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How to assess learning remotely—and reduce students’ temptation to cheat

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Oral finals and frequent low-stakes assessments are just a few alternatives to in-person exams that Jenny Quinn uses to ensure student learning and success.

While it may seem impossible to assess student learning without an in-person exam, Jenny Quinn is one math educator who has been proving that otherwise.

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Jenny Quinn teaches her students via Zoom.

Quinn, who teaches undergraduate mathematics courses at UW Tacoma’s Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, has been experimenting with new approaches to testing. In spring 2020, she gave an oral final exam remotely in her Matrix Algebra course and used frequent, low-stakes mastery-based grading in her Precalculus class. In autumn, she’s organized her two Calculus II classes of 30 students each around a mixture of online and oral assessments, culminating in an individual oral final exam. With planning and TA support, these successful approaches could scale up to larger courses.

Spring 2020—Giving an oral final exam

Quinn was faced with a common problem: how to ensure her exam was testing student learning, rather than their ability to search online for solutions.

“It used to be you could ask students to show their work to be sure they understood the concepts. But now,” she explains, “there are computer algebra systems where you can enter any computational problem and it will be solved symbolically, giving all the intermediate steps.”

Instead, she asked students to meet with her briefly via Zoom to walk her through two of the questions on the test, “so they could show me they understood the concepts and not just procedure.” Even if students looked up the answer, which was allowed since they had the questions in advance, they had to demonstrate that they understood the solution.

Quinn’s inspiration for including an oral component was not solely to discourage cheating. A strong advocate of growth mindset, she has long been interested in mastery-based grading, in which learning competencies are shared up front and students can take assessments multiple times until they master each point.

“There’s no reason to cheat, but it’s more work for me to set up. That said, I’m not testing the right things if the exam has to be done in person.”

Quinn’s oral exams by the numbers:

  • 9 questions total—Students get questions in advance so they can prepare for all nine. “I tell students, ‘You can use any resources. Internet search? Working in teams? That’s OK.’ There was one question in which I asked them to take a proof that we didn’t do in class and either create their own or find one online, cite and critique it. My favorite question was to write five true/false questions for this exam and explain their choices. They had to not only think about the substance of the questions but also how each reflected the learning in the course.”
  • 20 minutes to answer 2 questions from the list of nine—Students choose one, the instructor the other. “If they picked a question from the first half of the quarter, I’d pick one from the second half. If they picked one with a lot of computation, then I’d give them a reflection/synthesis question. I tried to balance it out.”
  • 50 points each—This is the maximum value for each question, based on a holistic grading rubric. “Students are afraid about how they say things (especially if English is not their first language), so I make it clear it’s not about the right words. It’s about the concepts they express. This kind of rubric is subject to bias, so you have to be aware of that. I ask myself if I would rate this answer the same if it were a different student—one I liked more or less—and I go back to the rubric to counteract by own biases. There’s a lot of thinking that has to happen.”
  • -4 points to “pass” on a question—Students can elect to pass on a question up to a maximum of two times but lose four points each time they do.

    • Learn more about Quinn’s oral exam method, questions, rubric and lessons learned

    Community inspiration for new approaches to assessing math

    Because UW exams are offered later than at many other universities, Quinn learned from her peers in the larger community of mathematicians who were giving remote finals earlier in spring.

    She took particular insight from two items on a popular forum: Harvey Mudd’s Francis Su, who posted “7 exam questions for a pandemic (or any other time),” and Rick Cleary of Babson College, who based his final exam on Su’s approach.

    “Su has written a wonderful book called ‘Math for Human Flourishing’ and was trying to align exam practices with what students need to flourish as humans. That was the first trigger,” says Quinn. “Then Rick Cleary shared that he gave an oral final exam based on Su, and I thought ‘I can do this!’”

    Quinn next had to prepare her students for the new exam format so they wouldn’t be surprised.

    She communicates what she’s doing and lessons learned with others via her blog Math in the Time of Corona.

    “The UW pivoted to remote learning earlier than most academic institutions. As president-elect of the Mathematical Association of America, I felt it was important to share my hard-won knowledge with others making the same transition and to offer support by humanizing the experience.”

    Her piece on alternatives to standard exams was the most popular in spring garnering over 1300 views from 70 different countries. Others have joined Quinn in sharing their experiences. She recommends Robert Talbert from Grand Valley State, for example, for his “beautiful series on how he was thinking about his teaching and doing inquiry-based learning in a hybrid setting.”

    Autumn 2020—Scaffolding students’ ability to ‘speak math’

    This quarter, Quinn is continuing to refine her practice. She will give oral final exams again but plans to develop students’ comfort and competence ‘speaking mathematics’ throughout the quarter. She introduced group oral assessments beginning in the second week to help students practice and build community early on. Her revised rubric rewards both individual competence and group accountability. There are two more oral quizzes in weeks five and eight. In each assessment, the group size gets smaller until, by the end of the quarter, students are presenting individually.

    Students appreciate that classmates aren’t tempted or able to cheat

    Quinn has been pleasantly surprised by her students’ reactions. “Students truly appreciate it. They worry about the academic integrity of their fellow students, as much as we do.” Students recommended better scaffolding for learning so they would be even more prepared and familiar with the format of the assessment. In response, this autumn Quinn introduced group oral assessments throughout the quarter. She continues to share via her blog as she updates and refines her practice.

    How to scale this approach to larger classes

    Quinn teaches two classes of 30 students and admits that this might prove challenging—but not impossible—in larger classes. The approach could work if teaching assistants were trained on the rubric and given practice using it in norming sessions prior to assessments to ensure inter-rater reliability across sections.

    Quinn discusses in this short video how remote teaching prompted her to implement oral exams to encourage collaboration, leverage available resources, and maintains individual accountability:

    For additional examples of UW faculty alternatives to timed exams, see Teaching Everywhere faculty blog posts:

    Flexible finals in the pandemic by Holly Barker, Anthropology

    Online finals: Providing flexibility & opportunities for creativity by Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, History

    Teaching physics: Videos instead of midterms by Peter Selkin, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Tacoma.

    Other resources include:

    Teaching Remotely: Assessment page includes information on utilizing alternative assessments, why high-stakes exams don’t transfer well to remote learning, academic integrity, and grading practices for online learning.

    How to Talk to Your Students About Cheating video featuring Professor and Chair of Chemical Engineering Jim Pfaendtner. Learn how to talk to students about cheating — why they cheat and what to say on the first day of class to discourage cheating.

    Timed Exams & Alternatives Teaching Remotely Pop-up seminar video recording, featuring Jenny Quinn and Jennifer Doherty, Biology

    Stirring the imagination

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    As the UW seeks to support data management and analysis more broadly across disciplines, the answer may just lie with Jupyter Notebooks.

     

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    David Shean, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering

    By Ignacio Lobos

    When David Shean started searching for a more effective and interactive tool to teach students how to analyze complex geospatial data sets in his mixed graduate and undergraduate class, he zeroed in on Jupyter Notebooks.

    The Jupyter Notebook is not a laptop — it’s a powerful open-source web application that offers students the opportunity to work with 100 different coding languages. They can combine live code with text and narrative to support their data analysis work, and graphs, equations, videos, animations, maps and other visualizations to explain their results more fully — whether they’re working in the humanities or STEM fields.

    “The notebooks are an amazing teaching and learning tool,” said Shean, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering who carefully built his most recent geospatial data analysis classes around their use.

    “One of the things that makes the notebooks great is that students write code, and immediately see results,” Shean said. “They can interactively tweak, interpret, and repeat until they are satisfied, which enables data-driven discovery.”

    Using their notebooks, students in Shean’s class learned how to analyze geospatial data to answer questions such as, “How much of Whidbey Island would be flooded due to sea level rise if the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted?” “What are the most hazardous roads in Washington state?” “How much snow was on Mt. Rainier yesterday?” “Is the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet?”

    In his class, students worked with sophisticated open-source software packages to visualize a given problem with a geographic component. “The notebooks can be run so that all of the plots are interactive, such as zooming or panning around high-resolution satellite images or clusters of data points on a chart, which is really powerful,” he said.

