Enhancing teaching team's communication at Econometrics and Business Statistics

I had the pleasure of being a part of the department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS)'s retreat earlier this month in the beautiful Red Hill. It was the first one after almost two years of uncertainty and radical changes due to the pandemic, and it was fantastic to see colleagues excitedly catching up and bonding over shared experiences. In the spirit of wrapping up and reflecting on 2021, I facilitated a session titled "Enhancing communication within teaching teams" which saw EBS colleagues engage in buzzing discussions and share great ideas. 

To offer some contexts for the session, let's turn back time to the beginning of 2021. Charanjit Kaur and I have been working on developing an Education Training Pathway that focuses on long-term and structured teaching development for tutors at EBS. 

EBS's Education Training Pathway

In undertaking this project, we conducted a series of discussions with tutors to better understand their needs for teaching development, and found that the theme of communication within teaching teams kept surfacing. As a result, we sent out a survey from the department's tutors to gather more feedback and suggestions for their team's communication. Below are some of the most commonly proposed ideas from survey responses:

More regular updates and meetings among teaching team members

Information related to weekly teaching to be communicated clearly and far in advance to tutors

Collect and discuss feedback for the unit from teaching team and students

Expectations, plans and changes to be communicated to head tutor in advance

Utilise online communication platforms (Slack, Whatsapp, MS Teams, Moodle forums)

More opportunities for team learning to share experience and exchange ideas

We also had the chance to hear from Ari Handayani and Julie Cook, two very seasoned Head Tutors in the department, about how they communicate with Chief Examiners and other tutors in their teams. 

Ari Handayani, an experienced Head Tutor, sharing her team's approaches to communication

And finally, colleagues in the room and those attending online had some time to join a group to discuss what had been presented, as well as to reflect on what they can take away. It was a pleasure to see many lively conversations, many ideas exchanged, and much food for thought. And I hope that the session served as a reminder for everyone to slow down, look back and think forward about how 2022 can be another year of improvements and innovations.

Tool Tips: Hidden feature of Moodle marking guide

Feedback is integral to student learning and development, yet it is among the most neglected when it comes to assessment marking. And this could be due to reasons such as large number of submissions,  laborious processes of marking, or it simply gets old by the 100th essay! 

If this resonates with you, here is a great feature of the Moodle marking guide that can help you save time while providing meaningful feedback to students. The frequently used comments. 

While setting up your marking guide for assignments in Moodle, you can also create a bank of frequently used comments. These comments serve as templates that can be easily inserted into the feedback comment fields and edited during marking. This can save you from repeatedly typing similar feedback for hundreds of students, keep marking contained in Moodle, and provide all students an equal level of details in their feedback. 

Here is a video demonstration for implementing this in Moodle. 

Give this a go for your next assignment, and don't hesitate to reach out to your Ed designer for support. 

Improving Moodle: Strategies with Links & Resources

This is a new series, dedicated to how educators can improve their Moodle sites.

When it comes to getting student's to click on things (sometimes referred to as 'engagement') it can often be a hard sell. The structure and the layout of a Moodle site plays a factor, but more importantly is how that link is being sold to the student.

Checkout the below video from the NNGroup (Nielsen-Norman, user experience specialists) to find out some principles to consider when linking to content.

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Growing Social Presence in Online Courses

by Andrew Moshirnia, Department of Business Law and Taxation

The need to establish rapport in a classroom is paramount. The class-as-unit is a social organism, to be tended and maintained, with the goal that instruction may be enriched with responsive learners and innovative peers. But in this environment, how can we cultivate social presence without the benefit of physical presence? We already use discussion fora and other technologies to create opportunities for interaction, but here are five additional ways to grow social presence and hopefully make your units less anonymous and your Zoom calls less barren.

 

1. Stressing (and re-stressing) the Importance of Turning on Webcams (and addressing the legitimate concerns of students who do not wish to do so)

The number one concern that I field is that students are refusing to turn on their webcams. I take this head on, by devoting time in my first class to walk through four different motivations for turning on webcams: Etiquette, Business Skill, Student Satisfaction, and Personal Appeal. I also do a quick training on how to turn on a virtual background. I return to this topic frequently, usually at the start of every class, and results have been good. I also tailor webcam policy to increase the comfort of students who are willing to turn on webcams when speaking, but often are reluctant to leave cameras on throughout the lesson.

