the bird species that you can hear in the trees. My favourite Android app is BirdNet. It could be used in teaching on either sound pattern matching tasks or identification field trips. 

Image recognition

Image recognition technology identifies shapes within images and makes educated guesses about what the image might be. There are many apps for anything from famous pictures to buildings. In an educational setting these apps can be used for practicing data collection and classification. 

General images

There are a number of general apps that attempt to recognise whatever the image type. The most well known mobile app is Google Lens. There is also Microsoft Lens and Apple have suggested that they will also be releasing a similar app for iOS soon. Additionally, Google image search allows you to photograph or upload an image into the search field and search by the image. 

Species

Of greatest interest to me at the moment are the possibilities of image recognition for species identification. Plants, insects and butterflies all have apps that allow their identification. I no longer need to walk through the woods wondering what the plants and animals are. My favourite Android app is PlantNet, but another popular cross platform app is iNaturalist. 

Text recognition

Text identification from phone app (Arabic to English)

Text recognition is useful when you would like to be read to, the text is obscured from you or not in your language. Many of the apps can recognise texts in multiple languages and can translate them.

There are many text recognition apps will read the text to you. This can be for your pleasure and can be useful if you are partially sighted and can not read the text without help. 

Text recognition apps are useful if a reading is not in your native language. The app will translate text from one language into another. An example of this is the Translate function in Chrome browser. These  translations have to be used with caution as they will not always be accurate as a result of technological limitations, different accents and colloquialisms.

Conclusion

There are many uses for recognition apps. If you would like to use them in your teaching please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk. Sign up to our identification app event at 2pm on Wednesday the 10th November as part of the library’s Digital Discovery Week.

Posted in Apps and tools

5 top Poll Everywhere question types

Posted on by George Robinson

Poll Everywhere is a fantastic polling tool licensed by the University of Sussex for use by teaching staff. It allows you to pose questions to students, but there’s much more to do then just getting students to write a short form text response. Below are 5 question types you can use in order to utilise the full potential of Poll Everywhere to energise and engage your classroom! 

1. Stick a pin in it with a Clickable Image question

The image tool within Poll Everywhere allows you to upload any image, students can then respond by dropping a pin on part of the image. This can be used in a number of creative ways such as, getting students to identify issues with an image i.e. looking at an image of machinery and getting students to stick a pin in the incorrectly assembled part. You could also use an image of the world and ask students which country they feel had the greatest effect on the world in the 1600’s then move onto a discussion based around what they’ve chosen. Use an image of a heart and ask students to drop a pin on the left ventricle or upload a graph and ask students to drop a pin where they believe a certain valve should be on the chart. These are just some suggested ideas but there is a wide variety of tasks and activities you could create using the Clickable Image activity type.

A Poll Everywhere quiz asking the question “Locate the left ventricle on the heart” below the question there is an image of a heart.

2. Get students to sum up a topic in one word

The word cloud tool allows you to pose a question to students with the answers being turned into a word cloud image. The more the same answer is received the large that word answer will appear on the word cloud. This sort of question type can be used to gather immediate broad feedback from students and then easily interpret the answers visually, such as  getting students to sum up how they are currently feeling about a lecture i.e. “happy”, “confused”, “focused” etc. 

A good tip if you’d like to generate a word cloud that uses more than one word answers is to ask students to put underscores between words i.e. very_happy, that way the word cloud will still recognise and include them as it will see them on a technical level as one word.

Allowing anonymous feedback can allow students to post more honestly and earnestly 

A Poll Everywhere word cloud

3. Gamify your classroom with Competitions

In a similar way to the popular quiz tool Kahoot, Poll Everywhere allows you to gamify your classroom by creating a quiz with a series of questions. Points are awarded for correct answer and speed sothe student with the fastest correct answers gets the most points. This can be a fun way to engage a class through making a series of quiz questions into a competitive game. You can combine any of the other question types into these Competitions.

These competitions don’t have to pit individual students against each other, you can put students into groups with each group then discussing and deciding on the answers together if you wish to make it a more collaborative activity. 

