Not familiar with Kaltura or My Media? Kaltura is a streaming video service that can adapt video playback quality to the needs of your students. It can play in HD when available or scale down media on the fly to support mobile users on shaky internet connections. It supports basic recording, machine captioning, adds a layer of security to your videos, and even lets you make some simple edits to your videos after you upload them! Weʻve created this Kaltura My Media Student Support Guide you can share when you use these features in your courses.

To get started, students can simply upload their media files using the “Add New” button they will find in My Media from their Brightspace by D2L home page:

and then

Media stored here can easily be used in any D2L course via “Insert Stuff”

Simple recording features are easy to access and use too!

We also have equipment check out  available for students needing webcams, microphones, tripods, etc. from our libraries at each campus.

Students have access to Kaltura My Media across all of their courses within Brightspace by D2L. Anyone needing further assistance or one on one support can contact our Student Help Desk.

That’s the basic overview of helping students get started with Kaltura My Media. If you are wondering how this might be used with students in your specific curriculum, reach out to your local campus Instructional Technology Specialist. Also, check out our Faculty Training Workshop schedule for upcoming Kaltura sessions.

Student Appointment Slots

Did you know that Google Calendar has a feature called ? This has been an amazing feature for me as an instructor. I started using it back in 2015 and have never looked back. You might be thinking, why would I want to use an appointment calendar to set up office time with my students? Here are my reasons:

1. I schedule times that I know I’ll be available. This provides a variety of opportunities for students whose schedules vary considerably. Plus, the times don’t have to be consistent from week to week.
2. Students feel empowered because they can set up a time dedicated to them vs. open office hours. They know how much time they have reserved and generally come prepared.
3. I can plan my life better. I know who is showing up and when! They even let me know why they want to meet! Now isn’t that nice?
4.  A Google Meet link automatically generates when creating an appointment and the student gets an invite too. I can also leave notes in the calendar invite for myself and the student!
5. I can set up a notification for my phone/computer to ping me so I don’t miss the meeting (especially if I am busy grading or… folding laundry).

I am sure there are more reasons to love using Appointment Calendars, but this is what comes to mind immediately.

How do I let students know about it?

Everywhere! Not really, but rather strategic locations in my Brightspace course:

1. My Syllabus
2. My homepage widget in Brightspace
3. My page in Brightspace
4. My email reminders
   I provide reminders to students who haven’t completed an assignment or received a certain score. In the email that goes out, a link to my appointment calendar is always included encouraging them to set up a time to go over anything that might be challenging.
5. ���Ѳ�

You know what! While writing this list I realized there is another place I thought I had mentioned my appointment calendar, but I forgot! I need to add it to my Welcome video! I just watched it thinking it was there. What a lapse on my part. So, that makes #6. I’m sure you can think of other places as well!

Empowering our students

Since the onset of the pandemic, the use of my appointment calendar has drastically increased. I feel like I am connecting with my student much more than I ever did before as a fully online instructor. I thrive on those interactions. Students are concerned about my time, but they don’t realize how much I enjoy getting to help them and see that light bulb turn on. (I think they do after meeting with me, though.  )  Letting them know they can have one-on-one time with me is important. I want to empower them to feel comfortable meeting with me. A dedicated timeslot lets them feel that this is “their” time and that it wasn’t an inconvenience to me, the instructor, to schedule.

If you need more help than the Google documentation on setting up , feel free to reach out to one of our amazing instructional technology specialists! They excel in helping faculty make their student experience better using technology!

Take care and think of ways you can empower your students to ask you questions this Fall term!

Rondi :)

What have I tried?

• No late work unless extenuating circumstances (this hurt completion and morale).
• 50% deduction for work submitted up to a week late (students seemed to think it wasn’t worth doing the late work).
• 10% deduction for work submitted up to a week late (this did work better because a 90% was still possible).
• No due dates at all, but I kept suggested due dates (this worked for some students, but many students fell really far behind and tried to do seven weeks of work in the last two weeks of the term).

