Chen, an assistant professor of public health at Nazareth College, spoke at last month’s virtual Pandemic Pedagogy Research Symposium to share findings from an experiment testing whether the use of digital-learning activities could help by increasing students’ feelings of connectedness and their motivation.
Chen created treatment and control groups using students from three courses. All of the students used Zoom, Moodle (the college’s learning-management system), Google applications, and the presentation tool Pear Deck. Those in the treatment group also used the messaging application Slack, the video tool Flipgrid, podcast and infographic tools, and social media. Most of those tools, Chen told me later in an interview, allow students to complete projects. Slack is a bit different: It allows for ongoing conversation that can be less formal than email and easier to navigate than the application in the LMS.
Students in both groups were scored on measures of connectedness and motivation. The results: students who used the additional tools scored higher on connectedness — but not on motivation.
At the end of the semester, Chen conducted student focus groups. And while he hadn’t thought of course evaluations as another way to gather information, they ended up providing another lens into students’ experience.
While the treatment group used a bunch of digital tools, the one that really seems to have mattered, Chen said, is Slack. Students’ comments indicated that “they felt more attached to each other, and also to me as the instructor,” he said. “I felt really encouraged by that,” he added. “That was basically the point of it.”
Chen was still thinking through why the treatment group’s motivation was unchanged. He suspects, however, that this finding points to the toll the pandemic has taken on students. They mentioned the college’s replacement of spring break with a few wellness days as one factor that really depleted their energy, he said. Chen included a question in his survey to get a sense of students’ academic burnout, and nearly 90 percent had at least one clear symptom of it. It may be, he said, that the kinds of tools he used just weren’t strong enough to make a dent in a problem of this magnitude.
Like many professors, Chen is still thinking through how he’ll adjust his teaching in light of what he’s learned through the pandemic. But he’s sold enough on the benefit of digital tools to make at least one change: He plans to discontinue his classroom ban on laptops.
Toward Better Feedback
During a recent discussion on Twitter about the gap between some instructors’ positive, informal feedback from students and negative feedback on their formal course evaluations, Rachel Rochester mentioned that she uses slides to help students give good feedback. She was quickly asked to share them.
Rochester, an instructor at the University of Oregon who teaches mostly in family and human services, started giving her students information on how course evaluations are used and on what kind of feedback is helpful in 2019. “I just kind of wanted to demystify this for everyone,” she said in an interview. This isn’t a ploy for better evaluations, she said — Rochester includes examples of constructive criticism that reflect her worries about her own teaching.
More recently, Rochester, who gives students an assignment in which they craft a professional email, added a slide letting students know where else they might take various kinds of complaints beyond the purview of their instructor. It starts with a link to email for the university’s board of trustees.
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ICYMI
- Teaching in Zoom allowed students’ authentic selves to sneak into the classroom, writes Samuel J. Abrams for The Chronicle.
- Rebecca Koenig lays out the case for having students provide early-term feedback in this article in EdSurge.
- Planning a course is complicated. In Harvard Business Publishing, Bill Schiano shares some tips for making it all a bit simpler.
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