A Poll Everywhere competition leaderboard displaying the current scores of students

4. Questions and Answers 

This option allows you to pose an open question which students can respond to then other students can upvote or downvote the answers. This can be a great way of democratically deciding which topic to cover next within your teaching or testing how popular a certain idea is or which side of an argument they agree with.

This question type also makes it very easy to quickly gather feedback from large groups of students and avoid duplication of answers, as students can simply upvote an answer they agree with rather than writing out a duplicate answer to the question. 

5. Use your polls outside of the classroom with the Survey tool

You don’t just have to use Poll Everywhere within the classroom, you can also create asynchronous polls using the Survey quiz question type. This allows you to create a series of questions that students can answer at any time which can be useful if you want to pose a question to students at the end of a class for them to answer before the next class when you can show the results of the poll. This can also be useful for posing questions to students who for whatever reason are not able to attend a session. 

Resources and support

So as you can see there is a wide variety of question types that you can use with Poll Everywhere, they don’t simply have to be multiple choice questions, hopefully some of the ideas suggested here for how to use these activities within your teaching will be useful and will hopefully inspire you to come up with your own. You can learn more about using Poll Everywhere from Poll Everywhere’s support page  and Sussex TEL’s Poll Everwhere page.
If you need any guidance or help using Poll Everywhere within your teaching then please contact TEL at tel@sussex.ac.uk

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Posted in Polling tools

Feedback options in Turnitin and Canvas SpeedGrader

Posted on by Emilie Hayter

‘Assessment and Feedback’ is a somewhat notorious category within National Student Survey data, frequently ranked poorly compared to other areas. This trend is present in most UK universities even when ‘Student Satisfaction’ is ranked highly. The 2021 Student Academic Experience Survey from Advance HE and Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) named assessment and feedback as one of the key areas to improve in higher education.

The move to fully digitise assessment in 2020 embraced existing technology that could enhance the submission and feedback process for many teaching staff and students. Pre-pandemic, it was clear that submitting assignments electronically provided many advantages, including faster input of feedback, improved legibility, and long-term storage of assessments. However, it also increases the functionality for a number of formats beyond the standard written text that can improve marking efficiency and enhance students’ experience of receiving feedback. 

This post will guide you through feedback options in Turnitin’s Feedback Studio and Canvas SpeedGrader. 

Turnitin Feedback Studio

Feedback Studio is the suite of marking and feedback tools for Turnitin submissions. It has several options for providing feedback to students.

QuickMarks 

QuickMarks is a feature in Turnitin that enables you to insert comment bubbles for common errors such as ‘Awk’ for awkward phrasing or ‘Improper citation’ for referencing errors. Simply drag and drop the comment onto the relevant sentence in the student’s essay. Turnitin provides banks of pre-made comments that you can access by clicking the drop-down menu. You can change the selection of default comments to tailor your feedback, ensuring it is relevant to the assessment in question.

View of the QuickMarks layer within Turnitin Feedback Studio with commonly used comments

In addition, there is the option to create custom comments in QuickMark’s settings. Custom QuickMark comments will save to your account, making these easily accessible every time you mark in Turnitin. Clicking anywhere in the submission will provide shortcut options to QuickMarks, free-text comments (allowing hyperlinks) or inline text comments. The benefits of using QuickMarks allows you to provide more feedback in less time through the use of repeated comments, it helps the student apply specific in-text improvements and, importantly, gives them a stronger understanding of the link between their feedback/grade and the rubric/marking criteria. 

Example essay with QuickMark comments and text

Audio feedback

Generally, teaching staff use the Feedback Summary box in Turnitin to provide written  comments on student essays. However, the option to leave a voice recording is available in Feedback Studio and may provide many benefits. Firstly, it is likely you will be able to provide more feedback in three minutes of talking than you can typing. Secondly, it creates a personalised feel, allowing you to talk as if directly to the student. For time-poor academics who prefer to talk through their critique, this is a viable addition. Simply click on the blue record button to start the feedback recording. You can replay, delete, re-record and save the recording, however you cannot edit. 

Audio recording capability within Turnitin Feedback Studio

Canvas SpeedGrader

If your students are submitting work to a Canvas Online assignment (not Turnitin) you will use SpeedGrader in Canvas for marking and feedback. The functionality is slightly different.