One of the questions that has guided my thinking is this: “is submitting the work ‘on time’ more important than submitting the work?” I teach because I love to see students learn and grow, not because I like to micromanage due dates.

I understand the argument of teaching students to manage their time and be accountable for deadlines because that’s an important workplace skill. But I’m a professional in the workplace, and I don’t get everything done by every deadline all the time.

As an instructor I had to ask myself, do I always return grades and provide feedback by the time I say I will? Honestly, no. Sometimes my daughter gets sick and my schedule is thrown by a day or two. Sometimes an unexpected need for a committee or project pops up and I fall a little behind on grading. In these situations I expect grace from my students. So I believe that I should extend grace to students who also need it.

I’m going to share the most current iteration of my late work policy. And I invite you to share yours in the comments, and offer me some new ways of thinking about my policy.

What does my syllabus say?

Unit reflections and homework assignments can be submitted up to one week late without any deduction- no questions asked and no judgment given! Assignment folders close at 11:59pm one week after the due date. Discussions must be completed on time, and the final reflection cannot be submitted late because it’s due in finals week.

What does my policy look like in practice?

The day after an assignment was due (Monday morning), I go into the grade book and enter a 0 (or the word “Ignored” because I use contract grading). I then add a note like this:

“Oops- looks like you didn’t get a chance to submit this assignment. But don’t worry! You have until 4/24 at 11:59pm to submit this assignment- no questions asked! Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

What if a student needs even more time? I extend extra grace when needed. Sometimes a student needs an extra day or two, and that’s okay with me. If a student wants to do the work, and I think that the assignment deepens their learning, then a little extra time seems like a valuable way to support learning and equitable student success.

I do have a creative (unadvertised) way for students to make up a missed discussion, and I offer that to any student who needs to get caught up as we enter the last third of the term. Most students take me up on it, which means they got yet another important opportunity to engage with our course content.

How has this approach been working?

Really well! Most students end up submitting their work within just a couple of days after I notify them via the grade book that they can still submit an assignment. Completion is up – I see students persisting in the class more than I did with my previous policies.

I also have received notes from students thanking me for the reminder and ability to submit the assignment late. And overall, I find that students are more likely to reach out via email when they have a question about completing their late work. That open dialogue between us makes such a difference.

I’m happy with my current policy because I can be empathic and show grace while having a schedule and structure for completing coursework. But will I change my late work policy in the future? Probably. I’m always looking for ways to grow and do better for my students.

This request resonated with both of us, as we and the entire Online Learning team know that we’re all working hard on BIG changes through a holistic span of initiatives that include department growth and governance, student support, course quality and design, Improved faculty on-boarding in a full training redesign, expansion of our Instructional Technology Specialist (ITS) support team, and growth in both administrative and innovative instructional technology teams, all our efforts aligning with system wide strategic plans. We’re proud to work on the “big stuff” of Online Learning’s system design to offer a solid framework for faculty to share their excellence in little, manageable ways with our students.

With so many ways to continuously improve our practice and service, we all want to focus on higher-quality interactions, not more work. In this spirit, I approached team Online Learning to glean a shortlist of some of the little things that matter so much. We’re sure this is in no way an exhaustive list, and I want to take a moment here to thank my experienced colleagues for sharing their collective wisdom. We also want to acknowledge that there is a lot of good going on! We hear the positive feedback of our students too, and some of these tips echo the little things they commonly share that support their learning journeys:

