Across the country, so many of my colleagues are facing the prospect of teaching an entire semester of university courses online for the first time. For faculty experienced in face-to-face instruction, and for faculty developers supporting them, this may seem like a daunting task. As institutional decisions about fall instruction and questions about how best to support faculty hang in the air, some concise guidance can begin to focus attention on key aspects of instruction and course design that will be critical for fall courses that may be taught entirely online.
While technological tools and skills were the focus of much support in the abrupt mid-semester spring transition at many institutions, an entirely online fall calls for more careful attention to key decisions from a course design perspective. For example, faculty used to teaching face-to-face courses will want to carefully reconsider their major assessments of learning. Many research and project-based assessments of learning can be readily adjusted for online course delivery. These kinds of projects can become even more robust in an online environment if faculty encourage students to use a wide range of technological tools to create multimedia projects, digital portfolios, and collaborative presentations. These presentations can be shared and developed further through class discussion asynchronously through tools like the video-discussion platform Flipgrid.
Face-to-face instructors who rely on closed-book exams and quizzes will want to think carefully about how to modify those assessments given the possibility of online course delivery. In addition to understanding whether or not proctoring tools are institutionally available, faculty should think realistically about their students’ access to reliable internet and suitable devices. The spring made clear how many of our students, once they returned home, were sharing one device with multiple family members or struggling to complete course work without adequate internet. This decision tree can help faculty members in these situations think through some common adjustments to exams and quizzes, as well as participation and attendance.
Experienced face-to-face instructors should reconsider their use of exams, quizzes, participation, and attendance when preparing to teach a longstanding face-to-face course in an online environment.
Sometimes there’s no way around it. You just have to use exams. In a previous post I highlighted some of the exam modifications faculty should review as they are planning to shift their classes to an online environment. These include replacing large exams with smaller quizzes, making exams and quizzes open book, and replacing exams entirely with authentic assessments of learning.
But in some courses, exams have to stay because they prepare students for critical licensure exams. Passing rates on these licensure exams are not only markers of student success, but also of program quality. And they are vital to student recruitment and accreditation.
How will students fair in the fluid, stressful, and challenging conditions surrounding COVID-19? How will proctoring for online exams in these courses impact their stress levels and their performance?
To help prepare students to succeed in these challenging circumstances, consider pairing course exams with metacognitive activities and treating both as essential components of your course and final grades.
Cognitive wrappers, such as exam wrappers, are some of the best-known of these metacognitive activities. Exam wrappers are commonly discussed in relation to in-person classroom use. They consist of short questions prompting students to note how they prepared for an exam, the types of errors they made, and how they will prepare differently for the next exam. They’re most commonly discussed as something to be implemented immediately after an exam, collected by the instructor, and then returned to students shortly before the next exam.
But here I am advocating a different application – one in which the metacognitive activity and insights from the exam wrappers become a more continuous process and gain a greater presence within the course. Online delivery facilitates this process. When students complete an exam wrapper online shortly after one exam, such as through an online survey or quiz tool, they can easily access their responses at any later point, including as they begin work on the next unit. This immediacy helps students adjust their exam preparation techniques as promptly as possible following an exam, rather than shortly before the next one. Those adjustments might entail new ways of engaging with concepts, reviewing them, and practicing their application.
The immediacy and continuity of access provided by an online exam wrapper are important because exam wrappers help students focus on the planning phase of self-regulated learning, including:
Evaluating their performance, process, or approach
Reflecting on their performance, process, or approach, and
Deliberately adapting their approach for future performances
In addition to online delivery, you can modify a standard exam wrapper by adjusting questions. Consider including a prompt asking students to indicate their use or disuse of techniques like spaced practice, interleaved practice, and self-explanation. In pandemic conditions, you might also prompt them to note aspects of their environment that impacted their preparation and what feasible steps they can take to reduce any negative impact.
Consider how you can best handle exam wrappers in your course grading and assessments. While many proponents of exam wrappers have suggested not grading them, depending on your setting you may find it helpful to grade exam wrappers on completion. If helping students learn how to learn is important to you, consider including a course learning outcome in this area of Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning and use exam wrappers a low stakes assessment of this outcome.
