Page 3 – The Teaching Innovation Blog

Examine data from students about smartphone usage and consider how this affects the place of smartphones inside and outside the physical classroom space.

In a previous post, I advocated for taking a “mobile-first” approach to course design, offering 10 teaching practices that benefit students accessing your course from mobile devices.

In this post, I want to take a step back and ask a broader question about mobile devices in teaching and learning: What role should smartphones play in our courses?

Let’s break this question down into two parts: Outside the Classroom and Inside the Classroom.

What role should smartphones play outside the physical classroom space?

I’ll start here, because evidence is clear that students are using mobile devices to access course content. Educause has been conducting student surveys about mobile devices in learning for more than a decade, and their recent findings are stark.

91% of students say that they regularly access the Canvas mobile app, and 81% use their smartphone at least once a week for learning activities. The #1 reason students cite for using mobile devices is to make it “easier to access coursework” (77%).

In other words, students will be using the mobile version of your course site – to access homework, find readings, check their schedule, take quizzes, and more. This is why I encourage all faculty to think about the mobile design of their courses, such as considering the teaching practices I outlined in that article about mobile-first course design.

It’s important to recognize, though, that students generally use mobile devices as secondary screens when completing coursework. This can range from checking assignment requirements to searching for term definitions to verifying a due date. As the authors of the Educause report say, “students are content with small tasks via mobile rather than large ones.”

Ease of access being the #1 reason for using mobile devices for learning also points to a key consideration: How can you help students fit their education into their lives? Smartphones can help students learn in situations where they can’t sit down at a desk and open a laptop. Whether it’s offering audio recordings of readings or splitting essay questions into a separate quiz, reflect on how you can enable students who are “on the go” to complete coursework directly on their phone.

What role should smartphones play inside the physical classroom space?

This is where things get a lot more complicated. Most research into smartphone use in classrooms focuses on test scores. Unsurprisingly, most research has found off-task use of cellphones to result in worse recall and test performance. For example, Kuznekoff & Titsworth (2013) found that students who did not use their phone “wrote down 62% more information in their notes, took more detailed notes, were able to recall more detailed information from the lecture, and scored a full letter grade and a half higher on a multiple choice test than” students who did.

However, test scores are not the only metric of learning, and few studies have investigated the effects of cellphones in class beyond test scores. Studies in on-task use of cellphones are similarly sparse.

It’s important, then, to consider not just if you should use smartphones in the classroom but how you use smartphones in the classroom.

I have long been against cellphone bans in the classroom on several grounds, especially concerns for equity of access (low-income students may only have cellphones for learning devices) and my stance that teaching should not be about policing. However, I fully understand why roughly half of the faculty Educause surveyed had instituted a cellphone ban.

What’s striking to me, though, is how students feel about mobile devices in the classroom. When asked if they wanted instructors to “ask students to use mobile apps or devices in coursework,” only 36% of students said yes (down from 42% in 2018). 34% of students said no, while 31% said not sure. Students are generally ambivalent about using mobile devices more in the classroom.

The authors of the Educause report speculate that the drop in “yes” answers could be due to burnout: “they don’t want another screen to work on.” They also speculate the proliferation of mobile apps during the remote learning of the pandemic may have caused students to struggle with some advanced features and essentially sour on mobile learning.

Whatever the reason for student ambivalence, it’s clear that mobile devices aren’t an unambiguous good when used inside the classroom setting. Whether you prohibit mobile devices, ban them, or adopt a laissez-faire attitude, I recommend doing so with intention and purpose so that students know why they are being asked to engage (or not engage) with their cellphones.

What does all this mean for me?

My goal with this post was not to give you clear-cut answers about mobile devices in the classroom. In fact, it’s quite possible I’ve only muddied the waters for you.

What I do hope is clear, though, is that efforts to make course sites (especially Canvas) more mobile-friendly are incredibly impactful and important. Students will use their phones to access your Canvas site, and it’s worth your time to consider how that use interacts with the design of your course.

If you’re looking for a primer on mobile design of course sites, I highly recommend checking out the previous article, “Toward Mobile-First Teaching Practices.” It can get you started with some practical tips to make your course site easy to access on a smartphone.

How do you use mobile devices in your courses? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

References

Chen, Baiyun, Aimee Denoyelles, Tim Brown, and Ryan Seilhamer. “The Evolving Landscape of Students’ Mobile Learning Practices in Higher Education.” EDUCAUSE Review, January 25, 2023. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2023/1/the-evolving-landscape-of-students-mobile-learning-practices-in-higher-education.

Kuznekoff, Jeffrey H., and Scott Titsworth. “The Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on Student Learning.” Communication Education 62, no. 3 (2013): 233-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2013.767917.

In this special two-part blog post, we examine what Ball State students say about flexibility and how teachers can offer students flexibility so they can fit their education into their busy lives.

In Part 1 of this two-part blog post, we examined what students have to say about flexibility. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, Ball State students express a need for flexibility in order to successfully fit their education into their lives.