• Bookmark this page and when you are working in BrightSpace, save often. – Melany
• Create learning objectives that are immediately relevant to learners, that are stated in language that learners can understand, and that describe performances that learners can be expected to carry out at a job or in some other “real world” context. It’s not enough to know stuff – learners need to know the immediate relevance of what they are learning. Students usually need to be given the challenge of DOING something before they will undertake the hard work of learning the skills and knowledge that underpin the doing. – Peter
• Use Item Descriptions. That short blurb you can add to an item in a module by choosing  ” Edit Properties In-place.” They help students understand “what” they are clicking on and “why” you think it is important. I love them as vital road signs in the course that help students know where they are and how to get to the next place. And you can even add an icon if appropriate to help students make visual connections to the same type of content. Modules that are just a long list of item names feel naked (and less welcoming)!- Emma
• Communicate often and honestly. Can’t get all the assignments graded as soon as you hoped you would? Email your students and let them know you are working on it and need extra time to give them substantive feedback. Most will be happy to wait for higher quality feedback and they’ll be happy (often surprised) you reached out.- Heather
• Use consistent naming structures for everything, and when you’re creating new pages, don’t start from scratch-  search for a template to begin from. Here, for example, is an accessible syllabus template. We have more within Brightspace.- Michael
• When you have a challenge, use the search tool at PCC.edu to find information first. Many times our support pages will come up at the top of a Google Search, but this assures that you get system-specific support when it’s available. – Brian
• When search doesn’t work for you, reach out to our Instructional Technical Support Specialist team. They are our front line connection to a deep faculty support net that helps you focus your time on teaching, not technology. You can also reach them at dlhelp@pcc.edu. – The entire ITS team
• Use the Brightspace Calendar that connects with Pulse- the mobile app to help students stay on track. – Andy
• Don’t use Word docs to present module content- copy and paste into the Brightspace editor. Having layout issues? Reach out to an ITS member, they’ve probably seen the issue before and can give you situated feedback. – Casey
• Also, when you make a change in your course or content, always quickly use the “Student View” feature of Brightspace to verify that the changes you intend to make are what your learners will see. – Casey

This list is rich, and I wonder were I to pose the same question to you as faculty, what would you say? What is the one little thing you do that always gives you a high return on your investment of time and teaching? There are so many ways to pick just one little thing to improve your practice with students! We are a team of colleagues all dedicated to continuously increasing student success, and we hope this list helps you feel both inspired to find just one little thing to do, and better connected to our incredible support team that’s got your back every step of the way.

Image licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 David Kennard

“Why do you approach this research with such hesitancy? Such timidness?” Such were the words of my 400-level botany professor, Dr. Meese, spoken in a moment of frustration to the whole class in his thick German accent. The Reproductive Biology of Flowers was truly a fascinating course, and I gradually found myself following the lead of Dr. Meese, diving into close-up UV photography of irises scattered around the University of Washington campus, deeply intrigued that those fat furry bumblebees could visualize those attractive runways in ways that eluded my human sight.

These are among the professors I remember when asked to think of an educator who inspired a leap to a new level, someone who broadened my capacity for growth in an area I barely knew existed. Who are the educators who inspired you to new heights?

I think of Dr. Barr and Dr. Meese as “warm demanders” in a sense. Though not warm and fuzzy, they were not without compassion. Had I known what they were doing, I would have realized they were not trying to be rigid and inflexible. In their own way, they were showing compassion while at the same time providing an opportunity for me to engage in productive struggle, a necessary path toward moving from a dependent learner to an independent learner.

Leaning into productive struggle

Michelle Pacansky-Brock defines warm demander pedagogy as a culturally responsive teaching approach that creates opportunities for students to engage in productive struggle through engaging in challenging tasks, and this helps students develop from dependent into independent learners. She goes on to assert that all humans begin as dependent learners, and students who are poor and people of color are less likely to have had the privilege to be challenged in their educational experiences through productive struggle, which means they are more likely to be dependent learners.

Photo by Julia Larson, Pexels

It is precisely the productive struggle I experienced in the aforementioned classes that allowed me to engage and challenge myself, and struggle, but this is not the first step. Warm demander pedagogy and creating those opportunities for “productive struggle” is rooted in a strategy Pacansky-Brock refers to as “care and push.” The foundation for this is the building of trust in the instructor-student relationship. As Pacansky-Brock explains, “once a student knows you care about them and that you believe in them, they lean in. They challenge themselves. That’s when a student can flourish and reach their full intellectual potential.” I’m personally drawn to this image that a student will “lean in” and accept more challenge after gaining trust in the instructor.

