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Evaluating Resources for Your Course

By Jessica O'Neel
November 8, 2021

Introduction

Quality resources can enhance the content of your course and foster deeper learning. However, selecting resources for a course can be overwhelming. In addition to textbooks, there are so many options for open educational resources (OERs) and resources from the UW library collection that it can be hard to choose. A targeted evaluation of the resources you are considering can make this process easier for you.

Set Goals for Your Search

Resource evaluation can begin before you start searching. Here are some tips and questions to get you started:
• Know what you are looking for in advance.
• Avoid duplicating existing content in your course when selecting additional resources.
• Take a moment to think about your goal for the new resource. Are you hoping to provide more depth to a topic? Clear up confusion about a concept?

Narrow Down Your Choices

After you have selected some possible resources, the seven evaluation criteria below can help you narrow down your options.

  • Alignment: Resources should help learners meet course and assessment goals. When evaluating a resource, ensure its format and content will align with your goals. A short video tutorial could present a complex concept more effectively than a journal article. An article or case study might allow for the deeper application of knowledge in an assessment.
  • Accurate and Current Information: Students may doubt the credibility of a resource if it contains errors or seems out of date. Use the publication date to prioritize recent content.
  • Proper Scope: “Resources should primarily focus on the chosen topic with limited coverage of additional topics.”. For example, selecting a ten-page article that mentions the information you want in one paragraph doesn’t have the appropriate scope.
  • Ease of Use: The learner should be able to access and navigate the resource with minimal direction or additional technology needs. A website with distracting advertisements or requiring specific applications or software may discourage students from accessing the resource. If navigation is a challenge, but the content is worth it, include clear directions to help students get to the information they need. For example, if students
    need to log in or use credentials, let them know ahead of time to prepare.
  • High-Quality Media: Video, audio, and images should be clear and high quality If the quality is low, it may be difficult for students to understand the concepts presented in the media piece. Low quality could also mean that students won’t access the resource.
  • Accessibility and Copyright: Any resource needs to be accessible and available to use without copyright restrictions. Look for PDFs that are screen readable or videos that have closed captioning. Librarians can be excellent resources for determining copyright questions. Your ID or media team representative can help identify accessibility issues.
  • Credibility: Resources should come from a credible source. A video about climate from a well-known organization such as NOAA is more credible than a video from a random YouTube channel. Also, consider whether the resource cites or references its sources.

Prioritize Your Resources

After considering the pros and cons of a resource based on the above criteria, prioritize your list. Resources can still be used even if they don’t meet all the criteria. If there are drawbacks or issues with a resource, call them out for students when you write directions or describe the resource in your course. Your carefully selected resources will enhance the content of your course, add variety and interest for your students, and foster deeper learning and retention.

Utilizing the Power of Feedback

By Eric Peloza
April 19, 2021

Feedback is a crucial part of the online experience for students and instructors. It is valuable for a number of reasons, one being that it allows instructors to connect to students and help students grow their skill set. This blog post will look at the importance of feedback and how you can leverage it in your courses.

Let’s unpack feedback!

Does feedback matter?

Instructor Sharon Frazier, Healthcare Administration

As we know from student feedback and research, instructor feedback is a priority for students in an online course. It has also been shown to have a direct impact on students’ perceived satisfaction with online courses. A study from an online nursing program showed that a lack of feedback caused students to be unsatisfied with their online learning experience (Soon, Sook, Jung, & Im, 2000). Additionally, we have heard from our students through surveys and student success coaches that they appreciate quality instructor feedback.

One of our Healthcare Administration students had this to say about the great feedback her instructor, Sharon Frazier, provided: “Overall, things have been going well. Getting constant guidance from Professor has been helpful in understanding the assignments and expectations for HCA 700. I find myself learning a lot through the discussions. She also provides a lot of feedback which is incredibly helpful.”

Getting constant guidance from Professor has been helpful in understanding the assignments and expectations…She also provides a lot of feedback which is incredibly helpful

What do students want from their online instructor?

Studies show that students feel affirmed, challenged, and influenced when they receive quality feedback from exemplary instructors (Edwards, Perry, & Janzen, 2011). Students also report frustrations with inadequate feedback and a lack of depth in another study (Lai, 2006). When you provide thoughtful feedback, it shows students that their instructor is invested in their learning. Students may have invested a lot of time and energy into an assignment, so putting the same effort into giving good feedback reassures and motivates them.

