Three teaching things: week of May 30
In this issue: facilitating a crossover between online and in-person in blended courses; designing courses for academic integrity; and embedding Kahoot! into PowerPoint
Issue #49
1. Strengthening the Conversation in Blended and Face-to Face Courses
Considering how best to incorporate all the teaching resources you created during your remote-instruction year when returning to on-campus instruction? Let me humbly suggest you should be considering blending your instructional approach: leave the online components of your course that are best-suited for that modality (most broadly—information transmission).
This week’s paper can help inform your approach to blended teaching by detailing a crossover protocol: a structured process “making an explicit link between what happens online and in person” (p. 3). The paper then details eight “basic crossover protocols” (see the table on pp. 5-6 for an overview of these techniques) that emphasize a focus on online discussion posts.
While that limits the paper’s application to courses that include discussion (oral or written) components, thinking about facilitating students’ crossover from online to in-person (and vice versa) will improve any blended experience.
Perrow, M. (2017). Strengthening the Conversation in Blended and Face-to Face Courses: Connecting Online and In- Person Learning with Crossover Protocols. College Teaching, 65(3), 97–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2017.1300869
2. Designing for academic integrity
In this padlet, which accompanied a workshop on digital assessment, author Dr. James Skidmore (University of Waterloo, Canada) details approaches to course design that, create conditions for academic integrity (or, conversely the conditions that dissuade the deviation from academic integrity). This resource offers an introduction to the approaches and assignments and provides links to further resources.
3. Embed Kahoots! into PowerPoints
Kahoot! is a tool that falls broadly into an audience response or assessment category (I’ve seen used most typically as an interactive quiz tool, spiced up under the auspices of a game). One challenge with many of these tools, when they’re coupled with a presentation tool like PowerPoint, is the need to alt-tab (or command-tab) into a browser window to run the quiz.
Kahoot! now offers an PowerPoint plugin that takes that immersion-breaking alt-tab out of the equation.
Thanks to those that provided feedback in last week’s 1-year anniversary readers survey (feel free to participate if you have not done so already). One thing I learned: some readers found publishing on Sunday a bit unusual. So while I author the newsletter on the weekend, I’m going to send the newsletter to arrive in your in-box for Monday morning. Hopefully an improvement?
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Thanks for reading!