Among the key characteristics of warm demander pedagogy is the need to express concern for students, not through passive sympathy, but by demanding a high quality of academic work. One of the main concerns we often have about showing compassion and some flexibility with our students in terms of deadlines, for example, is the fear that our expectations will diminish, that our courses will become less rigorous. Yet one of the pillars of the warm demander approach is that we challenge our students, all students, that we give them the opportunities for productive struggle essential in the path to become independent learners. Denying some students of this challenge denies them an opportunity for growth.

In discussing culturally relevant pedagogy, Gloria Ladson-Billings puts it this way…

Photo by Cottonbro, Pexels

“Culturally relevant teachers envision their students as being filled with possibilities. They imagine that somewhere in the classroom is the next Nobel laureate (a Toni Morrison), the next neurosurgeon (a Benjamin Carson), or the next pioneer for social justice (a Fannie Lou Hamer). The perspective moves the teachers from a position of sympathy (“you poor dear”) to one of informed empathy. This informed empathy requires the teacher to feel with the students rather than feel for them. Feeling with the students builds a sense of solidarity between the teacher and the students but does not excuse students from working hard in pursuit of excellence.” (White Teachers/Diverse Classrooms, p. 31)

The last phrase of that quote is the most revealing for us as educators. Indeed, the key principles of warm demander pedagogy used to develop intellectual abilities in dependent learners through cognitive struggle are perhaps best summarized by Pacansky-Brock in this intricate flow of “care and push.” A warm demander…

• Expresses personal warmth vs. impersonal professionalism
• Prioritizes building rapport and trust
• Clearly communicates high standards and scaffolds learning
• Shows personal regard for students
• Earns the right to demand engagement and effort
• Encourages and celebrates productive struggle

What about rigor?

What does this mean in terms of course rigor? Indeed, showing informed empathy, personal warmth, and compassion should not be equated with lowering our standards or less rigor. The warm demander approach starts with trust, proceeds with building the relationship, and at that point students will more readily engage with the challenge.

Photo by Allan Mas, Pexels

Thinking back to my own situation, what was it about the teaching of my professors, Dr. Barr and Dr. Meese that allowed me, actually inspired me to “lean in,” to accept the challenge, and to do so with passion, not only because a grade was at stake? What inspires you to “lean in?”

In my attempts to apply these strategies to my own teaching, I have not found the perfect balance of compassion, trust, relationship building and flexibility that always leads to student engagement. I think this pathway to engagement and the readiness to lean into productive struggle is highly individualized. A viable approach is to design what we think could be the most effective path toward this goal, but then be keenly aware of where our students are at, focus on trust, relationship building, and engagement, and then be prepared to to make small adjustments along the way.

Our students may not be ready to climb every mountain, but they will be leaning in more often to productive struggle along the path toward becoming independent learners. If there are warm demander strategies that have worked for you, please share!

Acknowledgement

Many of the ideas shared in this are based on the research of Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Faculty Mentor for the California Community Colleges CVC-OEI/@ONE. Michelle’s work focuses largely on humanized online instruction, and you’ll find a link to her full workshop presentation below. (If you can find the time, focus on the first 45 minutes.)

Resources for Further Exploration

• , Michelle Pacansky-Brock, from the series “Fall Into Humanized Online Teaching: A Pathway to Equity, Fall 2021 ()
• , Marcee Harris, The Chalk Blog, Mar 30, 2018.
• Krysti Ryan, Kathryn Boucher, Christine Logel, & Mary Murphy, College Transition Collaborative, (See the final FAQ section Do student centered policies sacrifice rigor?)
• White Teachers/Diverse Classrooms, A Guide to Building Inclusive Schools, Promoting High Expectations, and Eliminating Racism, Chance Lewis and Julie Landsman, editors, 2006.

