“I teach for free,” one of my colleagues used to say whenever the subject of faculty compensation arose. “They pay me to grade papers.”
I thought it was quite an original comment until I heard faculty members make the same remark on other campuses. Most of those folks, including my colleague, were not part of the ungrading movement that favors ditching standard grading practices altogether. Instead they were referring to the extensive time and effort it takes to write feedback on student work.
For me, the onerous nature of written feedback — in addition to the time it consumes — has largely stemmed from uncertainties about its practical value: Is it actually helping the student learn and improve? Even as a longtime instructor of writing courses, I struggle to find the right balance — between too much feedback and not enough, between criticism and praise, between commenting on style versus content.
Of course researchers have studied these questions, but the literature on how to provide effective feedback in teaching is voluminous, and often located in specialized journals or confined within particular disciplines. Given the time that faculty members have to devote toward staying current in our disciplines and fulfilling other work obligations, the prospect of wading through all of the literature on feedback and finding a few key strategies can seem overwhelming.
That’s why I was so grateful to discover a new resource for college faculty members. In beta version for the past year or so, and formally opened to the public this fall, OneHE is a British faculty-development site that emphasizes brief but meaningful training — by faculty members — in essential areas of teaching and learning for academics around the globe.
Readers of this column already know I’m partial to small changes that can have a big impact on your teaching. I wrote a nine-part series for The Chronicle on that very topic and a book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning.
So it’s no surprise that I found OneHE’s best feature to be a set of asynchronous micro courses, each of which requires only 20 to 30 minutes to finish. They cover a variety of teaching-and-learning topics such as “Helping Students Manage Attention and Distraction Through Technology,” “Supporting Students’ Use of Feedback,” and “Establishing the Foundations for Community Online.” Courses unfold in eight or nine brief modules, each of which typically consists of some text and/or graphics along with a short (two to three minutes) video lecture from the instructor. The modules cover topics like the research base of the course topic, its practical applications, and its key messages.
The website caught my attention, in part, because of a micro course on giving feedback to students, led by Naomi Winstone, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Surrey, in England. She articulates a key concern shared by many faculty members: We spend so much time giving feedback to students, and yet we often find that they don’t seem to follow through and make the improvements we would expect to see. One reason that happens, she explained in the course, is because we take for granted that students know how to apply our feedback to their work: “The capacity to use feedback well is a skill, and students need opportunities to develop and hone these skills.”
Her course offers very practical recommendations and resources to help faculty members improve what she describes as the “feedback literacy” of our students. I was particularly drawn to one of her suggestions: Ask students to turn in an “interactive cover sheet” with their papers. On the cover sheet, they explain how they have applied previous feedback they’ve received to this new assignment, and they can request help in specific areas if they need it.
After 20 minutes with Winstone’s course, I emerged with a couple of ideas that I could easily use in my own teaching. For the founders of OneHE, that is precisely the aim: to provide a quick introduction to the research on teaching and learning, followed by a few practical takeaways. Each course concludes with further reading and recommendations for a deeper dive into the subject matter.
I spoke (via email) with Mark Jones, a founder and managing director of OneHE, about its history and plans. In an experience that will sound familiar to many faculty members, he said he was thrown into a campus classroom with virtually no guidance on how to teach. As a doctoral student in history, he’d delivered lectures in other people’s courses but that was the extent of his teaching experience. So when he was handed an entire course to teach, he found himself floundering.
“I suddenly had things to do that I’d never considered before: syllabus, course design, approvals, materials, resources, assessments,” he said. “There was no guidance, no training, little in the way of policy. I was completely outside my comfort zone and the only option was sink or swim.”
Fortunately that didn’t sour him on teaching. His winding path led him eventually to a British nonprofit that recognized and rewarded excellent teaching in higher education. It was there that he met his future partners, Olivia Fleming and Simon Jones. The three of them loved the work but began to feel a growing sense that they could do more good in a broader organization.
“We recognized immediately that excellent practice exists all over the world,” he said, “but isn’t shared easily. We wanted to create a platform for making it accessible to all. We also knew we had to create something that was equitable and affordable, that would be accessible to the many, not just the few. In that way, we wanted to create something disruptive that builds on new technology to have wider reach and impact.”
The result, OneHE, has grown exponentially in the past year. One of the most impressive features is the quality and range of experts and courses:
- Thomas J. Tobin has a series of courses on Universal Design for Learning, drawing on the research and thinking that has informed his own scholarship.
- The HyFlex pioneer Brian Beatty offers an overview of that approach to teaching.
- Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s work on humanizing online learning serves as the focus of her micro course.
- And the site includes a robust series of courses and resources from an Equity Unbound team of Maha Bali, Autumm Caines, and Mia Zamora.
Full disclosure: I’ve now created a couple of micro courses for OneHe, too, offering quick introductions to the concept of “small teaching.” OneHe pays a modest, one-time fee to course creators, and Jones said it welcomes inquiries from experts interested in designing a course for the site.
While the courses are the most substantive element of OneHE, the website also includes other resources, such as a list of one-off recommendations for teaching activities collected from individual faculty members around the world. The list is easily searchable if you are, say, looking for a warm-up activity to build community or a quick tip for the first day of the semester. As OneHE continues to build out its offerings, Jones told me, it will be expanding to include webinars and seminars, as well as course sequences that link the micro courses into more extended options — for example, a 10-course sequence designed specifically for new faculty and graduate-student instructors.
Some of OneHE’s resources are free, while others require a subscription. (Winstone’s course on feedback is currently one of the free offerings.) The site offers both individual ($15 a month) and institutional (an annual fee based on the number of faculty members) subscriptions. (OneHE has a partnership with the Association of American Colleges & Universities, which means that member institutions receive a discounted rate).
A subscription-based model puts OneHE in competition with organizations like ACUE or Magna Publications, both of which have similar offerings for college faculty members. When I asked Jones what he thought distinguished his group from its competitors, he focused on the quick engagement aspect of its courses, which he described as “micro learning” opportunities.
“As educators, we’re time poor,” he said, “and we wanted something that gives faculty the essentials and a technique or approach that can be put into practice straight away. All the courses are available on demand, and we add a new course every week, so there’s always something new.”
Some academics might share a concern I’ve had about organizations like OneHE or ACUE: Do they give budget-minded administrators a handy excuse to ax faculty-development programs on campus and outsource them to these sites?
I know from the years I spent directing a teaching center that local context matters deeply. There is no substitute for getting a group of faculty members together in a room, putting a text or problem in front of them, and inviting them to think creatively about applications to their own classrooms.
“We’ve always seen OneHE as a complement to faculty-development units,” Jones said when I asked about this, “not a replacement. We’re finding that we can help extend the reach and impact of these units — for example by providing support to adjunct and sessional staff who often don’t have the same opportunities as tenured staff but are nevertheless critical to the student experience. And we mustn’t forget that there are many small institutions that don’t have faculty-development teams at all, and we can work with them to fill this need and support their faculty.”
Although I recently stepped down from my role as a teaching center director, the most regular model for our programming was to distribute a book or article to faculty members and then host a campus discussion about it. If I were still in that role, I would most certainly have taken advantage of OneHE’s offerings and occasionally built our local discussions around a micro course that everyone took together.
I continue to believe that small investments of time in our teaching have the potential to offer significant benefits to student learning. With its short courses and emphasis on micro learning, OneHE hopes to demonstrate that such minimal, realistic investments of time have the potential to benefit faculty members as well.