 

2. Pre-class Inventory

You can begin building a social connection before the unit starts (or alternatively in the very first week of the unit) by using a pre-class interest inventory. By email or the unit Moodle, you can query students in ways to create meaningful connections. Below is one that I use:

• How does this unit fit in with your course of study? (If you are coming from a technical field that taught you system analysis as part of system or product design, please let me know here).
• What is the best thing you remember learning about last year?
• How do you learn best? What have teachers and professors done in the past that helped you to learn?
• If you are reluctant to turn on your webcam during class, what adjustments can I make to encourage you to turn it on?
• Please tell me anything else you think I should know about you (for example, preferred pronoun or title, specific learning need, area you want to improve, etc.)  

3. Creating Quasi-interactive Lectures

As many instructors are using pre-recorded lectures, it is important to sprinkle quasi-interactive moments in those recordings. Recording short welcome- and exit-videos provides this opportunity. In my welcome videos, I respond to student queries (creating a sort of call-in show vibe) and share a little story or fact that is on my mind (for example, wishing my students a happy Nowruz). Exit-videos are also helpful in summarising the lesson and setting up interest in the coming lesson.

4. Check-in / Mid-SETU

We have no doubt encountered SETU comments at the end of the year that we lament: “You should have told me that during the semester!” Thankfully, there is a easy cure: we do not need to wait for official SETU’s to ask SETU-type questions. I do a mid-sem SETU and make adjustments accordingly. Students are often delighted that a stray comment from them motivates a change.

5. Ice-breaker / Sponge Activities

During synchronous activities, It can be helpful to prime students to respond and also to give them a motivation to be on-time. I often ask students a random question for mass response in text: what’s your favourite dessert, type in your favourite movie quote, etc. This recruits attention and also creates a learning moment for how to use communication tools.

A New Journey: Hybrid Concurrent Teaching

Since S1 2021, a relatively new teaching mode has been introduced in Monashto to cope with the new scenario of the pandemic. In those classes, some students attend a workshop in a physical classroom while others attend via video conferencing (eg Zoom) at the same time. Teachers have to deliver synchronous learning occurring at the same time for both on-campus and remote participants, known as Hybrid Concurrent Teaching.

In this new model, every student is able to have the same opportunity to receive identical information from their teachers in real-time, discuss with their peers and teachers, and complete in-class learning activities synchronously.

This new mode allows all students to connect with their educators and peers at the same time. With the hybrid model, every student is able to get the same information presented by the educator at the same time. Students are all given the same opportunity to participate in class discussions and to participate in online-class activities synchronously. 

Despite its benefits, it also presents some new challenges to our teachers who most likely have never done that before. I know that I have never done that before! What should we do? MEA has prepared some interactive teaching scenario demonstrations on their website. And I am also preparing myself for working with such a unit in the coming semester.

Design and preparation

Other than the general principles for designing an engaging unit, some special considerations can be given to the following items:

• Prepare a detailed session plan. Here are some examples from MEA:
• Team project lesson plan
• Tutorial lesson plan
• Workshop lesson plan
• And when you present those plans to the students, you can simplify them and make them more visually appealing for the students.
• Design how students in each cohort will ask questions and how both the question and answer will be communicated with other students if necessary.
• Plan simple learning activities before advancing to the complex ones
• Consider pre-recording most of the contents for students to view before the face-to-face sessions.
• Plan extra time for:
• Technical preparation
• Time to socialise: ice-breaker, fun activities ...
• Multiple mini-breaks

Teaching activities in the classroom

After attending MEA's hybrid teaching technical training session in the classroom that has a presenter camera with Zoom enabled, I have a better understanding of the technical requirements of the class (e.g. it is very important for all students to bring their own laptops and headsets) and which teaching activities might be suitable for the scenario.

• Easy ones:
• Demonstration
• Polling
• Quizzes
• Presentations
• Not so easy ones:
• Group discussion
• Collaborative whiteboard activities
• Students to create resources
• Group projects

MEA has prepared some questions to consider when you design those learning activities.

To mix or not to mix?

But the ultimate question for hybrid concurrent teaching might be: whether I should mix the on-site and online students in groups? Well, I have asked the same question to myself. 

Of course, you want to provide an equal learning experience for online and face-to-face students. In addition to asking everyone to join Zoom with the camera on and a headset, you want to mix them in groups in group activities. However, MEA strongly suggests we not do that. They even write that in BOLD in their guide. That is to avoid technical issues such as audio feedback.

I have not done such a test with everyone joining Zoom with a headset in one room. I guess things can get messy in a classroom with students' laptops, your mic, and the classroom speakers. Maybe it is better not to try mixing the face-to-face and online students and follow the MEA guide.

What is your experience?

What have you experienced in your hybrid concurrent teaching? What worked and what did not? What you are going to change in your teaching? Please leave a reply or share your story with us.