The Pulse app has been around for a while. In 2017, Andy Freed provided two posts about Pulse:

• A brief description of the Pulse app (the overview video seems to have disappeared from that post), which noted that the Pulse app was then “in active development.”
• A lengthier description of the features of the Pulse app, with an emphasis on making your online class “Pulse friendly” (again, the link to the D2L promotional video seems to be outdated).

In 2019, Andy provided another, meatier description of the Pulse app, which includes a link to a really useful, student-focused page with directions on how to download the app and other info.

Having used the Pulse app for a while and having thought a lot about how the app is and isn’t useful, I’ve decided that the most important thing for you, the online instructor, to know about the Pulse app is this:

The Pulse app is always working, even when you aren’t aware of it.

Let me attempt to illustrate this principle by telling a quick story:

The icon for the Pulse app on Peter’s iPad, showing no new notifications.

One summer term – maybe 2017, which was shortly after the Pulse app achieved maturity – I taught an online class in D2L. Since I knew I would be away for a few days on a summer vacation, I spent some time during the first week of class adding a page to my course intro module that notified students when I would be away, how to contact me directly, and what to expect while I was away. Later that same day, I was working out at the Sylvania fitness center (back when we did such things – oh, how I miss the Sylvania PE facilities!) and I recognized one of my students from her profile picture. She recognized me also from my Instructor Introduction page and we exchanged pleasantries (again, these kinds of casual face-to-face encounters were commonplace in our pre-pandemic world).

Then my student said the most surprising thing: “I see you’re going to take a vacation this summer – it sounds really fun.” I was a bit shocked, since I had just added the page to the course, and I thought the student would have had to pay especially close attention to my course to notice the addition of a page. So I asked her, “How did you know that I added the page?” She replied, “Because I got a notification in my Pulse app.”

To this day, I don’t know exactly what algorithm the Pulse app used (and perhaps still uses) to decide what students are notified about. But I gleaned several lessons from this experience:

• Whether you know it or not, the Brightspace Pulse app is out there and students can download it to their iPhones, iPads, and Android mobile devices.
• Once the student opens the Pulse app and is prompted to log into the student’s D2L account at PCC, the student has access to a Pulse-mediated version of every PCC course the student registered for, including your course if the student registered for it.

If you don’t use the Pulse app yourself – and most instructors do NOT use the Pulse app (based on my admittedly limited experience), here are a few things you should know about how your students are experiencing your course in the app:

• 

  The Pulse app on Peter’s iPhone shows 13 notifications. Keep up, Peter!

  The Pulse app is primarily a notification tool. That is, the app was designed primarily to help students stay on top of the deadlines in their courses – indeed, the “Pulse” name implies that it enables students to “keep the pulse” on their courses. The Pulse app allows students to track deadlines via a neat timeline that aggregates deadlines from ALL of their courses. However, for this feature to work, it is critical that you attach due dates and end dates to ALL of the activities in your course AND you check the “Display in Calendar” box for any activity that has this option. There are other good reasons to attach dates, but the key for the Pulse app is that if you don’t attach dates, the deadline won’t be reflected in the Pulse app and students are more likely to miss it.

• Students will not only see deadlines you set in the Pulse app; students are also able to create their own tasks that will be integrated into the timeline. So if students want to create their own intermediate deadlines or individual tasks, they can do so in the Pulse app and see how they fit with all of their other tasks.
• Students can also view content, which you created for the Content tool, in the app, and they can even make it available for offline viewing (essentially downloading the content for later). You can see how this feature could be really handy for students who have 20 minutes on a bus ride, say, and want to get some reading done. D2L also touts the display features of the Content view in the app, saying there is no “pinching” or scrolling required. I’ve heard some people say that the display is guaranteed to be good only if your pages are coded in HTML, but I’ve had no problems displaying PDF documents – they are easy to read. Maybe Word docs don’t display very well, but I’m not sure about that.
• 

  The Pulse homepage on an iPhone, showing the courses Peter is enrolled in.