At the core of all this is the fact that students, like faculty, are extraordinarily busy and have many time pressures in their lives. Adding flexibility and student choice to your course in terms of the content, assessments, pacing, and learning methods can help students fit coursework into their busy lives.

1 – Allow students to work ahead.

While it can be difficult to release your entire course at once, releasing content well in advance and not locking modules to specific times allows students to work at their own pace. In fact, many students in the Student Satisfaction Survey expressed frustration at having a short time window to complete modules.

If you are unable to release an entire course at once, consider adding more flexibility through late assignments (for more information, see #3 below).

2 – Carefully plan the pacing of your course.

Effective instruction generally involves scaffolding – learning that builds upon itself – but this can cause issues for students with busy lives. When possible, do not require a specific time window in the week for students to complete work in your course. For example, a Wednesday discussion board post due date and a Friday discussion board follow-up due date can force students to work between Wednesday and Friday, something that isn’t always possible for busy students.

Instead, consider pacing your course with larger time windows to allow students to work during the week or on the weekend as their schedule permits.

3 – Plan for late work, and support students who submit late work.

No matter how much in advance you release your assignments, some students in your course will fall behind and turn in late work. Instead of having no policy or unspoken rules, work to plan for late submissions. Consider the following:

What is the impact on learning of submitting late work?
How will late submissions affect student grades (if at all)?
Do students need to notify you in advance if they will be submitting work late? If so, how far in advance and through what medium?
Will your feedback on late submissions be different from on-time submissions?
How should students handle late work in cases where they are interacting with other students, such as peer review, discussion boards, or collaborative assignments?
Is there an ultimate “no submissions accepted after” date for your course?

Whatever you decide on these items, make sure you articulate this to your students clearly in your policies.

4 – Encourage flexible forms of participation.

While it’s important to support students in completing work when it can fit into their schedule, it’s also important to provide students with flexibility and options for what work they complete. A great place to start is in expanding your idea of participation in your course.

For example, if you use peer review in your course, you could expand from in-person sessions to asynchronous peer feedback via text or video. If your courses are discussion based, consider ways that students could participate that aren’t necessarily the “standard” for discussion participation (e.g., providing discussion notes, following up with the class with resources, or summarizing the last class’s discussion).

Like with the next practice, this choice can allow students to opt into work that fits better into their lives.

5 – Give students choices for how to complete assignments.

Choice in completing assignments can dramatically change how easy or difficult an assignment is for a student to fit into their lives. You don’t necessarily need to devise multiple alternative assignments – a great place to start is accepting multiple modalities in submissions.

For example, if you would normally accept a document (such as a paper), consider accepting audio or video submissions that meet the same criteria.

6 – Chunk content into smaller pieces that students can complete in 15 minutes or less.

Most people don’t like starting something they can’t complete. When completing something in your course takes an hour or more, it’s likely your students won’t work on that until they can sit down and complete that work in a dedicated time slot. Unfortunately, those time slots are far too rare for many students.

Chunking content, lessons, and assignments can positively impact motivation and encourage students to fit the work into their schedules more dynamically. In order to chunk, you don’t need to dramatically change your content or assignments – simply divide them up into discrete and manageable pieces that can be completed in 15 minutes or less.

7 – Consider adding “pauses” to your regular schedule.

Course “pauses” are class sessions or entire weeks where little to no formal instruction is scheduled in the course. Such pauses can help students who are behind “catch up,” and they can help students who are ahead or on schedule focus on other work.

Most courses are overfull with content, so it can be hard to find a time to “pause” in your course. Look at your course schedule and consider places where the work has been less impactful in the past. Also consider spots in the semester where students tend to feel overwhelmed. Another great place to “pause” is when students have been engaging with a difficult topic or assignment and could use additional time to process information.

If you’re struggling to find time in the semester, I also encourage you to read my earlier blog post, “The Siren Song of Comprehensiveness,” which explores the idea that we can accomplish more by teaching less content.

8 – Make resources that support students readily available.

If all of a student’s work was smooth sailing, then they likely wouldn’t need as much flexibility to complete it successfully. It’s the rough patches – when they’re struggling with an assignment, facing a major life event, or aren’t understanding a concept – that make flexibility so necessary and valuable.

While there are many ways to support students through these rough patches, an important first step is to make resources readily available to students. This can be done through a Canvas page, additions to your syllabus, and regular reminders of available resources. Making this information prominent and easy to access can help students quickly identify what they need to get through a rough patch.

9 – Ensure your course site can be easily accessed on mobile devices.

More than 70% of Ball State students regularly access Canvas via the Canvas Student mobile app. As anyone who regularly does work on a mobile device can attest, mobile experiences are often frustrating and put up artificial barriers to efficiency.

Taking deliberate steps to improve the mobile experience of your Canvas site can go a long way to helping students fit your course into their busy schedule. For more about how to do this, check out our earlier blog post, Toward Mobile-First Teaching Practices.

10 – Offer students the option for non-work hour meetings.

Synchronous interactions with faculty, such as attending office hours, are critical to student success, especially in asynchronous online courses. Unfortunately, offering office hours only during normal work hours (8-5) can lead to a significant number of students completely unable to attend these hours.

