Discussion on the EDUCAUSE Blended and Online Learning Group’s listserv
Question:
develop anonymous mid-course student evaluations allowing students to reflect on course and progress and informing instructor about what is working or not in the course.
Answers:
– what is working well for you in the course?
– what is not working well for you in the course?
What suggestions do you have to make the course better for you, your peers, or the instructor?
Katie Linder Research Director Extended Campus, Oregon State University 4943 The Valley Library Corvallis, Oregon 97331 Phone 541-737-4629 | Fax 541-737-2734 Email: kathryn.linder@oregonstate.edu
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At the University of Illinois, we have been using Informal Early Feedback as a way to gauge information from our students to help improve the courses before the end. Here are a couple of links to our site. The first is the main page on what IEF is and the second is the question bank we offer to faculty. This is a starting point for them, then we meet with those who want to work on tweaking them for their specific needs.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to ask.
Sol Roberts-Lieb Associate Director, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning Pedagogy Strategy Team and Industry Liaison UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and highlighted by the canny and pseudonymous Neuroskeptic, Danish researcher Morten Tromholt recruited 1,095 participants (by way of Facebook, naturally) and put them into two groups. One pledged to not sign onto the social network for a full week (87 percent made it) and a control group used the platform the same way as they always did.
If you go to the Facebook Live Map and browse the live feeds, you’ll often see people talking about nothing in particular, with unflattering close-up camera angles and scratchy audio. People often shift their phones from hand to hand when they tire of holding them, and brush the mic without realizing it.
#2: Invest in a Mobile Phone Setup Budget: $150-$300
iPhone Setup When choosing a mount for an iPhone, consider the iOgrapher ($60), shown below. Attach the 37mm wide angle lens ($40) if you want to get more people or surroundings in the video. Android and Windows Phone Setup The Saramonic SmartMixer ($149) fits any phone (including the iPhone) and incorporates both audio and video stabilization in one piece of gear. The mics are stereo, and you can angle them however you want to capture multiple people talking.
#3: Broadcast From Your Desktop
Budget: Free-$600 Going live from your computer allows you to bring in guests to interview, add pre-recorded video, graphics, titles (so people know who the hosts are), and more.
You can use the built-in camera on your computer or a USB camera, like the Logitech C920 ($99).
OBS OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is open-source software, which means it’s available for free.
OBS is a great option, but it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of paid software to make it intuitive or easy to use. You’ll need to do a bit of setup and testing before you go live.
Wirecast Wirecast ($495) has been around for years and has come a long way in the last few months as Facebook Live has exploded in popularity. The interface is a little more intuitive than OBS, but still requires some setup and experimentation.
Adobe Spark Video is an elegant, easy-to-use tool for creating animated videos that tell a story. It’s available as a browser-based cloud app or as an iOS app. You can get it as a single app or install the 3-in-1 tool to access the Spark Post and Spark Page companion apps too.
What’s great about Spark Video is that it’s quick. You can create a compelling animated video story in just minutes without any design experience, and work on your project from anywhere. As a cloud-based tool, your progress is saved and synced automatically, so you can work on it on mobile or desktop whenever creative inspiration strikes.
Animoto
Now let’s look at a tool that’s similar to Adobe Spark, but gives you more flexibility over your content. Animoto is an affordable, cloud-based tool that offers an assortment of choices and customizations to create a one-of-a-kind video to tell your brand’s story.
This tool gives you a little more control than Adobe Spark Video. You can start with a blank canvas (choosing your own colors, styles, and frames to more closely match your brand) or adapt one of the tool’s wide variety of templates.
YouTube Director
YouTube Director is a revolutionary tool to create video ads for business. Geared toward small local businesses, it’s a foolproof way to tell a compelling story in a short format.
As you follow the prompts, you’re guided to capture images, video, and voiceovers. Then you can post the video and run a video ad campaign on YouTube.
This phenomenon — testing yourself on an idea or concept to help you remember it — is called the “testing effect” or “retrieval practice.” People have known about the idea for centuries. Sir Francis Bacon mentioned it, as did the psychologist William James. In 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote that “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.”
Another theory is that information goes into our brains attached to context.
Sobel realized that his students were studying in exactly the wrong way, by rereading their notes the night before his two exams.
A vastly better model, Sobel thought, would be one where he essentially forced his students to retrieve knowledge over and over again throughout the course.
So, every semester, instead of two exams, he started giving his students nine quizzes.
Sobel has tried to talk to his colleagues about the results he was seeing with quizzing, but he says most of them aren’t interested in switching from a few exams to multiple quizzes. “University faculty are considered very smart, but are also very conservative,” Sobel said. “We don’t like to change our ways.”