    Shean partners with UW-IT to launch Jupyter Notebooks project at UW

    Shean has used the notebooks in two pilot projects for UW courses in the past year, most recently in a partnership with UW Information Technology’s Academic Experience Design & Delivery (AXDD) unit.

    “With David’s class and other classes that participated in the pilot, we’re carefully creating an enterprise service to support Jupyter notebooks for teaching and learning,” said Tom Lewis, AXDD director. “We are collaborating with the eScience Institute, UC Berkeley and others for knowledge transfer and system design. The goal is to provide easy-to-use research tools for use in courses.”

    Why Jupyter Notebooks are so powerful

    At the UW, where the Office of the Provost is working to support data management and data analysis more broadly across disciplines, the notebooks fit the bill. Among their advantages:

    • Students in multiple areas of study can use the notebooks to explore and work on a multitude of real-world applications, such as helping a city relieve traffic gridlock, a health department track a viral infection, or a utility reduce operating costs.
    • The notebooks are ubiquitous worldwide, a tool used by professionals to collaborate across multiple fields.
    • Students access their work and share it from anywhere — which is proving valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic, with classes being held remotely. All students need is a web browser and an internet connection, and they’re ready to work.
    • The notebooks lower the entry barrier, bringing powerful tools within the reach of more students.
    • Because students use their own laptops and other devices, the notebooks decrease or eliminate the need for expensive computer labs with limited hours of operation.
    • Faculty can provide a state-of-the-art computing environment to their students with none of the hassles of maintaining it.
    • The notebooks are hosted in the cloud, with powerful servers that can handle the computational work and vast amounts of data.
    • With easier and cheaper access to cloud computing, the notebooks are becoming a more viable and powerful tool in pedagogy.

    And, most importantly, students love them.

    “It is the future,” said Friedrich Knuth, a Ph.D. candidate who participated in Shean’s winter 2019 class.

    “The software is free and open-source, so as a student and young professional, I can take the methods that I learned to develop with me anywhere I go,” Knuth said. “I don’t need to own a powerful machine myself, as all computation is done on the servers hosting the notebook. This lowers the barrier of entry for scientific data analysis and exploration.”

    How Shean built a class using Jupyter Notebooks and other tools

    When Shean made the decision to use the notebooks, he worked with AXDD to carefully build a computing environment to enhance the teaching and learning experience in his classroom. After lengthy discussions about Shean’s needs, AXDD set up the system, maintained it and covered the costs of operations, including buying cloud server time, during the pilot.

    The notebooks are one of several key components that make up Project Jupyter, a non-profit, open-source organization that supports interactive data science and scientific computing with robust online tools.

    “We’re using a JupyterHub for cloud infrastructure, a JupyterLab environment for interactive computing, and the Jupyter Notebooks for teaching and development,” Shean said.

    “The UW-IT support freed me up to focus on the course content, and to develop the notebooks each week,” Shean said. “I developed and tested all course material on the JupyterHub, and the students did all of their lab exercises, homework, and final projects using the same resources. There was never a question about compatibility.”

    Other faculty, he pointed out, “might want to use notebooks for a few labs, or encourage students to use the notebooks as a substitute for MATLAB or Excel. Or, as with my course, the notebooks can provide the foundation.”

    “I perform interactive tutorial/demos with notebooks. All of the lab/homework instructions and questions are embedded in the notebooks. And I designed the notebooks to build in complexity, starting with simple examples to illustrate basic concepts, then adding new datasets and challenges with fewer instructions, so students apply what they did earlier to solve more complex problems with real-world implications,” he said.

    “The Jupyter resources transformed the way I taught the class,” said Shean, a young faculty member who has been in front of the classroom for only a couple of years.

    “Students are very comfortable in the modern tech environment. They get it, and more and more, they’re demanding tools that will allow them to explore and solve large data problems.”

    How to get started with Jupyter Notebook

    In the past year, AXDD has worked with 15 faculty members from different areas of study to understand their teaching needs. It also built and tested a set of JupyterHub/Notebook environments that can be quickly deployed by instructors. The pilot was so successful that UW-IT will be offering the service to faculty starting this fall. Currently, there’s no cost for this service. Visit IT Connect to learn how you can bring the notebooks into your classroom.

    “Students love the notebooks,” Shean said. “They see value in them, and are learning from them. It’s really rewarding to hear.”

    Resources:

    David Shean and Rob Fatland, UW-IT Research Computing Director, will host a session on Jupyter Notebooks at the UW TechConnect Conference, Sept. 2-3.

    Want to use Jupyter Notebook in your class? Visit IT Connect to learn how to acquire it and learn from others

    What is the Jupyter environment? A quick overview
    Shean’s Geospatial Data Analysis course
    Shean’s guide for faculty who want to use Jupyter Notebooks in their course
    Try it out right now
    Read about JupyterHub
    Check out GitHub

    A textbook that can be read on a phone? It’s logical!

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    Philosophy lecturer Ian Schnee‘s e-book about logic has proved to be irresistible to tech-savvy students. And there’s no reason other faculty can’t accomplish the same with their texts.

     

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    Ian Schnee, lecturer, Philosophy

    By using a new e-book in his Introduction to Logic classes, Ian Schnee wanted to engage his students more fully with the material and save them money — as much as $55,000 in just three quarters.

    To make it happen, Schnee wrote and unveiled his own e-book in winter 2019. His Logic Course Adventure, an active learning textbook for formal logic, was his latest effort to modernize the classroom experience with evidence-based teaching and learning approaches with a slight twist: he wanted to take his teaching into students’ natural spaces — think cell phones and other devices — and show them that traditional courses in the social sciences can be exciting and fun.

    “I want to make philosophy fun and engaging for my students — because philosophy is all of these things — but I can’t ask them to read 10-20 pages of dry prose from a book that hasn’t been updated in decades and expect them to come prepared to discuss logic during my lectures,” Schnee said. “The traditional textbooks that are in use today for teaching logic are dense, hard to read, and frankly, boring.”

    The evidence shows that forcing students to read traditional textbooks is not the best way to learn. But if you couple reading to engaging quizzes as they read, they’re more likely to absorb the material, Schnee said. And so far, his highly interactive e-book has accomplished that and more, his students agree.

    “I was at first a bit wary of this e-book because I believe my class was one of the first to use it,” student Kelsey Kinoshita said. “But it really contributed to my learning, and the class would not have been the same without it.”

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    Student interacting with the textbook on their phone. Photo: Elizabeth Lowry

    Alex Saveau read the e-book on the go on his phone, sometimes on the way to a part-time job – and found the seemingly endless number of problems captivating.

    “What really makes a difference is that you can engage with the textbook,” Saveau said. “For other classes, I find myself fighting to not drift off into a daydream while reading the textbook.”

    But Schnee’s e-book challenged him constantly with quick short quizzes, even after just reading a few sentences. The constant problems that require an answer before moving on to another section “keep you focused and accountable,” Saveau said.

    E-book becomes latest piece in modern teaching environment

    During the past decade, Schnee has carefully deployed new technologies and teaching approaches inside and outside the classroom to increase learning and engagement.

    He “flipped” his classrooms when appropriate, and when Poll Everywhere, the UW’s preferred classroom response system, was introduced at the University in 2016, he became one of its earliest adopters.

    During lectures, Schnee uses Poll Everywhere and other evidence-based teaching strategies such as collaborative group work, think-pair-share activities — where students work together to come up with answers — and the judicious use of random calling, which increases participation while decreasing instructor bias. With the e-book, he wanted to get the same engagement — only this time outside the classroom.

    A very active e-book

    Everyone learns better by actively engaging with the material, so Schnee knew his e-book would have to do a lot more heavy lifting than a regular book, even a typical e-book. E-books have been around for a while, but most are passive like their paper-based counterparts.

    “I wanted to revolutionize the paper book, and create an e-book that was fully interactive, with intuitive software and no learning curve for my students,” Schnee said.

    He had been thinking about it for 10 years, but it was only until recently that tech caught up to his vision. In 2018, he spent nine months writing his book and building his own website to host it. The latter was more by necessity than design. There are plenty of e-book platforms on the web, but many are quite costly — as much as $1,000 per year — or unwieldy for creators and users alike. So, Schnee learned programming to build his own.