Finding the correct tool to meet the feedback requirement

How to use the tools in Canvas to maximize your feedback

In online learning, providing effective feedback is facilitated by the tools in the learning management system or digital learning environment. Effective feedback is frequent or immediate, specific, or interrogative (Leibold & Schwarz, 2015). Our digital learning environment, Canvas, enables faculty to easily give feedback with these characteristics.

If you’re looking to provide feedback in Canvas, consider one of these tools:

  • Announcements: Announcements are a quick and great way to communicate to the entire class at once, such as when you notice a running theme when grading and want to point it out. You can also use them to prepare students for the next stage in the course.
  • Rubrics: The Canvas rubrics tool gives you the ability to use pre-built feedback and personalized feedback. You can use the pre-built feedback to quickly assess the main criteria of an assessment. It also gives you the ability to justify your grading with the differing levels of criteria assessment. The rubrics tool also has an area that allows you to provide context and commentary regarding your grading.

    Example of using feedback in Canvas Quizzes
  • Quizzes: The Canvas quizzes tool allows you to give feedback on quiz questions based upon the correct answer, incorrect answers, or for specific selections. You can create this feedback before the course opens, and students can receive it immediately after submitting their quiz. The advantage of this option is that you only need to write feedback once and it applies to every student attempt.

Canvas also has a great analytics tool that allows you to view student performance at the class-level. You can interpret the data and identify common threads from the reporting then use this information to provide additional feedback on specific content areas that have lower than expected performance. You can also leverage announcements to share content with students right when they need it!

If you’re looking to learn more about feedback and other related topics, you can review our Journey to Online self-guided courses! In our Teaching course, the following modules address feedback:

  • Developing Your Online Course – This module explores the ideas behind creating effective, feedback-drive, rubrics for your students and yourself
  • Teaching Your Online Course – This module has great information and advice on how you can best provide valuable feedback

If you learned something new or would like to suggest future topics for us to dig into, leave a comment below! We’d love to hear from you.

References

Edwards, M., Perry, B., & Janzen, K. (2011). The making of an exemplary online educator. Distance Education, 32(1), 101-118.

Lai, H. J. (2006). On-line courses: Recommendations for teachers. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 10(4), 50-55.
Leibold, N., & Schwarz, L. M. (2015). The Art of Giving Online Feedback. Journal of Effective Teaching, 15(1), 34-46.

Soon, K. H., Sook, K. I., Jung, C. W., & Im, K. M. (2000). The effects of internet-based distance learning in nursing. Computers in Nursing, 18(1), 19-25.

Faculty Spotlight: Rich Freese Interview

By Eric Peloza
February 27, 2020

Course revisions are an exciting time in the life cycle of a course. Faculty reflect upon the past offerings and look for ways to improve the student experience. I recently talked with Dr. Rich Freese (DMA) about how he approaches the revision process. Rich facilitates courses for our UW Independent Learning program and I’ve worked with him on a course revision (U660206 – Legendary Performers) that won the 2018 ADEIL College-level course award. For this issue of IDigest, we talk about Rich’s secret sauce for cooking up award-winning course revisions.

Read more »

Boundaries, Time, and Teaching Online

By Kristin Kowal
August 13, 2019

If you sometimes feel like your course is taking over your life, you’re not alone. Does this sound familiar:

Some weeks I spend way too much time on my online courses. Some weeks I do not spend enough time on my online courses. Please remember we all teach courses in >1 program, including our home campus responsibilities, with both in-person and online modalities!

No matter how prompt you are or how much time you dedicate as an instructor, there is never enough time to do everything you should or could. I try to find ways to automate things, but that even takes some time.

What I find difficult is that students, because they tend to work all hours all seven days, will ask questions 24/7. I feel like they expect me to be constantly monitoring my email. I like to take the evenings and weekends off (call me crazy), and that makes me feel guilty.

These are some of the answers I got to the question, “What do you find the most difficult about teaching online?” When instructional designers like myself meet with an instructor for the first time, it often goes like this:

A cartoon of an instructional designer and a faculty member having a conversation. The ID says "Okay, so the most important thing to remember is to be present in your course and give timely feedback." The instructor says, "Sounds good to me."
A well-intentioned ID encourages a new faculty member.