Annotations

Marking in Canvas SpeedGrader allows annotations to be made on student submissions. You can add point annotations (which can be colour-coded) directly onto the essay and add comments or use strikethrough to cross out words. There are options to highlight a single word or passage of text or use an ‘area annotation’ to create a box around a section of the essay. Finally, ‘free-text’ allows you to write directly anywhere on the page, and ‘free-draw’ is the same principle – especially useful if you are marking using a stylus or touchscreen.   

Example essay with annotations in SpeedGrader

Audio and video feedback 

SpeedGrader gives you the option to record a media comment using either audio or video. You can start the recording directly in Canvas SpeedGrader using your device’s microphone and/or webcam, or upload an audio/video file.

Image showing recording audio and video options within Canvas SpeedGrader

It is important to note that captioning software is not yet built into either Turnitin or Canvas online assessments and therefore a transcript will not be produced automatically. However, speech recognition is integrated into SpeedGrader. This allows you to speak into a headset or microphone to produce a text transcript, which you can then edit how you please. 

Rubrics

Most Schools at Sussex now use marking rubrics for their assessments. This allows students to have a clearer understanding of their feedback and to critically engage with it. It also encourages academics to provide a more well-structured and consistent response to the work. It is important that rubrics are continually critiqued and developed with the students’ module learning objectives and outcomes in mind, especially for non-essay based or alternative assessments such as portfolios and podcasts. Rubrics can be changed both in Turnitin Feedback Studio and Canvas SpeedGrader. The latter allows the attachment of text-based files, which enables relevant articles to be shared as part of the feedback. 

Summary

The different options in Turnitin and Canvas allow you to return effective and engaging feedback to students, providing students with multiple forms of feedback which will help to improve the quality of their next assessment. If you would like to explore these options further, please contact: tel@sussex.ac.uk or read our e-Submission Guidance for Staff.  

While low NSS ‘Assessment and Feedback’ scores and a pandemic may have provided the impetus for an overhaul of assessment practice, there is a way to go. The Rethinking Assessment report by Jisc and Emerge Education released in May 2021 pushed for a complete transformation and reimagination of assessment. Whether that’s developing the use of artificial intelligence to support marking or integrating completely automated end-to-end assessment platforms, it is clear that technology will play a prominent role in the future of assessment. 

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Posted in feedback

5 steps to effective formative assessment in Canvas

Posted on by Matthew Taylor

Good formative assessment throughout a module is key to achieving good student outcomes .It helps students and tutors to gauge how they are progressing and to identify areas to focus on. It also provides opportunities to practice and prepare for summative assessment.

In this post we’ll look at how you can prepare your Canvas site for formative assessment, explore some of the options in Canvas and beyond, and finally look at what we can do to encourage engagement with the activities.

1. The setup

In order for students to achieve the module objectives they first need to know what they are. Over the last couple of years we’ve worked with the schools to develop module templates which standardise where students can find this information. These may differ slightly between Schools but will include a module information page where the main objectives are communicated (for some schools this is listed on the assignment information page) and week/topic pages where more detailed objectives can be listed. Once the students know what the objectives are, they also need a way to measure their progress against them. The templates all include a space in which you can provide rubrics or guidance on what progress looks like. This again varies between schools and may be on the assessment information or module information page.

2. Testing for baseline knowledge

Now that the objectives are established and students have a scale against which to measure their progress, you might want to establish where on that scale students are now. 

This can be done in a number of ways but one simple way would be through a Canvas quiz. Canvas Quizzes are quick to set up and can be self-marking so scale well for larger cohorts. This doesn’t have to be a case of right or wrong either, you could use the quiz more as a survey to gain initial thoughts on a topic.  

3. Peer assessment

Canvas assignments and Canvas discussions provide two routes through which you can facilitate peer learning and peer assessment. In both cases students can post or submit work to be viewed by others. In the case of Discussions this may be more open, allowing students to see a broader range of work and get feedback from a wider pool. Peer assessment in Assignments has the advantage that it is less ‘on show’ and feedback can be anonymous which can encourage some less confident students to engage and be more honest. Peer review activities can refer students back to the rubrics to guide the feedback.