    “I called it an adventure, because I wanted the book to be fun,” Schnee said. “Reading separate sections of the e-book doesn’t take a lot of time, and I discovered that many students did all of the problems. And they kept telling me they wanted more and more problems. It was quite a pleasant surprise.”

    Here’s a typical example from Ian Schnee’s e-book. To get the answer, visit the site and work through the problem:

    1.1 Welcome to the Force

    A file folder lands on your desk with a thud. You’re a rookie police detective, so the Sergeant puts you on the case no one else wants. A bank robbery. Inside the file you see pictures of three suspects: Pia, Quinn, and Raquel.

    “We’ve got all three of them in custody,” the Sergeant says. “At least one of them is involved, but I can’t keep them past morning. You need to figure out who did it by 8 a.m.”

    Now you know why no one else wanted this case. It takes you all night but you finally get through the file. By 7 a.m., here’s what you’ve figured out:

    1. One or more of these people is guilty: Pia, Quinn and Raquel.

    2. No one else was involved.

    3. Pia never works without Quinn. So if Pia is guilty, so is Quinn.

    4. Raquel never works alone.

    What do you tell the Sergeant?

    Former student Andrew Stahl was happy to put on his “rookie cop” thinking cap to come up with the answer.

    “The e-book enabled us to learn the fundamentals of logic on our own so class time could be spent working on more complex problems and answering student questions,” he said. “I certainly found it more engaging than a regular book, as the embedded problems keep you from moving forward without first understanding what you have already read.”

    So, you want to create an e-book

    If you’re interested in creating an e-book, Schnee has some advice.

    Don’t go it alone: Schnee tells colleagues there’s no reason they have to go at it alone. So, if you are ready to get started with an e-book, he will be happy to chat with any faculty member about his own experiences and process in putting together the logic adventure, and point them to the appropriate resources, including UW Libraries and other faculty who are involved in evidence-based teaching.

    Schnee created his e-book from a combination of open-source software and his own code, and he’s hoping that instructors at other schools will one day use it as well.

    Schnee also notes that every feature of his e-book is based on “empirically supported pedagogy.”

    Other pointers to keep in mind:

    • Start small: There’s no need to write an entire textbook at once. Schnee’s first draft only covered 75 percent of his course material, but instructors could start with just one chapter or assignment.
    • Use ready-made software: For instructors who don’t want to make their own website, they can start with Pages in Canvas, which have much of the same functionality.
    • Think accessibility: Schnee is committed to making his e-book highly accessible, building in captioning and alt-text.
    • Don’t crash: He learned a quick lesson about managing high internet traffic (his website crashed on the first week of class, for four straight days, before he fixed the problem).
    • Make it interactive: For now, his e-book is not being used for grading. The problems are for practice only, but students really want them, so he is planning on doubling them in an upgraded version.
    • Iterate: An e-book is a living book. Feedback from students continue to make it better, and Schnee adds more problems as necessary.

    Not just for philosophy

    Schnee remarks that e-books like his are not just for philosophy and logic. His students agree:

    “Since this textbook was for logic, which has problem sets, I think it may work well for other science and math-based classes,’’ Kinoshita said. “The strengths of Ian’s textbook — easy to understand, concise, entertaining examples, straightforward, engaging — are what would transfer best in creating textbooks/e-books for other classes.”

    Ideas for teaching when operations are suspended

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    When the snow began to fall in Winter 2019, instructors across the UW had to think quickly about how to keep their courses on track.

    Instructors such as Haideh Salehi-Esfahani and Scott Spaulding, who were already using technology tools in their teaching, were well-equipped to ride out the storm. Others, like Riki Thompson, adapted quickly.

    These three instructors tell their stories and share tips about how they ensured instruction continued despite the snowfall. Their best collective advice for people who don’t already use Zoom or Panopto in their teaching is to think about starting now, regardless of the weather.

    Whether it’s snow, road closures, a broken ankle, or a conference presentation, faculty are making good use of teaching technologies to keep students on track when missing class is unavoidable.

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    Scott Spaulding, senior lecturer, education

    When familiar, Zoom conference calling is an easy back-up

    During Winter 2019, Scott Spaulding was teaching a graduate course in which Zoom conference call technology is a regular feature.

    When class was cancelled due to snow, Spaulding wasn’t sure if he was allowed to hold class remotely when campus was closed. “I wanted to have class and the students did, too, but I didn’t know if we could,” until a provost message clarified that classes could meet. “That was good to have that guidance from the provost’s office.”

    Many of the students in Spaulding’s program are teachers who join the class remotely from work. As a result, the program sets guidelines for how students use Zoom in the course.

    “We ask them to connect from a place that’s distraction-free. What’s behind you? What’s your connection speed like? We emphasize this for our program at orientation, before they come to any class. Students might be running late and want to connect via phone while they’re driving. We say don’t do it.”

    When the snow hit, students were familiar with the tool, although they had to figure out how to set themselves up at home. Spaulding suggests patience with the unexpected, “You can’t prevent everything from happening—a kid walks on camera, a cat—one day we had six cats wandering around on screen.”

    When Zoom is not an option, try Panopto or Canvas modules

    Spaulding was prepared in 2019 for the snow, but knows what it’s like to be caught off-guard.

    A different quarter, he had to miss the second day of class to attend a conference. He says, “I thought we could meet via Zoom.” But since it was early in the quarter, students didn’t know how.

    Instead, Spaulding created a Canvas module. “It was super-explicit with discussions, readings, and the need for them to comment.” He made a Panopto video from his hotel room of slides and uploaded the video to the Canvas page. “I told students to engage in discussion at the same time we would have met in class. I don’t normally use modules but it worked great this time.”

    Tips:

    • Be familiar with how to use tools yourself before asking students to use them.
    • Make sure your students know what to expect. Tell them, for example, ‘If we have inclement weather, we’ll use Zoom.’
    • Set expectations for access to a computer with a strong connection and a camera—and a quiet place. Tell students, ‘Don’t call from a coffee shop.’
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    Riki Thompson, associate professor, Rhetoric & Writing Studies, UW Tacoma

    Seminar students led discussions via Zoom conference calling

    When the snow started to fall in Winter quarter 2019, Associate Professor Riki Thompson was leading a group of graduate students doing independent study. She quickly looked for alternate ways for the group to hold their seminar discussion.

    Students had prepared to discuss the reading and facilitate a conversation—a conversation that if done remotely would require conference call technology.

    Thompson recalls, “We thought about Skype but didn’t know if it had multiple screens. We talked about doing Google Hangouts, but one of the students had trouble with it. Just trying to identify the tech we could use took some time.”

    Thompson had a free, personal Zoom account. It seemed the best option with one important exception: sessions time out after 40 minutes. But Thompson found a creative workaround. She told students, “We’ll talk for 40 minutes and then take a five-minute break—like in face-to-face classes—and then return.” Building in a five-minute break gave her time to start a new Zoom session, while avoiding feeling rushed.

    The students set to present during the session emailed handouts, and the class took advantage of Zoom’s chat function during the discussion. “If someone had a burning question, they could add it to the chat feature, so we could return to it,” says Thompson.

    While the group didn’t use the shared screen because everyone already had the handouts, Thompson reports that next time she would use that feature to highlight elements of the document.

    Tips:

    • Check to see if you have access to a Zoom account…before the snow starts falling
    • If you don’t have access, encourage your department to get Zoom or set up a personal account
    • Tailor your use of tools such as chat function and screen sharing to the discussion
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    Haideh Salehi-Esfahani, principal lecturer, economics

    Posting a recorded lecture kept a large class on track

    When a winter storm shut down UW’s Seattle campus in 2019, Haideh Salehi-Esfahani had not prepared but regardless was ready. Her ECON 200 Principles of Micro-Economics students—all 450 of them—watched a video recording she posted of the lecture she had given on the same day the year before.

    Salehi-Esfahani, a Principle Lecturer of Economics, uses the lecture-capture tool Panopto in her larger classes, whatever the weather, as a matter of course. Every lecture is recorded and then posted on the course web site. The video shows both the instructor and everything she projects on the screen during the class.

    According to Salehi-Esfahani, posting lectures regularly supports her students’ learning and “gives students a chance to review the lecture, even in a small class.”