While faculty often can’t (and shouldn’t) offer office hours outside the 8-5 window, it’s still important to provide help and interaction with these students. Consider weekend or weeknight “by appointment” times. Also consider ways to humanize asynchronous touchpoints, such as providing video feedback to students with your webcam.

What do you think of the data presented here? What strategies do you use to offer your students flexibility? Let us know in the comments below.

In this special two-part blog post, we examine what Ball State students say about flexibility and how teachers can offer students flexibility so they can fit their education into their busy lives.

Our students need flexibility in their education.

As the cost of higher education has risen, the days of students managing 40-hour weeks between work and school are gone. The COVID-19 pandemic shined light on a problem that has been growing alongside the cost of education: students are overloaded and struggling to balance work and school.

Many faculty responded to the pandemic by adding more flexible structures into their courses. Even as these structures shift into a new era, students are telling us loud and clear that flexibility is critical to their success.

Part 1: What Ball State Students Say About Flexibility

In the first part of this special two-part blog post, we’ll examine data from the Fall 2022 Student Satisfaction Survey, a survey that is distributed to all Ball State students every semester (n = 3,423).

Our online students tend to be working adults (77% work full-time and another 12% work at least 20 hours) who are usually taking 6 credit hours or more (81%). It’s no surprise, then, that online students at Ball State report work responsibilities as their biggest challenge (73% report at least some difficulty).

Our main-campus students are employed for significantly fewer hours (6% work full time and another 15% work at least 20 hours), but they offset that by taking more courses (64% take 15 or more credit hours).

Online students at Ball State rate flexibility with assignments as their biggest dissatisfaction, with 34% being neutral or actively dissatisfied. For main-campus students, flexibility is the third biggest dissatisfaction (31%), after course materials being useful in meeting objectives and the use of a variety of non-lecture teaching methods.

Ball State student holds sign reading "Chirp Chirp!"

Taken together, the high level of difficulty with work responsibilities and the low level of satisfaction with assignment flexibility suggest that Ball State students need additional flexibility in their courses in order to be successful.

In addition to the quantitative data, students also have an opportunity on the survey to share open-ended comments about their education. Here are some of the ways students have commented about flexibility.

Some students have had positive experiences with faculty offering flexibility. For example, one student said:

I took six classes and found that all of my professors were wonderful. I have been struggling to balance work and school this semester and they were very understanding.

On the other hand, some students have not experienced the flexibility they needed, such as the student who said:

I find it difficult to work full-time and be online full-time with only one week to complete all assignments. I had to adjust my work schedule to part-time so I could have time to complete all assignments. I am taking a semester off so I can work more.

For this student, the lack of flexibility led to them not being able to take as many classes as they would like.

One of the more common complaints regarding flexibility that students express is the ability to work ahead in courses. For example, one student said:

Sometimes work is posted too late. I have to plan my work on Sunday so when a professor adds a new unexpected assignment during the week that is due that week it is hard to be successful.

Students are also frustrated by what they see as rigid timelines for completing work in courses. As one student said:

Assignments were not posted until the week of (and several times not until Wednesday) and assignments were due on Sunday. This makes it so that people with full time jobs almost HAVE to do the work on the weekend, which is not something that is feasible always.

It’s clear from what these students are expressing that flexibility plays a crucial role in the success of students, both online and in-person. In the next part of this two-part blog post, we’ll explore some teaching practices that can offer your students the flexibility they need to succeed.

What do you think of the data presented here? What strategies do you use to offer your students flexibility? Let us know in the comments below.

Continue on to read Part 2 of this 2-part blog post.

References

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Price of Attending an Undergraduate Institution. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved July 20, 2022, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cua.

Are teachers too focused on comprehensiveness, trying to cover everything about their topic? What would teaching look like if we all just taught a little less?

How much should my students learn in my course? This may seem like a strange question—especially compared to the more salient what students should learn—but it’s been on my mind lately.

For many years, my answer has been, “As much as possible.” Now, I’m questioning that assumption, considering that I have perhaps been lured in by the siren song of comprehensiveness only to crash upon the rocks of rigor.

What do I mean by this? The aim of education is a big, thorny thing, that is sometimes hard to unravel. One thing that I believe, without having to disentangle it, is that education is not about having “as much knowledge as possible about any given subject.”

Instilling habits of mind, inspiring curiosity and a love of learning, building strategies for lifelong learning, and cultivating critical thinking—these are the central tenets to my practice as an educator, not helping my students build a laundry-list of knowledge.

And yet, as I’ll discuss later in an example, I’ve prioritized comprehensiveness in my teaching. In doing so, I deprioritized knowledge as a process and prioritized knowledge as a long list of things that can be mastered and checked off. This is not the kind of educator I want to be, nor is it the kind of educator my students need most.

Now, I’m questioning that assumption, considering that I have perhaps been lured in by the siren song of comprehensiveness only to crash upon the rocks of rigor.

In fact, comprehensiveness gets in the way of change. By aiming to teach as much content as possible, I reduced the time and space in my course for real, meaningful change in students. Paradoxically it seems that by teaching less, we can accomplish more.