Example of excellence - Role-play in Accounting

In 2019, I had the pleasure of observing a very engaging and authentic form of assessment in Damien Lambert's class: role play based on storyboards of auditing scenarios that students have created. 

In this assignment, students are to demonstrate their understanding of the processes and activities involved in the planning, performance and conclusion of a financial report audit through the creation of a hypothetical scenario. The assignment also aimed to help students develop key skills and attributes of a effective auditor, according to a survey by Forbes and KPMG (2015):

This assessment format has been implemented in many Auditing and Assurance units, not only at Monash campuses but also in a graduate audit unit at San Francisco State University. With its four-year history and counting, this assessment has become a remarkable tradition. 

This year, I caught up with Damien, Ashna Prasad and Lisa Powell to learn more about how they have managed to successfully facilitate role play when students are not physically in the room. The answer is, unsurprisingly, technology. More specifically, empowering students to showcase their creativity through the use of technology. 

Which aspects of assessment design have stayed the same? 

• Students are in groups of 4-5 members
• Provision of written instructions
• Detailed marking guide for storyboard (group) and role play (individual and group evaluation)
• Group activities to help students connect with group members and build rapport
• Role-play/presentation tips videos created in collaboration with Monash Centre of Theatre and Performance
• Visual illustrations and visual performance art workshop run by a professional artist

What's new?

• Hybrid cohort: some groups met face-to-face, and some worked completely online
• Format of the role play performance: video submission, instead of live performance
• Instructional videos for the assessments and other resources
• Sample storyboard to demonstrate exemplars
• Feedback Fruits used to facilitate peer evaluation
• Students experienced less stress and anxiety of role-playing live, while showing more creativity through the creative process of making videos. 

Show time!

Here are some highlights from student performances. Enjoy!

These snippets of student role play are a testament to the power of students' creativity when they are given the space, guidance and autonomy to express it. The team and other colleagues have also written a paper about their teaching practice, and highlighted "enhanced creativity and human skills", as well as "high levels of engagement, motivation, and enthusiasm" among students. 

"Creativity in intelligence having fun." 

Albert Einstein

It goes without saying that contextualised and creative forms of assessment bring about challenges in terms of time, resources and student reception. Upon reflection, the team shared about a small minority of students who struggled with the lack of structure and ambiguity from the revised assessment format (Powell et al., 2015). Improvements such as more visual aids, video demonstrations and scaffolding towards dealing with ambiguous situations and uncertainties are in store for future student cohorts. 

How have you innovated to transform your teaching for a hybrid or online environment? We'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below. 

2021, A Year in Sight

Following on from the post at the end of last year, here is a reflection on things that academics had success with during 2020 and will continue to work with in 2021 or something they'd like to explore.

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How TaLT Provided Support

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Without tooting our own horn too much - it was important during these 'interviews' to find out how we, as TaLT, could improve our support to academics. During this process, there was much gratitude and affirmation. We felt it was important to share so that you may be inspired to consider the different ways the Faculty Educational Designers can work with you.

Every academic that was asked stated they felt "very well supported" by their departments Educational Designer (ED), along with all the TaLT resources.

And although some stated they felt guilty reaching out to the ED - because they thought they were doing so 'too often' - they knew they were welcome to do so, given that the convenience of a quick Zoom meeting was within reach.
These Zoom meetings often went beyond just the immediate problem at hand - but deeper conversations around assessment strategies and pedagogical approaches for different elements of the unit.

2020 required a complete rethink on approaches to teaching and learning; and so the ED would often provide suggestions on new things to try - as conversations would often highlight deficiencies or areas that could be improved with new tools or strategies. Many academics shared they felt some level of apprehension in adopting some of these - but that they felt comfortable and confident in trying knew things (at the encouragement of the ED) knowing they were not going into it alone and that the ED was there supporting them along the way - always ready to support the acaedmics in a timely manner should something happen.

Moodle was a key focal point of 2020 - as it became the primary medium of communication for students. Some felt that Moodle was such a complicated beast that it was daunting to try and make any meaningful change in the limited time frame available. However, in talking to the academics, quite a few stated that although they were initially resistant to making any sort of change in Moodle, they were encouraged by partaking in or watching recordings of various workshops run by TaLT, and that the ED was there supporting them along the way. The Faculty Moodle Team also provided invaluable support when things got more technical - and were quite responsive to most requests.

The TaLT Newsletter was also highlighted as really useful resource - with links to articles or other media that could inspire or challenge conventional thinking or approaches. One criticism was that sometimes the content came a little delayed (eg. one newsletter focusing on assessment would've been nice to have prior to semester) - and we acknowledge it's hard to time and release these in a way that suits all. However, we will endeavor to work on this for future Newsletters.