However, the well-intentioned ID might not imagine this reality during that conversation:

A cartoon of the instructor sleeping in his bed and thinking, "1:00 a.m. I'm having trouble both sleeping and being present in my online course"
Hopefully, this cartoon is a hilarious exaggeration and your online course isn’t keeping you up at night, but can you relate?

What’s the answer to this problem of no boundaries naturally existing in the “Anytime, Anywhere” model of online education? As a faculty-designer team, we cannot manufacture more time in the week. What can we do to achieve a healthy work-life balance in the online classroom?

Tips from a Journal Article

I looked for journal articles that applied to this issue, and I found one article from the Journal of Educators Online that I wanted to highlight called Creating Boundaries within the Ubiquitous Online Classroom1. If you have the time, I suggest reading the entire 21-page article. The authors briefly explain the theory of andragogy and the Community of Inquiry framework and then use them to support some time-saving strategies. They also highlight some efficiency tools that might save you time. If you don’t have time to read it, here is a summary of their tips and tricks. The article suggests setting three “priorities” as I illustrate below. (Click on an image to enlarge it.)

Heading: Priority 1: Engage With Students First. 3 Tips are listed: Post Early. Keep Ancedotal records, and practice backwards mapping. Heading: Priority 2: Produce Assets that Guide Students in Self-Management. Tip: Prepare Student guidance. Examples: Video guides; netiquette guide; prep announcements in advance; store repeatedly used materials Heading: Priority 3: Use time management strategies. Strategy 1: Strategies to reduce interruptions: Set up a physical workspace; establish work hours; communicate your plan. Strategy 2: Limit-Setting Strategies: plan work sessions and breaks; use timers' use limiting programs or apps

What UW Extended Campus Faculty-Designer Teams are Doing

After reading the research article, I realized we are already implementing these strategies in course design; this is why course design can seem like such a heavy lift upfront. Here are some of the strategies we as faculty-designer teams have used that help create a healthy work-life balance:

  • Creating boundaries through office hours
  • Using rubrics to grade more efficiently
  • Generating automatic feedback through quizzes, practice activities, etc.
  • Providing examples through multimedia or text to guide students when the instructor isn’t present
  • Using technologies like the Canvas Teacher App, Speedgrader, Turnitin for efficiency
  • Leveraging Peer Review and Group Assignments to save time (though the design time can be on the heavy end!)
  • Saving announcements/pre-writing announcements
  • Using and re-using just-in-time videos to clarify course concepts and provide help
  • Posting “weekly wrap up” announcements to provide a feeling of closure and continuity before moving on to the next unit
  • Finding opportunities during the course revision process to implement (e.g., cutting down on weekly discussions when one isn’t needed every week). 

We want to hear from you!

Even though I see evidence that faculty-designer teams are employing time-saving strategies to set boundaries and manage time, I realize it’s not a perfect solution; instructors still struggle with work related to their online courses creeping into their personal time. We would love to hear your stories and strategies you would like to share.

Comment on this post or email me at kristin.kowal@uwex.edu on what you’ve tried and learned about time management, setting boundaries, and teaching online!

1Hansen, B., & Gray, E. (2018). Creating Boundaries Within the Ubiquitous Online Classroom. Journal of Educators Online,15(3). doi:10.9743/jeo.2018.15.3.2

Faculty Symposium: Feedback, Discussions, Revisions, and Introduction Videos, Oh My!

By Kristin Kowal

UW Extended Campus held its third annual faculty symposium this year in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 3 and 4. The instructional design and multimedia teams had a blast presenting our breakout sessions. While we can’t re-create the warm, fuzzy feeling of mingling and sharing ideas with our faculty in a blog post, we can at least share our presentation materials.

Connections and Reflections: Feedback in Canvas

Session Overview

A group activity during the Connections and Reflections breakout

Instructional Designers Stephen Beers and Eric Peloza chose this topic because it was focused on tools in Canvas, and it was timely and relevant because many of our faculty are just getting started in Canvas; Stephen and Eric also chose the topic because they wanted to highlight how important and influential faculty are in the student experience.