An Example: Web Writing for Professional Writing Students

For many years, I taught a course in Writing for the Web—at 2 different universities, both online and in-person. Students were primarily Professional Writing majors and minors. These students would often go on to get a wide variety of jobs, from communications to marketing to social media management to administrative.

Most of the jobs they would get would involve some amount of working with websites, whether that was building full websites using software like WordPress or simply updating their company’s blog every now and then. My goal was to teach them about the fundamentals of working with websites so that they would be well-equipped to handle a wide variety of tasks.

We covered a lot of ground, but one of the core focuses was web code: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Feeling comfortable adapting, editing, and writing web code would give my students a leg up on the job market, as these skills are highly valuable in a variety of positions.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost sight of that goal. I taught students everything they may need to know about web code. And in the process, students often didn’t build up a comfort level and fluency, as they would move on to the next item on the list without having time to sit and explore what came before.

How This Approach Missed the Big Picture

I’ve been reflecting on this while working on Beautiful Canvas Pages Made Easy, a self-paced course for Ball State faculty to add custom Canvas designs to their courses. For this project, I’ve written (mostly from scratch) 2,000+ lines of web code. Yet, the single most important factor in my success with this project hasn’t been my comprehensive knowledge of HTML tags or CSS properties.

It’s been my familiarity with tweaking web code through Chrome’s Developer Tools, a feature of the Chrome browser that allows you to open a website’s code and make changes that will change how the website displays in the browser. My comfort with this tool has allowed me to build an entire design library by playing with code in Canvas, tweaking existing content and designs.

It’s shocking to realize that I never once taught this to my students. That’s a shame, because Chrome Dev Tools is an incredible way to learn about the code that underlies the web. It encourages playfulness and experimentation. It lets you make changes and see the effects of those changes, building up a knowledge of how the pieces of web code fit together into a complete puzzle.

Instead of teaching this kind of experimentation, I taught my students highly specific “pieces” of knowledge that many of them would never use. But at least, my thinking went, I could say that we had covered all the “important” aspects of web code.

Charting a Different Course

So how do we avoid the siren song of comprehensiveness?

This starts by laser-focusing on what change you want to accomplish through your course. This is something I always had in mind with my course development, but it often got lost after I started developing the course. Keeping this in mind at every step can help you sort through what is actually important to student learning and what is just there for the sake of completeness.

There’s a trick I use in my work a lot, a simple thought that has been transformative for me: “My only job is to _________.” I often approach situations with a laundry list of things I want to get out of them, and that often results in me getting less out of them than when I focus on the single most critical item.

Applying this thought to your course can be transformative, as well. It allows you to focus on a single change you want to effect, then give that change as much time and space in the semester as it needs.

You can also regularly ask the question, “Do my students really need this knowledge?” For example, I taught my students the history of web code, even though they didn’t really need it. But I also taught them about web accessibility, something that they would absolutely need if they wanted to improve the experience of all web users and help their future organizations avoid accessibility lawsuits.

Finally, it’s worth listening to your students to help you understand what is most valuable and important to teach. Ask students about their goals and aspirations, then craft your focus based on what can help them reach those goals and aspirations.

As teachers, we know a lot about our subjects, and it can be difficult to put that aside and focus on students who are very different from us. By setting aside comprehensiveness, though, we can better support and guide students through deep, meaningful learning that will serve them well, now and in the future.

Have you been lured in by the siren song of comprehensiveness? What could you radically cut from your teaching to instead prioritize activities that facilitate meaningful change and growth in your students? Weigh in through the comments below.

Learning styles are a myth – the research is conclusive. What can we take away from this myth, though? What, if anything, can be salvaged from learning styles theory and its relation to empirically-backed learning theories?

I have a confession to make. Until recently, I believed in learning styles. I may not have been a die-hard proponent, but I thought of learning styles as a largely accurate way of describing individual differences between learners.

In fact, I identified as a visual learner, one of the four main categories in the popular VARK theory (Visual / Auditory / Reading-Writing / Kinesthetic). I was convinced that I learned best when presented with visual materials.

If you read the title of this post, you know where this is going. Study after study after study has shown there to be no solid evidence that teaching to a learner’s preferred learning style has any benefit on their learning.

In fact, our stated preferences may not even be our actual preferences. In a 2018 study at Indiana University, more than 400 students completed a VARK questionnaire at the beginning of the semester. Then, at the end of the semester, those students completed another questionnaire asking which study strategies they employed. Most students reported using study strategies that were out of alignment with their VARK preferences.

This post, though, isn’t about deconstructing the learning styles myth (if you want that, you can turn elsewhere). It’s about examining what it tells us about teaching and learning, and how we can use that to inform our pedagogies.

Some Learning Strategies Work Better Than Others

While adopting VARK-specific teaching and learning strategies does not benefit learners, that doesn’t mean that all learning strategies are the same. Depending on what is being learned, some strategies are far more likely to be effective.