    Posting lectures has the added benefit of maintaining continuity when a class is unable to meet. “What’s really nice about this,” says Salehi-Esfahani, “if you have consistent lectures, students don’t miss anything.”

    For those who don’t have a handy archive of last years’ lecture videos or are teaching a new course, it’s possible to use the same technology to record a lecture from home. Faculty can even learn how to use Panopto remotely, as well.

    That said, Salehi-Esfahani suggests taking advantage of available training—before you need it. “It’s worth spending a few minutes with the guys at Learning Technologies to learn how to do this.”

    Snow can close a campus but is not the only reason a class can’t meet. “You may go to a conference or you may get sick,” says Haideh, “this is not just for winter weather.”

    Tips:

    • Plan ahead for how you’ll teach when your class can’t meet
    • Practice with the tool before you need it
    • Attend a Panopto training by Learning Technologies

    Using evidence to improve teaching and learning

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    The Evidence-Based Teaching (EBT) program supports faculty to try new, research-based teaching strategies in classrooms across disciplines.

     

    Across the UW, faculty are committed to using the best possible teaching strategies to enhance student learning — whether that learning takes place in large lecture classes or small seminars, in Philosophy or in Oceanography.

    What are the benefits of being an EBT member?

    • Improved teaching and student learning outcomes
    • Expedited support from the Center for Teaching & Learning and Learning Technologies
    • Mentorship from faculty across campus who are implementing best practices into their own teaching
    • A community of peers invested in improving their own teaching and supporting one another
    • Recognition from the provost
    • Opportunities to advance as a leader in teaching and learning at the UW

    What’s expected of EBT members?

    • Attend biweekly meetings
    • Conduct peer observations
    • Participate in online discussion boards

    Join EBT

    To join the 2018-19 cohort or to learn more about the program, contact UWebt@uw.edu

    At the same time, few faculty have time or support to continuously evolve their teaching — or necessarily know where to begin. Frequently, instructors learn to teach on the job without formal training, and community around teaching and learning can be hard to come by.

    Enter the Evidence-Based Teaching Program (EBT): a program offering mentorship, a community of peers, opportunities for leadership, and expedited support from the Center for Teaching and Learning and Learning Technologies to faculty in all disciplines. The EBT program also offers opportunities to innovate: to use research on pedagogy, and the support of teaching colleagues, to implement new techniques and tools to become better teachers, and help students become better learners.

    “From the first meeting, I knew that this is what I’d been looking for: a program that wants to prioritize empirical work in teaching, and support faculty to continuously improve their teaching,” says Lecturer in Philosophy Ian Schnee, who joined EBT in 2016. Over the past two years, participation in EBT has “transformed my teaching,” Schnee says.

    A program built for growth

    EBT began in 2015 as part of the Office of the Provost’s Teaching & Learning initiative, in response to a meta-analysis, co-authored by UW researchers including Principal Lecturers in Biology Scott Freeman and Mary Pat Wenderoth, that showed dramatic gains in student learning when instructors use active learning techniques. A small team in Academic & Student Affairs, led by Senior Director Marisa Nickle, partnered with Wenderoth to design the pilot.

    The program takes a three-phase approach: Exploration, Implementation and Research. Faculty can participate for just the Exploration quarter, in which they read literature around teaching and learning (as extensively as they’d like) and develop goals for their own courses. Those who stay on for an Implementation quarter then implement those goals with support and mentorship from colleagues who have more experience with EBT. Some faculty are now even conducting their own research. Members can progress through the program’s mentoring ladder, from early-stage participants to group coaches or “leads” — allowing professional development opportunities for tenure-track faculty and lecturers alike.

    Graphic explaining the three phases of the EBT program.
    EBT has seen enormous growth over the past three years, largely through word of mouth, as participants share their experiences with colleagues. It continues to attract instructors interested in learning about education research and implementing what they learn in real time, with support from an interdisciplinary community of peers.

    The program now has three “leads” who have moved up the mentoring ladder: Schnee, Mikelle Nuwer, senior lecturer in Oceanography, and Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, principal lecturer in English. Faculty from over 50 departments have engaged with the program, from all three campuses; over 13,000 students have taken EBT-informed courses; and the new 2018-2019 cohort is predicted to include over one hundred faculty participants.

    Exploring the research — and implementing new, innovative teaching practices

    In the first two phases of the EBT program, members explore existing research on teaching that applies to their own unique contexts. They meet regularly to discuss what they’ve read, as well as their own goals and potential challenges, and they observe at least two other participants’ courses. Those who stay on then implement their findings in their own classrooms, while continuing to meet in small groups to share and troubleshoot.

    Mikelle Nuwer tends to teach large lecture courses in Oceanography — and like many faculty, she used to rely in large part on a traditional lecture format. But reading and discussing the evidence on active learning, and receiving support from EBT peers as she implemented new strategies, has fundamentally changed her teaching, she says.

    Mikelle Nuwer teaching photo
    “EBT has been really important in showing me again both why I love to teach and how I can do it better,” says Mikelle Nuwer, senior lecturer in Oceanography. Photo credit: Shantelle Liu.

    Now, she relies on active learning techniques that have been shown to be more effective at engaging students. These include assigning more collaborative group work and think-pair-share activities, and using clickers to increase engagement. Nuwer has seen the results for herself, she says. Even in large lectures, more students participate more actively, more often.

    “Because of the diversity of our students, having a toolbox — tools to engage different learning styles — is really important,” she says.

    And faculty are using evidence to do more than just restructure class time. Research is continuously being published on everything from online and hybrid teaching, to assessment strategies, to creating inclusive classrooms.

    “On any aspect of teaching, there’s evidence out there,” says Kristi Straus, who recently stepped down as EBT lead to serve as acting director of the Environmental Studies program. “In EBT, it’s the job of lead faculty to help other faculty find that literature, and then help them apply it to their own contexts.”

    Opportunities for original research and leadership

    While most EBT participants join an Exploration or Implementation group, some connect to the program in a Research group. These participants focus on conducting their own classroom research to close gaps between teaching and learning . “Faculty may not have the critical mass or the expertise in their own departments to do research on teaching,” says Colleen Craig, senior lecturer in Chemistry and Academic & Student Affairs Teaching Fellow. “A crucial thing that EBT offers is an outlet for high-quality, rigorous education research in faculty’s own courses.”

    The program also offers unique opportunities for leadership. Participants receive mentorship and collaborate with peers throughout each phase of EBT, but they can also move up the mentoring ladder to become coaches, and continue to learn through leading others.

    Building community around teaching, across disciplines

    Ian Schnee teaching
    Ian Schnee, lecturer in Philosophy, makes use of polling tools such as Poll Everywhere in his large lecture classes – an evidence-based technique to increase student engagement. Photo credit: Shantelle Liu.

    Ian Schnee says that finding a community of faculty invested in teaching has been one of the most valuable aspects of EBT. “It’s great to meet all these other instructors whose fundamental mission is to teach well,” he says. Nuwer agrees. “The support we’ve gotten to create plans and implement new tools has been incredible,” she says, “but so are the things we learn from each other, and the ability to discuss our challenges and successes.”

    The interdisciplinary peer group can have an enormous, even surprising impact. Approaches more common to teaching in the humanities can help STEM instructors think differently about their own habits, and vice versa. Meanwhile, says Schnee, “it becomes apparent that we do so many things in common. Everyone teaches critical reasoning; everyone strives to do more than teach facts, but to teach students how to apply facts and problem-solve,” he says.

    Nuwer, for one, developed new assessment techniques for her Oceanography courses after observing how EBT colleague Gillis-Bridges evaluates student work in her English courses. “Kimberlee’s assessment tools were so different,” Nuwer says. “To see what she expects from her students inspired me.” Now, Nuwer uses a combination of assessments in addition to exams, including having students create videos or posters — techniques borrowed from Gillis-Bridges and other colleagues in other fields.

    Ultimately, these interactions across disciplines benefit students. “Because I have more diversity of assessment, I see all my students do better,” says Nuwer. “It allows more students to show different kinds of strengths.”