If your course prepares students for licensure exams and you must use multiple high stakes exams in your course, consider gradually adjusting the relative weight of each exam and exam wrapper paired with it during the course of the semester. Particularly in pandemic conditions, this can reduce stress on students for the first exam and incentivize their thoughtful completion of the first exam wrapper as they are adjusting to a new course and new expectations. As they progress through the course, each exam can gradually take on more weight and the paired exam wrapper can greatly take on less weight. By the end of the course, the exam wrapper has filled most of its function, so the last exam may carry nearly all of the weight and the last exam wrapper carry only modest weight to ensure that students continue to identify preparation adjustments they can make prior to the licensure exam.
Example of Relative Weighting of Summative Assessments:
First Unit
Second Unit
Third Unit
Fourth Unit
65% Exam 1
35% Exam Wrapper 1
75% Exam 2
25% Exam Wrapper 2
85% Exam 3
15% Exam Wrapper 3
95% Exam 4
5% Exam Wrapper 4
Finally, to help your students get the most out of reflective and metacognitive activities like exam wrappers, some supporting steps in your course planning and teaching practice include:
Explain the purpose of these activities, and specifically why you’ve paired wrappers with exams.
Reiterate their purpose in your syllabus, course site in the LMS, and communications with students.
Call out students’ good work on them, through individual and whole class feedback.
Prompt students to share their preparation techniques with each other, whether through online discussions or a collaborative tips document.
Develop a shared class vocabulary for reflection and metacognitive techniques.
A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that thousands of my long-time colleagues at a commuter campus across the country were told to plan to teach the fall semester fully online. I immediately thought of my dedicated performing arts colleagues and the challenging decisions they would face. Next, I envisioned thousands of working students struggling to complete a full slate of online courses at home without access to reliable, high-speed internet and potentially sharing one device with several family members.
As it turns out, my colleagues across the country—like so many faculty—are facing a fall semester of unknowns. Not simply teaching classes online, but not being able to know for sure where they will be teaching. Or where their students will be learning. Online for the entire semester? Five weeks online, then shifting to campus? Teaching students who are simultaneously split between a physical classroom and remote environments?
Plus the prospect of again shifting to an entirely online environment on a dime, mid-semester, as local conditions unfold in real time.
In an ideal world, instructors would have time to fully redesign all their courses for this situation using a full-fledged instructional design process. For some, even with institutional support, this is simply not feasible.
Another approach to the many unknowns that is feasible is for faculty to work through each major component of the final grade in a typical face-to-face course and explore how it can be conceptualized to support successful delivery of parts of the course in either a face-to-face or online environment. These types of large-scale decisions can be then represented in a syllabus in a way that gives faculty flexibility to pivot and students clarity. And the decisions can be made with attention to class size, TA support, and many other institution- and discipline-specific contextual factors.
With this in mind, in my last post, I focused on some of the most problematic major assessments of learning in face-to-face courses in this situation: closed-book exams and quizzes. With a quick read through a decision tree, instructors can see how they can reconfigure these assessments in a course that may be partly delivered in an online environment.
In this post, I turn to two other common components of final grades in face-to-face courses: attendance and participation. Courses often illustrate 2 extremes: grading mere physical presence (“attendance”) in face-to-face courses and grading written discussion board posts (“one post and 2 replies” meeting specified word counts) in online courses. Expressed that way, neither translates well to the other environment.
When conceptualizing your course and revising your syllabus, consider instead—What is it that you really want students to do through their participation? Then identify the range of tools you could use, as needed, to achieve that in both physical and online environments:
The items from the first column provide criteria for grading that you can communicate to students in your syllabus. Selected items from the other columns become examples of how you’ll incorporate opportunities to participate in class, tailored to how the COVID-19 situation unfolds. Offered this way, as examples and opportunities in a fluid situation, you’ve built in the flexibility you’ll need to pivot. And students can see how you’ve organized the course in a way that they can succeed, despite the unknowns. Ultimately, giving students choice among tools will be critical in the event that they are learning remotely from home in wide-ranging conditions.