It was great to hear faculty share their feedback and knowledge of Canvas and its tools. For example, one faculty member mentioned how they used the mute feature, which many faculty found beneficial. Overall it was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the unique questions and topics that came out of each session. —Eric Peloza, Instructional Designer

 

Main Takeaways

I asked Eric Peloza about his main takeaways of the presentation. He highlighted four:

  1. Yes, feedback does matter. Our teams hear about the wonderful job our faculty do with feedback and how much students value feedback.
  2. The frequency and timing of feedback matters. This is a challenge for faculty and the good news is that Canvas has tools that faculty can leverage. Course level reports (course analytics) and announcements are great ways to reach or review the class as a whole. Templated feedback is another great way to help faculty. Using rubrics or automatic feedback in Canvas is a great way to improve the immediacy of feedback.
  3. Feedback is improved when it is specific. Canvas gives faculty options across all of assignment types in Canvas. This includes general feedback by way of text, video, or file upload, along with using specialized tools such as DocViewer in Canvas.
  4. Sometimes, questions work better than statements. This is best best leveraged in discussions. Interrogative questions can open up or keep discussion going among students. Again, Canvas can be leveraged here in facilitating feedback. Another great feature is that faculty can view all of a student’s submissions at once.

Download the Presentation Materials

You can download the Connections and Reflections: Feedback in Canvas Presentation here.

Part Deux: Discussion on the Rocks? Add a Twist of Fresh Alternatives!

Faculty connecting over how they use discussions in their courses in this group activity

Session Overview

My fellow instructional designer Laurie Berry and I presented on ways to add a little “zest” to online discussions by varying the discussion format. We reviewed the two most popular strategies that we presented at the symposium last year (you can get a full explanation of these strategies in my blog post “Five New Twists for Online Discussions”). Then, we presented three new “twists” faculty used in their course during the spring semester. There may have been some light dancing as well.

[The faculty] seemed interested in trying at least one, if not more, of the presented twist ideas. They also liked the format/layout of the presentation where it showed the traditional question and seeing how the twist can transform the question into something new without too much effort. I think they also liked seeing their colleagues’ testimonials of student engagement as well as tips and tricks for success. —Laurie Berry, Instructional Designer

Main Takeaways

Laurie summarized the key points of the presentation:

Providing the same type of discussion throughout the course multiple times can become repetitive and boring to students and faculty. Adding a twist to at least one discussion provides unique ways to get students to interact with course content and to engage with each other. Also, don’t be afraid to try something new or different with a discussion board activity.

Download the Presentation Materials

You can download the Part Deux: Discussion on the Rocks? Add a Twist of Fresh Alternatives Presentation here.

Extreme Course Makeovers

Ryan Martinez and Kristin Pierick lead a group activity in their Extreme Makeovers session.

Instructional designers Ryan Martinez and Kristine Pierick presented on a topic that nearly all instructors will encounter: how to prioritize course revision tasks. Ryan and Kristine used the metaphor of renovating a house and examples of how to pick specific projects to fit your time and budget to bring this presentation to life.

We had several faculty members express their own difficulties when revising their courses. We also shared several examples from faculty that were in the audience, so they were also able to elaborate more on our points, which was very helpful. All in all, it was also a good session because faculty were very willing to walk through some of their troubles and to also help some of the faculty who have not done a revision yet navigate some of their potential issues. —Ryan Martinez, Instructional Designer

Main Takeaways

Ryan summarized the main takeaways:

The main takeaways from our presentation are for faculty to be considerate of their time and resources when they are ready to revise a course, and reconcile what they can actually do in the time frame versus what they would like to do.

Download the Presentation Materials

You can download the Extreme Course Makeovers Presentation here.

Meet the Instructor: Building a Social Connection

Nick Meyer explains why “Meet the Instructor” videos are important.

Nick Meyer and Bryan Bortz from the media services team presented on how “Meet the Instructor” videos can build a social presence in your course. They demystified the process of working with media services to create a “Meet the Instructor” video. This session was recommended for faculty who are new to online learning and/or developing a course in the next one to two years.

Main Takeaways

The main objectives of the presentation were that faculty will:

  • Gain an understanding of the purpose and importance of “Meet the Instructor” Videos.
  • Acquire knowledge of the planning process.
  • Obtain tips and tricks for generating ideas for “Meet the Instructor” videos.
  • Gain an understanding of the filming process.

Download the Presentation Materials

You can download the Meet the Instructor: Building a Social Connection Presentation here.

You can view Nick and Bryan’s highlight reel of introduction videos here.

For even more examples of what the media services team can do, view their Faculty Showcase here.

Future Topics

Do you have an idea for a future topic that you want to see us present (or to present yourself)? Comment on this post or email me at kristin.kowal@uwex.edu!