  While the Pulse app may have started out as a notification tool, it now allows students to click into a course and do a lot of the things they could do in a web browser, such as submit an assignment or participate in a discussion (and possibly even take a quiz – I’ve never tried it so I hope someone will let me know, in the comments, if it’s possible). If your assignment requires a file to be attached, the student will need to navigate to a file on the phone or tablet, which could be tricky, although the student can also attach a file from Google docs, which has a very nice app of its own (at least on my iPhone – I don’t know how well Google tools work on Android devices).

The key takeaway is that students may not be able to do EVERYTHING via the Pulse app, but they can still do a lot.

What about you as the instructor? How can you use the app to make your life easier?

• The first thing to know is that if you go looking for materials from Brightspace to help you use the Pulse app as an instructor, you will be frustrated! There just aren’t any docs or videos for instructors – everything about the app seems geared toward helping students download it and use it. I even called the D2L help line and spoke with Keyla at the Brightspace help desk in Mexico. We had a very nice conversation (in her good English and my terrible Spanish), and in the end she admitted that she couldn’t find any documentation for instructors; she ended up sending me student “help” materials for the app.
• I mentioned that the Pulse app excels at notifications. One particular type of notification is the “push” notification you receive when you SUBSCRIBE to a discussion topic, which is designed to help students stay abreast of discussions but can also help you in the following way: If you have a “Student Q&A” discussion topic, where students can ask (and answer) questions about the course, you could subscribe to this topic, and then you’ll get notified in the app when anyone posts to this topic. This way you can respond quickly when students encounter show-stopping obstacles (“There’s no attachment for Assignment #1” etc). Subscriptions also push emails to your email inbox, but you probably get tons of email already and are more likely to lose your subscription emails among your regular emails. Only the topics you subscribe to will be pushed to your Pulse app in the form of a notification, so it may be easier to stay on top of them there.

The controversy about mobile apps

There’s a school of thought that says students shouldn’t be doing serious academic work on their phones, and that by enabling students to access their courses on their phones, we are doing a disservice to student learning – at least that’s one opinion I heard during a session at a conference I attended in February 2020, right before the big pandemic shut-down.

Another school of thought says that students are already looking at their phones all of the time, so we may as well put their courses on their phones too, making it more likely students will spend some of that screen-time on academic work.

What do you think? Are there some learning activities in your courses that could be optimized for a mobile app? (perhaps a quiz on body parts in a biology class?). Are there some activities, like writing a serious academic paper, that should NEVER be attempted on the small screen of a mobile device? (but the paper could still be submitted via a mobile device?).

What are your experiences with the Pulse app? What do your students tell you about their experiences with the app? Please let us know by leaving a comment in the Comments section below, to help us all learn how to use the Pulse app more effectively.

The best video about the Pulse app

It’s almost four years old, but I thought provided the best objective overview – one not solely focused on marketing the app to students.

As we all engage in service that aligns with primary college goals, the CTLE can be a focusing resource to find out what professional development is available along our continuous improvement journey. The CTLE continues to support our long-standing signature programs Teaching Week and The Andersen Conference, while also offering an ongoing program of professional learning opportunities with college and community partners.

Going forward, this blog will be expanding to proudly include topics and writers from the CTLE – weʻre excited to have them on board next term, and look forward to increasing opportunities for collaboration.

, Photograph by Sourav, CC0

Why flexibility?

Does the thought of giving a student a time extension cause you to bristle? How about allowing students to make revisions to work or retake exams? In higher education, we often associate the amount of time a student spends on schoolwork, performing well on a challenging, timed exam, or meeting strict deadlines with academic rigor (1). Academic rigor is often associated with rigid standards that can be unintentionally exclusionary. In fact, the core idea of academic rigor has even been argued to be exclusionary.