Take the previously referenced IU study. The students who did employ study strategies in alignment with their VARK preferences did not perform better than their peers. However, “some specific study strategies (irrespective of VARK results), such as use of the virtual microscope, were found to be positively correlated with final class grade” (Husmann & O’Laughlin, 2018).

This makes intuitive sense: art is best learned visually, music is best learned auditorily, and so on. Every discipline has a robust literature about discipline-specific teaching strategies that enhance learning.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should ignore individual differences between learners. For example, the “expertise reversal effect,” coined by Kalyuga et al. (2003), explains that prior knowledge and expertise with a topic has a profound impact on the effectiveness of learning strategies. The researchers found that inexperienced learners learned better by studying examples of problems, while experienced learners learned better by solving those problems.

Preference ≠ Learning

One of the core problems of learning styles theory is that they often conflate a learner’s preference for learning in one modality to learning better in that modality. This conflation usually comes from a good place: the desire to understand that individual students are different and to take full advantage of those differences.

However, subjective feelings of enjoying learning or it being smoother and easier have very little to do with objective measures of learning. For example, one study sorted learners into visualizers and verbalizers, and found that while there was a strong connection between learning style and subjective judgments of learning, learning style made no difference on objective measures of recall (Knoll et al., 2016).

Learning is rarely easy – in fact, by making it easier for students to interact with materials that match their preferences, we may be inadvertently harming learning. If, for example, reading is critical to reaching a course’s learning goals, then “educators may actually be doing a disservice to auditory learners by continually accommodating their auditory learning style preference … rather than focusing on strengthening their visual word skills” (Rogoswky, Calhoun, & Tallal, 2015).

This idea resonates with my experience of teaching English majors about visual design. English majors spend the majority of their academic life engaging with the written word, and yet the written word is not an effective means of learning about visual design. Part of my job when teaching visual design was to help these students learn to learn through visual means. This process was uncomfortable for most of my students, but it was also necessary to reach the course objectives.

Multimodality and UDL

After realizing that learning styles are a myth, I immediately wondered about Universal Design for Learning, in particular the UDL principle of providing multiple means of representation.

Unlike learning styles, there is a strong empirical research base for UDL. Much of the research for multiple means of representation is based on an idea called the multimedia principle, which holds that people learn better when information is presented in multiple modalities, such as written words, spoken words, and pictures/video.

Consider, for instance, this question from the VARK questionnaire. “I want to learn how to play a new board game or card game. I would:

Use the diagrams that explain the various stages, moves and strategies in the game.
Read the instructions.
Listen to somebody explaining it and ask questions.
Watch others play the game before joining in.

As we discussed previously, some of these strategies may be inherently more effective than other strategies. The effectiveness of some of these strategies also depends on your prior knowledge and experience with board or card games. For frequent game players, hopping right into the game and starting to play may be more effective, while for infrequent players that is more likely to harm their learning.

Perhaps the most effective of these, though, is a combination. For example, you might watch others while looking at the rulebook or listening to them explaining the game.

As teachers, we often do this naturally in course design, giving students experience that range across different modalities and ways of engaging with the material. Instead of pigeonholing students into categories of learners, though, this allows us to create engaging and active learning experiences that benefit all learners.

How do you employ multimodality in your course design? What effect does it have on your students? Weigh in through the comments below!

References

CAST. “Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2.” Accessed June 10, 2022. https://udlguidelines.cast.org.Husmann, Polly R. and Valerie Dean O’Loughlin. “Another Nail in the Coffin for Learning Styles? Disparities among Undergraduate Anatomy Students’ Study Strategies, Class Performance, and Reported VARK Learning Styles.” Anatomical Sciences Education 12, no. 1 (2019): 6–19, https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1777.

Kalyuga, Slava, Paul Ayres, Paul Chandler, and John Sweller. “The Expertise Reversal Effect.” Educational Psychologist 38, no. 1 (2003): 23-31, https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_4.

Kirschner, Paul A. and Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer. “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education.” Educational Psychologist 48, no. 3 (2013): 169-183, https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2013.804395.

Knoll, Abby R., Hajime Otani, Reid L. Skeel, and K. Roger Van Horn. “Learning Style, Judgements of Learning, and Learning of Verbal and Visual Information.” The British Journal of Psychology 108, no. 3 (2017): 544-563, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12214.

Massa, Laura J. and Richard E. Mayer. “Testing the ATI Hypothesis: Should Multimedia Instruction Accommodate Verbalizer-Visualizer Cognitive Style?” Learning and Individual Differences 16, no. 4 (2006): 321–335, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2006.10.001.

Nancekivell, Shaylene E., Priti Shah, and Susan A. Gelman. “Maybe They’re Born With It, or Maybe It’s Experience: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Learning Style Myth.” Journal of Educational Psychology 112, no. 2 (2020): 221-235, https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000366.

Price, Linda. “Individual Differences in Learning: Cognitive Control, Cognitive Style, and Learning Style.” Educational Psychology 24, no. 5 (2004): 681–698, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144341042000262971.

Rogowsky, Beth A., Barbara M. Calhoun, and Paula Tallal. “Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method: Effects on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Psychology 107, no. 1 (2015): 64–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037478.