    Looking ahead

    After three years as a pilot program, EBT has found a new home in the Center for Teaching & Learning. “It’s a natural fit with the expertise of CTL consultants,” says Colleen Craig, who now works with the CTL to support the transition and the program’s continued growth. “We’re thrilled to take on the EBT program,” says CTL Director Beth Kalikoff, “because it runs on the creative and scholarly energies of UW faculty.”

    “In addition to building community among teachers at UW, EBT is a way to contribute to the broader community of education research. It all has downstream benefits.”

    – Colleen Craig, senior lecturer in Chemistry

    The program has the potential to grow in a number of ways: by bringing in more faculty from more departments; by encouraging new faculty to participate in their first few years teaching; and by supporting original research from EBT participants on the scholarship of teaching and learning — research they can publish and add to the growing body of evidence.

    And EBT’s impact can extend to the departmental level, as departments such as Public Health and Philosophy have discovered. The Philosophy department has launched a new committee, led by Schnee, to review findings from EBT groups and potentially implement EBT-based techniques across Philosophy curricula. “The EBT program is helping the Philosophy Department to bring best practices to the entire department, helping us to think outside the box to make our courses more engaging and effective,” says Andrea Woody, chair of Philosophy.

    Katie Kirkland, project manager in the Office of the Provost, managed the pilot and worked closely with EBT leads to develop the program in its first two years of growth. “EBT not only helps the university fulfill its mission to be a superb teaching institution — to be not just an R1 but a ‘T1’,” says Kirkland. “It has also led to greater collaboration among departments across campus that support teaching faculty.”

    Kalikoff agrees. “EBT is changing cultures of teaching at UW,” she says, “because the faculty participants, coaches and leads care so deeply about sharing their passion for discovery with students and with each other.”

    Linking classroom to community with technology

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    A geography workshop paired its students with nonprofit organizations to help solve critical community issues, offering a model of how to bring service learning into the classroom.

    Sarah Elwood, Professor of Geography
    Sarah Elwood, Professor of Geography. Photo credit: Lisa Faustino.

    Two fundamental questions help shape Professor Sarah Elwood’s approach to teaching a capstone course in the Department of Geography.

    “What do I want my students to learn? And what does the world around us need?”
    These are important issues for Elwood and the students who participate in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Workshop, an upper-level course that uses emerging technologies and the power of spatial data to tackle the critical needs of community organizations serving underrepresented populations.

    “One of the many things we do in the geography department is to share with students our long-term commitment to public service and scholarship,” says Elwood, who has been widely recognized for her work inside and outside the classroom.

    “We have a deep commitment to giving students meaningful assignments that engage them in community service and prepare them with the skills they need once they leave the University,” she says.

    An example of that commitment was the most recent GIS workshop that Elwood taught, with about 40 students and two TAs working alongside organizations such as the South King County Food Coalition, Northwest Justice Project, Statewide Poverty Action Network, and Real Change News, a newspaper sold by the homeless in the Seattle area.

    “All of the groups have pressing needs, and the urgency of the work makes the classroom experience real for the students,’’ Elwood says.

    Linking class work to real world experiences is a valuable teaching and learning tool. And the UW geography department offers a model for other departments to emulate those experiences in their own workshops or classes.

    It is certainly an approach that has worked well for the students, offering a tough challenge with a great payoff, said Jacqueline Ines, a former student who worked with the South King County Food Coalition, a group of 12 food banks collectively serving more than 35,000 families each year. The coalition partnered with the workshop to help find unserved potential clients and develop strategies to connect people in need to food bank services in a decentralized geographic area.

    “This was one of my favorite projects to work on because it was equally fun and stressful to have a real-life audience to present our work to who would be utilizing the findings we ended up producing,” Ines says.

    Mapping data to help communities solve problems

    Geography students learn to use GIS — at its most basic, a software for gathering, managing and analyzing geographic data. And because it is deeply rooted in geography, that data is integrated into maps — where information is more easily brought to life.

    Practically every field of study uses GIS to make maps that help them better understand an issue and solve problems. Whether someone is studying loss of habitat in the swamps of Florida, the effects of climate change on economically undeveloped island nations, or the opioid epidemic in the Midwest, you can bet that GIS tools are being used to map it all in order to understand the root causes and ultimately offer solutions.

    These are some of the reasons Professor of Geography, Timothy Nyerges founded the workshop nearly two decades ago. He wanted students to use their GIS skills to gain a better understanding of environmental and sustainability issues. Elwood started teaching the workshop shortly after she came to the University in 2006, shifting the focus of her course to social justice and poverty issues. Today, professors take turns teaching the workshop, with topics switching back and forth. Professor Suzanne Withers will be teaching the workshop in spring 2019.

    But no matter the field under study, Elwood says acquiring and working with data is difficult — and often quite expensive. That makes it inaccessible to community organizations, including food banks and environmental nonprofits, seeking to improve their decision-making. That’s where the partnership with the UW students comes in.

    GIS has migrated to the web and cloud computing, and accessing, analyzing and applying the needed data is a complex undertaking. Putting a map together for use by a client such as a food bank requires specialized skills and teamwork, and GIS students are versed in a number of the technologies needed.

    As geographers, says Elwood, “we bring the technical expertise, but our students quickly learn that our partners bring rich community expertise.”

    How one student project showed food banks where to focus efforts

    Sarah Elwood, Professor of Geography
    Students work closely with their South King County Food Coalition community project partners during the workshop. Courtesy of Sarah Elwood.

    Consider the work of Ines and her fellow students with the food coalition, Elwood says.

    “We use Census data in a lot of our GIS work,” Elwood said. “But the Census doesn’t ask, ‘Are you hungry?’ And that’s a fundamental question that needs to be asked if we are trying to analyze gaps in services in a particular community.”

    The South King County Food Coalition was seeking to answer that fundamental question, as well as several others, when it started working with the geography department. The coalition has been considering whether to start a mobile van service to deliver food to some of their most vulnerable clients, including elderly residents living in isolated areas with no public transportation and single parents who have little time to travel to a food bank. But it needed to know where those clients were.

    Ines and her team set to work. Using GIS, they identified and mapped regions in South King County that were underserved by the food coalition, explored the prospect of introducing a mobile delivery service to the Des Moines Area Food Bank’s operations, and compiled an analysis of data to locate potential long-term volunteers to help grow the coalition’s fresh produce at Elk Run Farm.

    “While we all collectively worked on the end-product, we were able to split parts of the projects out to those who were comfortable extracting and analyzing the types of data we had to investigate for each individual part,” Ines said. “Two of my partners focused more on the bivariate choropleth map (a map that uses color to show quantities within a geographical area) because they did the most research on the data that was used to create that map, while another partner and I were primarily responsible for the hot spot map (a map that uses statistical analysis to define areas of high occurrence versus areas of low occurrence).

    I think we created a helpful map for them,” she said.

    And their work is likely to pay off in big ways, Elwood said. “They built a realistic model that showed a need in several areas.”

    Ultimately, the workshop is not just about accurately mapping data. “We want our students to bring together what they have learned here over four years about technology, race, class and poverty,” Elwood said, “and integrate these lessons so they can effectively support communities that are often marginalized and underrepresented.”

    Elwood’s top tips for successful community partnerships:

    Look for opportunities to bring real world experience into the classroom

    Elwood, and Nyerges before her, identified real world applications for what they’re teaching their students. “Our workshop is not just about geography,” Elwood said. “My students learn about social justice issues, public service and collaboration.” They suggest looking for real world applications in your field, such as what the Henry M. Jackson School of
    International Studies did for its capstone projects.

    Define the relationship

    “I don’t use the language of ‘client.’ They are colleagues, project partners,” Elwood says about community organizations that agree to work with workshop participants. “We are working together to find solutions, so we strive to teach humility, and learn humility.” She also makes sure that any organization is committed to a long-term partnership with the UW. She suggests defining what the workshop needs as well as what partners need, and ask organizations to “Be a good partner to our students.”

    Balance your teams

    Students bring all kinds of experiences, and that’s particularly important in a workshop that relies heavily on tech tools. So make sure each student team is balanced, such as Ines’ team. And don’t overlook the intangibles. UW students come from all social and class backgrounds, and they have much to learn from one another. Help them recognize how these differences can make for a better team.