Indeed, the defines rigor as “harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment: severity.” This definition is fitting in higher education if we define academic rigor as getting it right the first time, figuring out how to learn on our own, doing it fast, or spending a lot of time doing it. In their article Reframing Rigor: A Modern Look at Challenge and Support in Higher Education, Campbell, Dortch, and Burt (1) propose that notions of equity and rigor are intersectional. They propose that academic challenges that do not contribute to learning and development have the potential to be exclusionary.

In this post we, propose ways you can introduce flexibility in your online course as a way to enhance equity by reducing exclusionary course requirements disguised as rigor. Ultimately, the goal is to maintain high academic standards for learning and student achievement.

Build flexibility into the course schedule

• Have students complete 8 out of 10 weekly discussion posts during a term. To set this up in D2L, consider making all the discussion posts worth the same amount of points, and follow the instructions to.
• Drop the lowest grade in a set of repeated low-stakes assignments (e.g., weekly reading quizzes or problem sets).
• Offer an “amnesty week” during which students may submit assignments they missed earlier. To do this in D2L, set a due date but leave the end date blank. D2L indicates that the submission is late but still allows students to submit. You can do this from the assignment or from the manage dates tool.

Build flexibility into graded assessments

• Require students to write four essays but give them six or eight choices of subjects.
• Allow students to choose what kind of artifact they will turn in. For example, an instructional video, PPT, or essay. This will require planning in advance, you will want a rubric or well-defined grading criteria for each type of artifact and you will want to make sure that the effort required to complete each artifact is roughly the same. D2L can handle a as assignment submissions.
• Provide opportunities for students to redo assignments. To do this in D2L, make sure the “All submissions are kept” radio button is selected from the Submission and Completion area of the assignment. This way students can submit multiple files. You may also want to consider whether you want a due date or end date on the assignment.
• If you have a comprehensive final exam, allow students to replace a low or missing exam score with their score on the final. This way they have an opportunity to show that they have learned the required material.

Share your practice

Do you build flexibility into your course? We would love to hear what you do in your teaching practice. Please share your ideas, successes, or lessons learned in the comments below. Do you have strong feelings about academic rigor? Share your thoughts to get the conversation started!

References

1. Campbell CM, Dortch D, Burt BA. Reframing Rigor: A Modern Look at Challenge and Support in Higher Education. New Directions for Higher Education. 2018;2018(181):11-23. doi:10.1002/he.20267

Learn how implicit bias can affect grading

We don’t want to have bias influence our grading, but our implicit biases could be affecting how we score student work and assign final grades in a course. Uncovering and working toward removing bias requires looking at our biases from many angles. Inaccurate judgments have the potential not only to alter grades but could negatively affect teacher-student relationships, distort a student’s self-concept, or reduce opportunities to learn (4).

In this post, we are focused on the tools in D2L that can help reduce bias in grading. We acknowledge that technology on its own cannot eliminate bias, but it can help us respond objectively to student work. Below, we offer some suggestions that you can implement in your D2L course with little effort.

Anonymize grading

Research has indicated that biases can influence how a teacher grades student work. For example, in one study, 6th grade teachers gave lower scores to girls in math even though the girls scored better on national standardized tests (2). Another study showed that having prior knowledge of a student’s performance can bias how grades are assigned on future work (3) (also known as halo-bias).

Anonymous Marking is a tool in Brightspace which allows you to review your students’ assignment submissions without knowing the identity of the student. While it is not a one-size-fits-all solution to addressing bias, it can be a useful tool to reduce the influence of implicit bias.

• Use the for grading short answer questions in quizzes
• If you are not using the LMS to accept student work, ask students not to put names on their assignments, rather have them use their G number
• If you wish to give feedback that is attuned to individual students, consider writing personalized feedback after scoring anonymously

Grading habits

Grading can be demanding and overwhelming at times. Have you ever thought about how your mood, attitude, or behaviors around grading or toward students may be affecting how you determine a student’s grade? Below are a few tips for setting yourself up for an objective grading session.