Rohrer, Doug and Harold Pashler. “Learning Styles: Where’s the Evidence?” Medical Education 46, no. 7 (2012): 634-635, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2012.04273.x.

Willingham, Daniel T., Elizabeth M. Hughes, and David G. Dobolyi. “The Scientific Status of Learning Styles Theories.” Teaching of Psychology 42, no. 3 (2015): 266-271, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0098628315589505.

When recording videos for your class, polish matters less than you think. Learn why and how to let go of the idea of a “perfect” video and embrace some jankiness in your teaching.

If you’re tentative about making videos for your students, this post is for you.

When I started making videos for my classes, I felt like I had to be “perfect” on camera. I was convinced that I needed to be a YouTube star to be a successful teacher.

More than a decade later, I am reflecting on just how wrong I was. You do not need to be a YouTube star to make great videos that help your students learn.

You don’t need fancy, expensive equipment. You can use whatever you have lying around, including your phone.

You don’t need editing wizardry. You can make great videos while barely using any software at all.

You don’t need to be charismatic. You can make engaging videos even if you’re not comfortable in front of a camera.

You don’t need to be flawless in your recording. You can make mistakes and be human.

If any of these have held you back from recording videos, you’re in good company. I want to encourage you, though, to let your reservations go and create some janky videos. I expect you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much of a positive change those videos can make.

Why Record Your Own Teaching Videos?

To understand why you don’t need to create polished videos, we need to explore the question, Why record your own teaching videos in the first place?

One common answer here is meeting students where they’re at: 95% of 18-29 year olds use YouTube, with more than half of those using it at least once a day (Pew Research Center, 2021).

This reason is at best only a part of the picture, though. If we were to always align our teaching methods with student media consumption, we would all have TikToks now, and no one wants that.

Instead, let’s consider three other reasons:

Videos help my students connect with me as a teacher and a human being
Videos are more engaging than text or other media
Videos help my students learn more efficiently or more effectively

Together, these three reasons account for the wide variety of teaching videos: welcome videos, course tours, weekly announcements, module introductions, reading discussions, content lectures, assignment feedback, and more.

When we think of our teaching videos as meeting students’ YouTube cravings, we inevitably will end up comparing ourselves to the myriad of professionally produced educational content on YouTube. This comparison never ends well.

Instead, when we think of our teaching videos as working to connect, engage, and teach, it’s easier to realize that we as teachers are already talented at doing those three things. We just have to translate that into video.

So What Do I Need?

If you don’t need fancy equipment, technical mastery, charisma, or video experience, what do you need to record great videos for your course?

I encourage you to infuse all your videos with the 4 P’s:

Preparation: Prepare for your video with a quick outline or a script. This will help you ensure that you don’t ramble or wander into irrelevant territory.

Purpose: Every video should have a why. Writing this out and even saying it in the video can help you hone in on what’s important and what’s not.
Passion: Let your enthusiasm for your teaching and your subject shine. This will help students connect with you and encourage them to engage with the topic at hand.
Personality: Be a human being. Make mistakes and don’t re-record. Have a sloppy Zoom background or an intrusive pet. These all help humanize you and help your students connect with you.

Consider this example video I recorded. This isn’t a “polished” video, but it does help connect, engage, and teach.

(This video included 2 minutes of preparation – jotting down notes on a pad – and was recorded in one take with a phone and no additional equipment. It was not edited in any way.)

Want to know more about how to make videos? While this article didn’t have space for that, we will be exploring that more on this blog down the road. Subscribe below to get updated on new blog posts.

Have examples of videos you’ve recorded? We encourage you to share them in the comments below.

References

Auxier, B., & Anderson, M. (2021, April 7). Social Media Use in 2021. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/

Consider how to craft a syllabus disability statement that students will read and will encourage them to seek help with their learning.

When you include a disability statement on your syllabus, do your students…

Ignore it completely
Read it and feel like it is cold and unwelcoming, or
Read it and feel a sense of belonging

Of course, we’d like to think that it’s always C. Unfortunately, many students at best ignore disability statements and at worst experience them as exclusionary.

Why is this? And how can we craft our disability statements to reflect the welcoming communities of our courses, our departments, and the university as a whole?

Important note: All Ball State courses are required to include the syllabus statements detailed on the website for the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. The discussion in this article is intended to supplement these materials, not replace them.

Who Can Get Help?

An important consideration for disability statements is who is represented within them. For legal reasons, the required disability statement specifically identifies individuals who need course accommodations and have a documented disability on file with the Office of Disability Services.

What this doesn’t cover, though, are students who do not have a disability on file with Disability Services. This can be because they cannot afford the healthcare necessary to receive an official diagnosis, did not seek diagnosis, are still in the process of being diagnosed, or were misdiagnosed.

While it can obviously be hard to estimate how many students fit this category, research from the National Center for Learning Disabilities estimates that more than half of children with learning disabilities, such as ADHD or dyslexia, are unidentified and undiagnosed.

A great first step to improving disability statements is offering help to these students. More on this shortly.