    Learn More:

    Read Professors Elwood’s and Nyerges’ biographies, visit a leading commercial GIS company’s showcase site to learn how different groups use the technology, check out how to make a bivariate choropleth map, and don’t miss Real Change’s article that includes GIS workshop data.

    The “global flip”: a new model for international learning

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    A new course add-on option adds short-term travel to international, online collaboration — helping more students to have rich global learning experiences, at home and abroad.

    Teaching sustainability through international partnership

    Kristi Straus, lecturer, Program on the Enivronment
    Kristi Straus, lecturer, Program on the Enivronment

    Kristi Straus, lecturer in the College of the Environment, knew that her students could learn an enormous amount about sustainability issues if they could place them in more global context. But traditional study abroad programs aren’t always feasible, or accessible, for many students.

    So when Straus was approached by the Academic & Student Affairs in Fall 2017 to design and pilot a new “global flip” course model, she jumped at the chance to add a short-term study abroad option to her introductory course on sustainability. Straus partnered with professors at Tsinghua University in Beijing to design an international — and internationally collaborative — component to her ENVIR 239 Sustainability: Personal Choices, Broad Impacts course. The 15 students who enrolled in the “global flip” option (of 80 total students in the course) worked alongside their peers in China to tackle real environmental issues in both countries — first online, then in-person — without the time or cost of traditional study abroad.

    Using technology to “flip the classroom” on a global scale

    Straus had long practiced the “flipped classroom”: in which students study course content outside of class via recorded lecture or course texts, and do more active learning during class time. The idea — increasingly popular nationwide — is that “flipping” makes best use of learning time, as instructors can support students through the more applied learning activities in the classroom.

    A “global flip” course combines a flipped classroom with Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). Sometimes called “virtual exchange,” COIL refers to any method that uses technology to bring global experiences into classrooms or curricula. In COIL courses, faculty in different nations loosely sync their curricula so that students collaborate on projects in international groups.

    In Straus’ course, “flipping” a COIL course meant that students read materials and watched lectures outside of class; during class, they worked collaboratively amongst themselves and with their Tsinghua peers. Throughout the course, students on both campuses connected online — via WeChat, online discussion boards and video conferencing — to think critically about how personal choices affect social, economic and environmental sustainability. They shared their experiences with assignments and activities, and compared sustainability issues, policies and cultural norms in the U.S. and China.

    “It is certainly innovative,” says Straus of combining COIL with a “flipped” classroom. “It helps us to learn together across boundaries, to use technology and the skills of our students, while also teaching our students multicultural, multi-disciplinary collaboration and problem-solving, virtually. I can’t imagine more important skills for this generation.”

    Maximizing the short-term study abroad

    UW Students at the Gaobeidian Waste Water Treatment Plant learned about how waste water is managed in Beijing. Photo credit: Shunxi Liu.
    UW Students at the Gaobeidian Waste Water Treatment Plant learned about how waste water is managed in Beijing. Photo credit: Shunxi Liu.

    In addition, the “global flip” includes short-term study abroad — adding travel and on-the-ground applied learning to the experience.

    At the end of the term, during exams week, the UW students traveled to Beijing for 10 days. Together with their Tsinghua peers, UW students attended lectures, went on field trips and collaborated on course projects. They saw Chinese sustainability efforts at work through field trips to industry and government labs, and vast solar and wind farms. They also explored Beijing, including the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, to learn about Chinese culture and history, and to think about how cultural and political norms influence sustainability.

    A short-term study abroad allows more students to access immersive international experiences. The cost of going abroad is much lower than a full-quarter program, and students with tight timelines to graduation or restrictive course requirements in their majors can more easily manage the travel schedule.

    Placing learning in global context

    For UW students, says Straus, there is enormous value in having cross-cultural conversations around pressing global challenges, including sustainability — whether those conversations take place online or in person. Students not only learn about another nation’s sustainability issues and policies, but they learn that sustainability has everything to do with cultural norms and ways of thinking about the environment.

    Straus emphasizes that the diversity among both UW students and Tsinghua students enhanced everyone’s learning experience as well. About half of her 15 UW students were international students from China — and many of the Tsinghua students were international students as well, from Spain, Brazil, Hong Kong and elsewhere. For the UW Chinese international students, the course offered an opportunity to work with scholars at the prestigious Tsinghua, and to learn about environmental sectors in China where they might return to work after college. For all students at both universities, international and domestic students alike offered distinct insights around relationships between sustainability and culture.

    A model with far-reaching impact

     

     

    “This program is not just about environment and sustainability. It’s about comparing two countries and building a community of global citizens.”

    — Mike Liu, class of 2018, Environmental Studies major

    The “global flip” builds potentially long-lasting connections across institutions, faculty and even nations. “I see this program as planting the seed for future environmental collaboration between the U.S. and China,” says UW student Shunxi Liu, “and it was exciting to be part of it.”

    This highly transferable model is inspiring others, across disciplines. UW instructors in departments ranging from English and Philosophy to Oceanography are currently seeking partners in countries around the world to teach global flip classes of their own. Proposed courses include titles such as PHILOSOPHY 149: Existentialism and Film and ENVIRONMENT 300: Diversity and Ecology of Coral Reefs.

    “Global flip” tips

    • Sync schedules carefully. Syncing courses across nations means accounting for different scheduling challenges, such as time differences. But it also means making sure that academic calendars can be coordinated. In addition, advance planning is needed to make sure that assignments follow similar sequences, and that topics are introduced at a similar pace.
    • Set clear expectations for all partners. From the start, communicate with partner instructors to make sure expectations are clear for all sides (for example, what will collaboration look like? For students? For instructors?). Keep lines of communication open, and check in with partner instructors regularly.
    • Recruit early (and everywhere). A mix of student disciplinary backgrounds, and of international and domestic students, brings diverse perspectives and adds to everyone’s experience, says Straus. Make use of advisors and reach out to specific schools and colleges to recruit a wide range of students. Students can also be encouraged to apply for scholarships through the Office of Global Affairs — which can often cover the full cost of short-term study abroad.
    • Choose tools strategically. Decide what COIL platforms will be easy and accessible for students on all campuses to use. Also, get help from UW Academic Technologies, who Straus says were an enormous help in navigating the complex challenges of the Chinese firewall.


    Watch the global flipped classroom video on YouTube.

    Resources for faculty:

    UW Study Abroad partners with faculty to develop, plan and run programs on programmatic, logistical, and health and safety fronts.

    UW Bothell COIL Initiative: A fellowship program to support faculty and staff across UW’s three campuses to establish online international collaborations.

    UW Tacoma COIL Fellows Program: A fellowship program that links UW courses with courses in different countries through real-time and asynchronous technologies.

    Global Innovation Fund: A fund to provide initial support for initiatives and programs that enhance the UW’s global engagement and reach.

    The Center for Teaching and Learning and Academic Technologies offer support for global teaching collaborations.

    The power of online learning

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    Evans School and Academic and Student Affairs build a powerful platform for learning — and help improve health in Africa

    Scott Fritzen, associate professor, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
    Scott Fritzen, associate professor, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance

    When Associate Professor Scott Fritzen was asked to help craft and teach a long-distance program for mid-career African health professionals at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, he jumped at the opportunity to improve public health in Africa through executive education.

    A well-crafted program — with the bulk of the work conducted via live online classes — would need innovative and easy to use e-learning tools to succeed, he thought.

    “We were seeking to build a tightly-knit community of health experts from a half dozen African countries — like-minded colleagues who would continue to work together to improve health outcomes throughout Africa long after classes ended,” Fritzen said.

    Health professionals from six African countries participated in a pilot long-distance learning program at the Evans School.
    Health professionals from six African countries participated in a pilot long-distance learning program at the Evans School.

    So they partnered with online teaching experts at the Office of the Provost, and together they crafted a program backed by easy-to-use technologies that were quickly adopted by the participants and Evans faculty in the first International Program in Public Health Leadership held last fall.

    The strategy worked better than expected, with the online tools playing a key role in helping the first cohort build skills as well as professional and personal relationships.

    Financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the program focused heavily on individual coaching and mentoring, online and at the Seattle campus, with the goal of developing leadership, problem-solving and negotiation skills.