• Don’t grade hungry – when we are tired and hungry we fall back on our defaults which may include biases (1)
• Take breaks while grading (1)
• Don’t always grade in alphabetical order

Share your practice

We hope this series has been helpful in providing you with actionable suggestions for increasing equity in your courses. Do you have suggestions or methods you want to share about how you have worked to reduce bias in your grading practices? We’d love to hear what you’re doing! Please make a comment below to start the conversation.

References

(1) Gordon, Anne, Better Than Our Biases: Using Psychological Research to Inform Our Approach to Inclusive, Effective Feedback (February 1, 2021). 27 Clinical Law Review 195 (2021), Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2021-28, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3777546

(2) Lavy, V. and Sand. E. 2015. On the origins of gender human capital gaps: short and long term consequences of teachers’ stereotypical biases. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20909.

(3) Malouff, & Stein, Sarah & Bothma, & Coulter, & Emmerton, Ashley. (2014). Evidence showing that keeping students anonymous helps prevent halo-based grading bias. Cogent Psychology. 1. 10.1080/23311908.2014.988937.

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Last week we shared some tips on how to improve your course organization by creating consistency within modules and naming conventions and by using dates on assigned materials. This week we share a few more ideas on how to improve consistency and navigation in your course.

Why target the LMS?

D2L Brightspace is the common denominator among almost every course offered at PCC. We are all using the LMS for, at the bare minimum, grade reporting, and PCC offers support to faculty who are using and learning D2L for online teaching.

In a recent survey given by the Online Student Services Team, students were asked “What has made you feel successful in one of your classes?”. The overwhelming majority of responses related to course organization. It was clear that courses with consistent organization and a clear schedule with a consistent rhythm to each week provided the most support for student success.

Why not meet students where they are at? Below, we give some tried and true ways you can use the tools in D2L/Brightspace to improve the organization and consistency of your course.

Course introduction video

Provide an overview video with a “tour” of how to navigate your course in D2L. What you think is intuitive may not be. Some things to include in your overview video are:

• Here’s the syllabus, here’s why it is important
• Here’s the gradebook and how to read it from the student view
• Assignments are due every Monday…
• Here’s how the units, weeks, etc. are organized
• Here is the list of required course materials
• Here’s how to contact me

Check out Media Options from Instructional Support for more information on making a course introduction video. Record your screencast using the student view in D2L so it looks the same as their experience.

Checklists

There is a checklist tool in D2L that has the ability to link to assignments, quizzes, and most other content in your course. Students can check off what they have done in that week or module. If you are linking to publisher content and are unable to add due dates to assignments, you can put the assignments in a checklist to help students know when they are due. Read more from D2L/Brightspace on the .

The screenshot below shows detail of the student view of a checklist in a module in D2L. Students can see a progress bar (1), can checkboxes for the items they have completed (2), and can follow hyperlinks to the activities in the list (3).

Below are some ways you can use checklists in your course.

• Use in each module in the course
• Create module introductions and conclusions with written checklists using “Create a file”
• Create a PDF with a checklist of important dates for the entire course

Organize your Gradebook

You can improve the transparency of your expectations for graded work in your course by using some of the gradebook tools in D2L. The gradebook is one area for which the Faculty Help Desk gets many calls. We know the gradebook tools aren’t always self-explanatory, so we hope these ideas help you create consistency and clarity for students around graded work. First and foremost, make sure all graded work is represented in the gradebook in D2L before the start of class so your students don’t have any surprises. The following resources will help you get your gradebook set up before the term starts.

• Choose how you are going to set up the gradebook, you can use .
• Set the course grade to show from the start so students know where they are throughout the course. There are a lot of nuances with this step so take your time and call an ITS if you need guidance.
• to the gradebook

This wraps up our focus on how to create consistency in your course using tools in D2L. We would love to hear how you create consistency in your course. Please share your ideas and questions below. In our next installment, we will be sharing tools in D2L to help you reduce bias in grading.