Warm and Welcoming Language

There is an increasing body of literature and movement among teachers to craft warm and welcoming syllabi. One of the foundational articles about warm syllabi, Harnish & Bridges (2011) points to 6 characteristics of warm language: “(1) using positive or friendly language; (2) providing a rationale for assignments; (3) sharing personal experiences; (4) using humor; (5) conveying compassion; and (6) showing enthusiasm for the course” (321).

Despite the benefits of warm language, required syllabus language such as disability statements still tends toward the cold and impersonal.

While much of the argument for warm language hinges on student perceptions, its use can have an impact beyond simply how students perceive us as teachers. The language you use on your syllabus and other materials can encourage or discourage students from seeking valuable help.

In one recent study (Gurung & Galardi, 2022), students were exposed to warm and cold syllabi, both with and without a “Reach Out” statement normalizing seeking help for difficulties and setbacks. Students exposed to the warm syllabus, which was adapted from Harnish & Bridges, were more likely to seek help across all categories, including help with assignments and help when dealing with personal issues.

When possible, shifting the language of syllabus statements like the disability statement to be warm and welcoming can have a profound impact on students. Stay tuned for more in a bit.

Rethinking Name and Placement

What you call your disability statement and where you put it on your syllabus sends implicit messages to your students.

The name “Disability Statement” implies that it is only relevant to students with disabilities, leading many students who do not identify as having a disability to ignore it. Further, placing the statement at the bottom of the syllabus, often alongside other “procedural” and “required” language frames it as unnecessary and unimportant to your course.

Instead we could consider placing the statement in a more prominent spot and naming it to be more applicable to all students.

Putting It All Together: A Sample Statement

What would a re-envisioned syllabus disability statement say? To review the previous 3 sections, it would:

Welcome and speak to as many students as possible, including students who do not have a disability on file with Disability Services
Use warm and welcoming language to frame the discussion
Be placed prominently on the syllabus with a name that encourages all students to read it

While the Ball State disability statement is required for all courses, we invite instructors to include a secondary syllabus statement.

Here’s just one example of a statement framed as a “Universal Design for Learning Statement.” We’d love to hear your statements or thoughts in the comments.

Universal Design for Learning Statement

I have purposefully designed this course with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in mind. UDL is a framework for creating learning experiences that are flexible and designed to engage all students, regardless of individual differences. Throughout this course are elements that are designed to meet you where you are at as a student and allow you to take agency over your own learning. You know best how you learn, and I have taken steps to ensure that you can direct your own learning in a way that works best for you.

No course is perfect, though, and I am always growing and developing new ways of engaging all students. If you find that any course elements are interfering with your learning, or that changes to the course would benefit your learning, I’d like to invite you to email me to open that conversation. I may not always be able to make these changes, but I will always listen to you and discuss strategies to help you get the most out of this course. Please feel free to send me an email at any point, whether it’s Week 1 or Week 15.

References

Gurung, Regan A. R., and Noelle R. Galardi. “Syllabus Tone, More Than Mental Health Statements, Influence Intentions to Seek Help.” Teaching of Psychology 49, no. 3 (July 2022): 218-223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628321994632.

Harnish, Richard J., and K. Robert Bridges. “Effect of syllabus tone: students’ perceptions of instructor and course.” Social Psychology of Education 14 (2011): 319-330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-011-9152-4.

Learn how to use a new Canvas design feature to create quick buttons or icons for common course items, such as Syllabus and Grades.

Want to quickly and easily make buttons to help your students navigate your course? With the new Icon Maker in Canvas, you can have buttons like these up and running in 1-2 minutes, without ever leaving Canvas.

How to Use the Icon Maker

To open the new RCE Icon Maker, select the icon to the right of the “Documents” icon in the Rich Content Editor (RCE) toolbar. This will open a dropdown asking if you want to create a new icon or insert a previously created (saved) icon.

Selecting “Create Icon Maker Icon” will open a right sidebar where you can create the icon. The initial options include:

Name: For internal purposes only, this will not display on the icon
Alt Text: Absolutely critical, since these buttons are images – use the text the button shows, such as Home
Icon Shape: Any shape will work
Icon Size: Any size will work, but we recommend Medium
Icon Color: Any color will work
Icon Outline: Any color will work, but choose one that contrasts well with the icon color; neutrals are preferred
Icon Outline Size: Any size will work, but we recommend Medium

After that, you’ll need to set up the text of the button. The text position is particularly important here, as including the text on top of the icon will only make it extremely hard to read if you have an icon image. As such, we recommend choosing “Below” for the text position. We also recommend choosing “Large” text, as the smaller text sizes are not particularly legible in the Canvas design.

Finally, you’ll add the image part of the icon. The Icon Maker comes with preset image options (single color and multi-color). You can also upload your own image or use an existing course image. To get started with the image selection, click “Add Image.”

From the drop-down menu, select the option you want. If you choose to upload an image, you will have the option to crop the image to the shape as you see fit. For example, here is an icon where I uploaded an image of Shafer Tower to go along with the word “Home.”