    Group discussions came easily when the fellows arrived in Seattle because they got to know each other online.
    Group discussions came easily when the fellows arrived in Seattle because they got to know each other online.

    “Our goal was to re-create the Evans classroom experience in an online long-distance course,” said Justin Marlowe, associate dean for Executive Education at the Evans School. “For us, it wasn’t enough to simply have one of our faculty members lecture online. The fellows would be coming to the Seattle campus after 10 weeks of online classes, so we wanted to build community before they arrived by providing a genuine, interactive experience.”

    The pilot’s success has attracted attention from other UW departments that are interested in enhancing the online teaching and learning experience for the general student population — not just for professional continuing education. The Evans School is building on its success, applying lessons it learned from the fist program to its second, which started in the spring.

    Partnering for success with Academic and Student Affairs

    Last year, the Evans School asked UW-IT’s Learning Technologies, now part of Academic and Student Affairs in the Office of the Provost, to work with them to build the new program from scratch.

    Learning Technologies has been focused on refining the online teaching and learning experience, and its staff understood the ins and outs of various technologies and how best to apply them according to circumstances.

    “We were very fortunate that they asked us to partner with them,” said Nate McKee, director of Learning Technologies. “They told us, ‘we want you to help us build what is possible.’ Certainly, they were very ambitious and we welcomed the challenge.”

    Connecting existing online tools creates powerful learning platform

    McKee’s group recommended Canvas, the University’s learning management system.

    “Canvas is very powerful and there are some very interesting things you can do with it,” McKee said. “So, with their input, we built a system around Canvas with UW-IT-sponsored tools” — including Zoom for live video collaboration, and Slack for instant messaging online.

    “In a way, we were using technology creatively to stretch the experience and create a space so our program participants could interact over a longer period of time,” Fritzen said.

    The fellows — who were located in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda — relied heavily on the tools, and the apps allowed Fritzen and as many as 10 other faculty members who participated in the program to communicate during online classes and outside the virtual classroom.

    “We chose a multipronged approach, using Slack for small-group discussions and for one-on-one conversations. And we used the Zoom tool during the twice-weekly online classes. Zoom also allowed us to break into small discussion groups, which gave us a lot of flexibility on how best to present course material,” Fritzen said. Faculty also used Canvas and Panopto for recorded lectures and to present case studies.

    “None of us had a lot of experience working with all these tools,” Fritzen said. “I had never done this. But we jumped into it and did our best to design a class that would work for our fellows.”

    The fellows didn’t have any experience with the tools either, but they quickly caught on.

    “Canvas, Slack and Zoom helped the group establish community among all of us, making it easier to learn,” said Abiola Ogunenika, program manager with the Ondo State Ministry of Health in Nigeria. “These tools facilitated group development faster, even while we were thousands of miles apart across our different countries.”

    Several of the participants lived in countries without the robust communications networks found elsewhere, so choosing tools that didn’t need a lot of bandwidth was key.

    “I think we are mostly amazed at the technology that was used to bring such a group together,” said Gloria Ntow-Kummi, with Ghana Health Service. “Even from our various countries, we were able to meet as a group to have good interaction. I know that even as the program is ending, we still have a platform that we can use to continue to interact and discuss issues for our common good.”

    All that technology had a purpose, Fritzen said: improving the learning experience in a short-duration executive program that allowed students to learn from one another, bringing a great deal of value to participants.

    “What I loved about the program is the mix of teaching us how to improve our leadership skills as well as our technical skills,” said Kenya’s Joanne Ondera, with the German Development Cooperation/GIZ-Health Sector Program. “We were able to teach each other and learn from the different experiences.”

    “A big part of our mission is to help improve the quality of government, add value and fulfill our educational mission to train a new generation of dedicated public sector professionals,” Fritzen said. “We often do that with executive education, but it has certain limitations. We can’t reach everyone, it is expensive, and it is hard for those professionals who do participate to build relationships with others in their field, because classes are short and quite intensive.

    “Despite the challenges, I think we used technology creatively to overcome some of the limitations of executive education,” he said. “More importantly, we discovered that quality programming can be delivered this way. And it is certainly not limited to executive education programs.”

    Fritzen’s top tips for building a successful online executive education program — which can be applied to any type of online class:

    Partner with like-minded UW groups working to improve online learning

    Learning Technologies loves a challenge, Fritzen said, whether it is big or small. If you have a particular need but don’t know how to solve it, or you need to talk to someone about overcoming online teaching and learning challenges, give them a call. McKee agrees. “We are familiar with these tools and we can help you decide what can work for your class. We are here to help you.”

    Choosing easy to use tools is key — not just for students but also faculty

    Sometimes, the temptation is to throw the latest and most innovative tool at a problem, but Fritzen said that’s not the best approach. Because the University already has Canvas, a robust system that works with multiple apps, The Evans School chose simple tools that could be coupled with Canvas. The tools are easy to download, and easy for students and faculty to use, without spending too much time on training.

    Be prepared for some chaos, and adjust to it

    Connecting the fellows across several timelines with their instructors at the UW campus was a challenge.

    “It took a while to make a one-hour class go smoothly,” Fritzen said. “People lost connections, others couldn’t hear their peers, and there was a lot of background noise. We had very chaotic and distracting early sessions, but it does settle down. People get used to the technologies and make it work.”

    For the second cohort, Fritzen planned on using the first online session with the new group to troubleshooting technology and get everyone acquainted with the different tools. The program also is providing “concierge-level” IT support for all participants to improve their experience. That means one-on-one training as needed.

    “You have to be ready to take a deep breath and roll with the punches,” Fritzen said.

    Online tools may surprise you in many other ways

    As many as 10 faculty members interacted with the fellows during the program, and its success has led to a lot of discussions on how to best use technology inside and outside the classroom — and to a wider acceptance of the tools within the Evans School.

    “One of our lecturers utilized Zoom in a particularly useful way last quarter, piping in guest speakers and experts, and preparing students to ask questions,” said Molly Jay, chief digital officer at the Evans School. “The sessions were recorded and uploaded to Canvas for later viewing/reference.”

    For Fritzen, Zoom is becoming a must-have technology. “We use Zoom for some faculty meetings at the Evans School, recording the sessions for those who can’t make it. Overall, this experience has made us more open to try new things.

    “Students want to use technology, but we need to understand how best to harness it so we can improve the student experience,” Fritzen said.

    Learn More:

    Read UW-IT’s story on how the program came together.
    See how Zoom, Slack and Canvas can help you bring the best in your students.
    Contact Academic & Student Affairs, which helps faculty create a leading-edge learning experience.

    Keeping history alive with a digital library collection

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    Vivid oral histories from the South Sound get a second life at UW Tacoma

    More than two decades of research by students in Professor Michael K. Honey’s oral history courses was kept in a library storage room — a rich collection of untold stories of working-class Tacoma sadly out of sight and out of mind.

    Honey knew the materials gathered by students supported first-person stories that deserved to be shared widely. So the humanities and history professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences found a way. He collaborated with UW Tacoma Library and funding partners to digitize dozens of bulky 3-ring notebooks that make up the Tacoma Community History Project.

    Michael K. Honey, humanities and history professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
    Michael K. Honey, humanities and history professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

    The online collection has preserved his students’ best work, but more importantly, it has kept alive the underrepresented voices of blue-collar workers, minorities and Native Americans of the region.

    For Honey, the experience has underscored a valuable lesson: In many classes across the curricula, students are doing amazing work that deserves to be shared with a larger audience. Faculty, he believes, should remain open to finding ways to share and disseminate that knowledge more widely, as they did in Tacoma.

    What Honey is doing is part of a national trend that seeks to integrate technology with research throughout the humanities. At the UW, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities offers a number of programs for faculty who wish to bring technology and research together to advance teaching and learning.

    “Before we digitized their work, these oral histories were not readily accessible,” Honey said, pointing to some boxes containing the work of recent students. “Getting them digitized was an important accomplishment.”

    Now, someone anywhere in the world, with access to the UW digitized library materials, can read these oral histories and hear the recordings of real people from the South Puget Sound area.

    ““What they do in my class will live on, and so will the stories of the people they interview.”