4. Expanding options beyond Canvas

Canvas provides a core set of tools, however, they may not suit every activity so it is worth looking beyond them. Many external tools can be easily incorporated into your modules either via embedding in pages using the embed button, through Learning Tool integrations (LTIs) or simply by linking to them. If you have ideas for an activity but aren’t sure of the best tool for the job I’d recommend you contact TEL@sussex.ac.uk. If you’d rather look on your own, do check out our earlier post on identifying appropriate apps for teaching.

To use embed code from an external app in a Canvas page look for the cloud icon in the Canvas editor, sometimes hidden in the three dots icon.

5. Removing barriers

Planning a great formative activity doesn’t mean that people will do it. One big fear of formative assessment, particularly when it is not grade bearing, is whether the students will do it.

There are some things you can certainly do to help. 

  • Clearly communicate the activity and the expected outputs. This may mean demonstrating it in class but also providing guidance on your Canvas module site. 
  • Include how long you expect the activity to take and define clear deadlines. Students have many things competing for their attention so this can help them to block out time. 
  • Explain how the formative assessments will help them to achieve better results on their contributory assessments.

These are just a few ideas and there are many other ways in which you can plan for and facilitate formative assessments. If you would like to explore the options further please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk. 

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Posted in feedback

Adding a ‘chat’ backchannel to in-person classes

Posted on by Anne Hole

During the pandemic most lectures have been online – either as recordings or as live Zoom sessions. Academics noticed that the ‘chat’ facility in the latter encouraged more questions and discussion than they had experienced during in-person lectures on campus. The ability to ask questions without holding up the progress of the lecture for everyone, allowed more students to engage with lectures and students could help each other. This post will look at some possible ways to retain this aspect of online learning as we move back to lecture theatres.

Some options for a lecture backchannel

There are a few tools that could be used to facilitate questions and discussion online during in-person lectures. Which you choose will depend on the types of engagement you want.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is popular across campus for asking students questions during a lecture, to check understanding or gauge opinions, but it could also be used to elicit questions from students. The Vice-Chancellor has used Poll Everywhere like this in his open forums, with an ‘open-ended’ question that participants can post their questions or comments to. 

The results can be displayed in the session, or viewed privately by the lecturer and questions that cannot be answered in the lecture could be addressed in a Canvas Discussion later.

Padlet

This versatile tool could be used to collect questions and/or comments during a lecture. It has the advantage of allowing everyone to see all the posts and can be saved as a PDF and/or embedded in Canvas. A simple ‘stream’ layout would most closely mimic a Zoom ‘chat’ but with options to reply to each post and/or use ‘reactions’. 

A Padlet using the stream layout.

Alternatively, you could use the ‘shelf’ layout if you wanted to split up posts into categories. Students’ posts to a Padlet will be anonymous so they should feel comfortable asking questions in this format. 

A Padlet using the shelf layout

You can read more about Padlet on the TEL website. The university has a Padlet Backpack licence and teaching staff can be added by emailing tel@sussex.ac.uk. 

There are other whiteboard tools that work in a similar way, with free and/or education plans, such as Miro, Mural and Google Jamboard.

Canvas

If you want a backchannel that uses the basic tools in Canvas you could try using a  Canvas Discussion or Module Chat. The former has more functionality and the latter is simpler. Either could work for a lecture backchannel. Canvas has the advantage that students should be familiar with it and it meets accessibility standards, but Discussions don’t update automatically so require ‘refreshing’ to see the latest posts. Chat is much more like a messaging app. 

Considerations, resources and support

Whatever tools you choose, remember that not everything will always be accessible to all your students, in which case alternatives will need to be considered. You can learn more about accessibility in the TEL Digital Accessibility Toolkit.

You can read more about some of the tools mentioned here in Communicating with students in Canvas and 4 fantastic uses for Padlet in online teaching. Other tools are listed in the A-Z of Apps.

If you would like to discuss options, what might suit you and your students and how you can get started please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk 

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Posted in Apps and tools, Blended learning, Polling tools

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