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.

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. 

Using Learning Analytics System to Communicate with Students with Personlised Emails

Learning Analytics

With the growing size of the class in Monash Business School, teachers have found it is hard to track individual student learning path and maintain quality communication with them as there are simply too many students in the class. More and more communications initiated by the teachers are now sent as a general message to address all students. For example, the same messages are posted on the online forum, sent via SMS, or email to all class participants to reduce the teachers’ workload. Recently, with the innovation in educational technology, it is possible for lecturers to use information technology to draft and send personalised emails to students in bulk according to their online engagement, tutorial attendance records, and assessment results. Learning analytics allow us to identify certain student groups with different selecting criteria and reach them via personlised emails.

Zoee Cohen from the University of Arizona has also been sending personlised emails to students for year and seeing improvement in student academic performance: Small Changes, Large Rewards: How Individualized Emails Increase Classroom Performance.

TaLT has tried to answer that challenge by trialing using a learning analytics system to communicate with students with personlised Emails with one of our Business Law units in S1 2018 and the results are very encouraging.

SRES - The Student Relationship Engagement System

The SRES, Student Relationship Engagement System, empowers teachers to collect, analyse, and act on data to better engage students at scale. It was developed by built, run, and supported by a bunch of teachers primarily at the University of Sydney. Monash Biology has set up a server for those who are interested: https://sres.biol.monash.edu/

Here is a short introduction to the system:

Our trial

Last semester we have trailed SRES to send personalised emails to certain student group worked on his BTF5903 unit with 389 students. We think that it improves student engagement as well as their classroom performance. We have attached a brief report here:

Time/Event	Students No. Received Emails	Students No. Read Emails	Student Action
Week 4 before 1stassessment	57 students who did not do more than 4 online learning activities	51	Students finished 3.1 activities on average in the following days.
Week 5 after 1stassessment	24 students who scored 100% in the 1stassessment	23 (3 left feedback to consider the email useful)	2 students wrote back to the lecturer
Week 8 before 2ndassessment	185 students who did not do more than 3 activities in Week 5-7	180 (4 left feedback to consider the email useful)	Finished 2.1 online activities on average in the following days.
The mean student final grade increased by 6.7 and the median grade increased by 8 compared to the previous semester together with other unit design improvements

And here is an example of the email:

Dear XXX

I hope you are well. As you know we will hold our first major assessment for BTF5903, the Mid-Semester Feedback Test, this week.

In the first three weeks there were 8 online Lessons and Quizzes on our Moodle site that you needed to complete. We noticed that you completed 1 of them: that’s no more than 50%! Our past student records prove that those students who fail to complete half of the online learning activities by the middle of semester are TWICE as likely to fail the ENTIRE unit when compared to those who complete more than half of the online learning activities.

We strongly advise you to complete your online Lessons and Quizzes, as well as all other relevant study materials to prepare for the test in Week 4. The test result will contribute to your final grade.

Good luck and see you next week.

Regards

Lecturer

What is not so good?

The system is not integrated with our Moodle yet. We have to export results from Moodle into CSV files and then import those files in SRES.

Would like to try?

If you are interested in using that in your unit this semester, just let us know. All you need to do is to sit with us for an hour to discuss and then we will take care of the system set up, etc.