    “There are few histories of the South Puget Sound, and our collection provides an important primary source for anyone who would study this region in the modern era,” said Honey, who started the oral history class in 1991, one year after he and others started the Tacoma campus in the fall of 1990. The content of his classes were digitized and made available online in 2011.

    The community history project now has 70 oral histories, and Honey and his UW Tacoma Library partners continue to add to the rich digital tapestry, as students finish the latest interviews. This quarter, some of Honey’s students are expected to interview a number of grass-roots community leaders involved in the desegregation of public schools, as well as add to the interviews of Puyallup tribal members.

    And Honey said he is looking forward to having his students work on oral histories that will focus on the creation of the UW Tacoma campus in future classes. Honey is one of the 13 founding faculty of the Tacoma campus.

    The power of oral histories

    Everyone has a story, Honey tells his students. And students have the power to bring them alive.

    Honey, a gifted interviewer and award-winning author, teaches students skills he learned from a career of tapping into the oral history of underrepresented classes. This includes interviewing black workers in the Deep South during the 1930s for a book titled Black Workers Remember, to his recent book, Sharecropper’s Troubadour, about John Handcox, a beloved African American folk singer and labor organizer who helped shape the labor music tradition.

    Michael K. Honey recently performed the songs of a beloved African American labor organizer as part of an oral history project. Visit Honey’s website to hear the songs.
    Michael K. Honey recently performed the songs of a beloved African American labor organizer as part of an oral history project. Visit Honey’s website to hear the songs.

    “My class focuses on teaching students how to do oral histories. The students do a research project, find someone to interview and off they go to get their stories. But there’s a lot of work they need to do before that conversation starts,” Honey said.

    He teaches them about the methodology of conducting oral history; how to compile documents to back up the stories, where to look for information, and finally how to approach the oral interview.

    “As an interviewer, you have to come from a place of respect. You’re usually learning from an older person,” Honey said. “Oral history is important and demands immediate action because you don’t want these important stories to  be lost.”

    Honey wants others, including faculty, to know that it is not just oral histories that lend themselves to projects that fall under the digital humanities. There’s so much more that deserves to be digitized and shared with the world.

    How Honey brought students’ oral histories out of the box

    Honey spent quite a bit of time thinking about how best to bring his students’ stories to a wider audience. Here’s what he did:

    Start with funding: Digitizing a large collection is an expensive task, so Honey procured funding from Friends of the UW Libraries and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians.

    Strike key partnerships: Honey partnered with Justin Wadland, head of Media and Digital Collections at UW Tacoma. The library provided the expertise and the people to create an online digital collection that is easy to use and readily available. Michael Sullivan, an architect, preservationist and historian, also works with Honey in developing and teaching the course.

    The library sought permission from former students, and their interview subjects and families to publish their materials. It is quite a bit of work because each oral history is accompanied by a research essay, interview recordings, primary and secondary sources and other key documents created by students.

    Make students realize they are part of something big: “I tell my students that as historian, you want to get as close to the truth as you can. We can help preserve history by talking to people who have played an active role in their communities but have been overlooked for one reason or another. As students, they can contribute a great deal of understanding about our communities. What they do in my class will live on, and so will the stories of the people they interview,” Honey said.

    Resources for oral histories:

    Instant feedback via earbuds

    Posted on

    Bug in the Ear project allows distant learners to connect with their School of Education faculty coaches during critical teaching and learning moments

    Kathleen Artman Meeker’s six-year-old student had three words inhis vocabulary: “No,” “eat” and an expletive that he used to maximum effect in the classroom. The outbursts disrupted the class and puzzled Meeker, who was desperately trying to help him.

    Kathleen Artman Meeker, assistant professor, UW College of Education.
    Kathleen Artman Meeker, assistant professor, UW College of Education.

    And she finally did, thanks to valuable feedback from a behavior consultant who observed Meeker’s interactions with the student. That experience led to “Bug in the Ear,” a 2015 pilot project that tested “in-the-moment” feedback using earbuds and video camera phones to link coaches to educators.

    Meeker, now an assistant professor in the UW College of Education, partnered with colleague Nancy Rosenberg, Applied Behavior Analysis Program Director and Special Education Lecturer, to launch a pilot with educators in an intensive practicum in the Applied Behavior Analysis Distance Education Program.

    The educators work with children with autism and other developmental disabilities on their own, without an advisor present in the classroom. Even when educators videotape their interactions, it takes at least a week before an advisor can see it and provide feedback. This time lag makes it more difficult for educators to put input into action. The “Bug in the Ear” approach helps them overcome this challenge.

    “We do a lot of coaching at our school, but a lot of it is after the fact. A prime teaching moment is often lost because we can’t give immediate feedback,” Rosenberg said. “And many of our students are long-distance learners, so we can’t be in their classrooms.”

    Using earbuds to maximum effect

    Kathleen Artman Meeker, assistant professor, UW College of Education
    Nancy Rosenberg, Applied Behavior Analysis Program Director, UW College of Education.

    As part of the pilot, educators were asked to wear Bluetooth-enabled earbuds and connect to their coaches via the FaceTime app. With cell phone cameras on, coaches could now see and hear them interact with students — providing instant feedback that only the educators could hear.

    With earbuds, “we were virtual guests in our students’ classrooms. We saw what they saw,” Meeker said. “An educator facing a challenging moment with an uncooperative student said, ‘What do I do next?’ And someone was there with an answer! Try this, we told them. And if that didn’t work, we suggested something else. And we could do that in real time, right there in the moment. It was very exciting.”

    Bug in the Ear provides valuable lessons

    The pilot has been reaffirming for Meeker, who remembers well-meaning advice from others who had not witnessed the 6-year-old’s behavior when she was trying to figure it out on her own. Be more firm; don’t take that from him; put your foot down, she heard many times.

    The consultant “saw a pattern that none of us had been able to see. And she seemed to solve this mystery for us about (the student’s) behavior,” Meeker narrates in an educational video made for the School of Education to discuss the potential of Bug in the Ear.

    Maximizing the use of earbuds for coaching involves communicating early and often, and making sure technology is easy to use
    Maximizing the use of earbuds for coaching involves communicating early and often, and making sure technology is easy to use.

    The subtle change in approaching the student, “made a difference for me, it made a difference for (the student), it made a difference for his family,” She narrates.

    And it underscored the importance of having someone else listening in, paying attention to those small details that mean a lot but can be easily lost by an educator working hard to reach a student, Meeker said.

    Their preliminary data has shown a lot of potential for in-the-moment feedback. For example, because teachers were coaxed by their coaches to keep trying new approaches, they more than doubled the number of chances they created for children with autism to communicate.

    “The children talked more and they talked in new ways,” Rosenberg said. “With one student, we saw her confidence grow in every class, and we saw that using technology this way could be very powerful.”

    While the pilot only tested earbuds with educators in a very specialized field, Rosenberg and Meeker said their experiences and results showed that earbuds and virtual coaches could be used in a number of other situations and classes.

    Meeker’s and Rosenberg’s tips for getting the most out of the Bug in the Ear approach:

    Sharpen your coaching skills: Just as a football coach should never yell instructions at his quarterback as he steps back to throw a pass, a long-distance educator coach should know when and how best to offer feedback through an earbud. “Timing is really important. When to prompt a child for an answer or how much to push is a very delicate balance. When you’re watching a teacher interact with a student, you need to know when to offer a suggestion and when to hold back,” Meeker said.

    As part of this process, it is important for the coach and the student to agree to ground rules, such as drawing the line between too much or not enough coaching.

    Debrief after each session: “If you’re going to be in someone’s ear, you have to establish trust,” Rosenberg said. The best way to do that is to communicate early and often. Establish ground rules with the student before that earbud is turned on. “Some students want a lot of feedback. Others expect less. A student may say, “Tell me what to do now! Don’t let me flail!” You have to be ready for that, and ready to have an appropriate answer,” Rosenberg said.

    Use tech tools that are easy to use and maintain: “It is great if people want to use their own phones,” Meeker said. “Today, technology makes remote communications much easier and there’s plenty to choose from — as long as you can establish a stable connection.” Meeker and Rosenberg are currently testing a camera on a swivel that follows the educator.