The 1-on-1 sessions provided great opportunities to have a focused discussion on a particular area or topic; with many wishing to have more of these in the future to discuss and plan their units - which we are always happy to do.

So if you would like to have a chat to discuss plans for the future, new tools or strategies, or even some big, blue-sky thinking: Don't hesitate to arrange a discussion with your departments Educational Designer.

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Looking forward: 2021 and beyond

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Given the experience from 2020, it's not surprising that through discussions with other colleagues, reading articles, attending virtual conferences, seminars, and symposiums - many academics have had their interest piqued in adapting existing practices or finding new ways to teach or engage students. Here is a brief breakdown of some of the things shared:

Although the university has been encouraging it for some time - it seems that the 'blended' or 'flipped' approach to learning will now become the norm for many units, with academics sharing that they will reuse their pre-recorded videos as much as possible; primarily because the presentation of the slides and content works better compared to a lecture theater presentation (or recording). 

Moodle

Many feel their Moodle layout worked well - and so will keep this. Along with reusing the various resources, updating the content as appropriate and if possible. Thus, many plan on continuing to do what they did in S2-2020.

Others, however, have identified a deficit - be it in the resources or activities - and so want to focus on creating deeper learning opportunities as they explore deepening the online experience students have. Particularly around better integrated multimedia resources, and creating more self-directed activities. One such area that was mentioned was exploring the use of integrated quizzes into the asynchronous (onDemand) videos through Panopto.  

In-Person Experiences

Some academics noticed that the 'dual-mode' students seemed more engaged than those learning purely online - and so will look to leverage the 'in person' experience more going forward. Part of this focus includes (re)designing the tutorial activities to provide more reflection and low-stake assessment of the students, as well as encouraging more discussion at a deeper level.

Additionally, to give some more authentic experiences to the students, some would like to consider a 'research day' type of assessment, tied to a poster presentation - so that students can present (and thereby practice another professional skill) and also learn what many academic conferences are like with regards to posters and presentations in general.

Assessment

This was one of the biggest areas of challenge - particularly with assessments focused on the entire units content. At least half of the participants talked to mentioned bringing back exams for different reasons. A couple of the academics mentioned the need for examinations for integrity and trust. Some actually felt that the past exams were easier than the modified assessment task, as it became much harder for the students to complete successfully. 

There's also a desire by many to find effective ways to provide additional marks for participation and engagement by students, based on specific group activities. Including some more 'profession' based ones, such as how to write an email (especially given the nature of communication in 2020, it became clear that many students lacked certain professional skills in this area). 

Video (or audio) based feedback was another area that is being considered by many; and we encourage exploring the Feedback for Learning site to discover what tools and strategies work best, and students respond to most positively.

One tool that many mentioned either using (and planning to use more in 2021) or want to adopt in 2021 is Perusall:

Perusall is a free social reading platform integrated into Moodle which allows students (and teaching staff) to digitally annotate readings and videos collectively and respond to each other’s comments and questions. It creates an environment for online collaborative reading and discussion and provides auto-marking of student comments and the analytics which will enable you to see not only who has completed the set readings but also to measure their interaction with the text.

Feedback on the use or Perusall has been quite positive - with one academic reporting that its use lifted the overall grade by around ~10 marks. This is because key concepts learned in papers (which historically wouldn't have been read by students) now were being read, because of the associated additional marks in responding to other students comments. Which, in turn, meant that students were prepared for the assessments and could respond accordingly.

Zoom

A critical component of education - and teaching - is the formation of relationships; the use of Zoom consultation sessions helped many in 2020 to get to know and build on the educational relationships between lecturers and students. Due to its relatively ease of use and ubiquity - many will continue to use Zoom for 'virtual office hours' and consultation. A couple even mentioned making these consultation sessions compulsory - as it would allow a regular point to touch base with students, check in, and address any issues - or direct them to resources or support as necessary.

Health and Wellbeing

One area that became very important - and was heavily discussed in social media, news sites, and by Monash Health and Wellbeing - was the importance of a 'good' work-life balance. Working from home has made it a lot harder to separate the work from the personal, and many shared that they felt they were working much longer and much harder than in the past. Whilst this makes sense, most people that were asked stated that they will spend 2021 being kinder to themselves and trying to put in place some strategies to break up work from home.

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Here ends the reflection and planning for 2021. We hope that this has been informative, and that you have been given some thing to consider for the future. Remember to reach out to your departments Educational Designer should you want some consultation - or just someone to brainstorm ideas with.

Good luck for 2021!

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