Once you’ve set up the icon options, select “Apply” and the icon will insert into your content. You can edit it by selecting it and selecting “Edit.” When editing, there is a box you can check to apply changes to the icon across your entire course (anywhere that same icon appears in your Canvas design).

If you want to link the icon, this works just like linking an image. Select the icon and select the Link icon in the RCE toolbar (or press Ctrl+K / Cmd+K). You can link the icon to an external website or to any item in your Canvas site, such as an assignment, a module, your syllabus, or your homepage.

That’s it – all it takes for new icons is 1-2 minutes! Your icons will save in your course, so they will copy over whenever you copy that course in the future.

Ways to Use the Icon Maker in Your Canvas Design

The new Icon Maker can be used to create any icon, but its most natural fit is in creating buttons. Here are a few ways you could incorporate buttons created with the Icon Maker into your Canvas design:

Add a “Quick Links” section to your course home page with buttons directing students to commonly-used links, such as the syllabus, course schedule, and the current module.
Add “Back to Module Overview” buttons to any items in a module so that students always have quick and easy access to how the various pieces of the module fit together.
Add a “Send Me an Email” button to your instructor contact information so that students have a visual reminder to contact you with questions or concerns.
Add buttons linking to each module on the course home page, so that students can access current and past modules without having to scroll through a long Modules list.
Add a “Discussion Board Guidelines” button to any discussion board so that students can visit your overall guidelines/rubric for discussions in the course.

These are just the beginning – share in the comments below how you could use this new Canvas design feature to help students navigate your course!

Learn more about who Ball State students are, the challenges they face in their academic and personal lives, and how this can impact your teaching.

Every Fall and Spring, Ball State deploys a survey to students (online and in-person) through institution-wide Canvas announcements. This survey, which consists of about 40 questions, is designed to evaluate the student experience at Ball State. On average, about 2,000 students respond to the survey every semester.

In this post, I will share insights from one portion of the student experience survey: a series of questions asking students about the challenges they face in their academic and personal lives. These questions ask students to self-evaluate their own difficulties in various areas—such as work, healthcare, and family responsibilities—on the following scale:

No Difficulties
Minor Difficulties
Moderate Difficulties
Serious Difficulties
Does Not Apply

I will specifically focus on students who answered Moderate or Serious Difficulties, as these are the students who are significantly impacted by the challenges they face. All data discussed in this post is combined from the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 surveys, with a total of 4,266 responses.

My hope is that this analysis will help you gain a better picture of your students, as well as build empathy for them and develop strategies to help them with the challenges they face.

Common Challenges Learners Face

The biggest challenge learners face is staying motivated: 74% of Ball State students report motivation problems while 45% report moderate to serious motivation problems.

In a close second are mental health concerns, with 68% of students facing mental or emotional health problems and 42% facing moderate to serious issues with mental health.

Issues balancing work responsibilities with school come in third, with 57% of students facing these issues and 30% to a moderate or serious degree. This is to be expected, as 51% of Ball State students work at least 20 hours a week, and 25% work 40 or more hours a week outside of school.

Financial hardship is the next most common challenge, with 55% of students facing some financial hardship and 28% facing moderate to serious hardship.

These challenges, as well as learner preferences, are presented in the infographic below.

Relationships Between Different Challenges

While the data about common challenges is important, it’s worth noting that a significant portion of students are facing any challenge. Even the least common challenge – childcare – impacted 225 respondents.

That’s why I dug deeper into the data to examine how certain challenges are related to each other. Which challenges are more likely to occur together? What can that tell us about our students’ lives?

Below are some insights regarding the relationships between challenges. The percentages below are the difference between the “baseline” rate of a challenge and the rate when a learner also faces another challenge. For example, if 20 out of 100 students face financial hardship, but 40 out of 100 students face financial hardship while facing healthcare challenges, that would be a 100% increase (2x as likely).

Financial difficulties come with more challenges. For students facing financial hardship, all other challenges except mental health and motivation are more common than average. This includes food insecurity (94% more likely), affordability of materials (64%), technology access (57%), housing (47%), transportation (38%), and healthcare (36%).
Access issues are closely related. Students who have difficulty accessing reliable internet are almost 6x as likely to also not have access to learning devices such as laptops. They are almost 3x as likely to not have access to a dedicated learning space.
Motivation problems are less likely to be associated with other challenges. Students facing motivation problems are less likely to face other challenges than average. The only exceptions are mental health problems and social justice issues, both of which are more likely than average to co-occur with motivation problems.
Affordable materials are a social justice issue. While students who face challenges with affordability of learning materials are more likely than average to be facing financial hardships (64%), they’re even more likely to be facing social justice issues (67%).
All challenges are social justice issues. Only one challenge was more likely to co-occur with every single other challenge: social justice issues. Students who are facing social justice issues are more likely than average to be facing other issues, with the most likely challenges being housing (167% more likely) and healthcare (153% more likely).

Teaching Implications

How can this data about the challenges learners face inform our teaching practices at Ball State? Here are a few points I think are important to note:

Empathy is critical. Your learners often face many challenges outside your classroom. When they aren’t on top of their game, it’s not about you as the teacher. Having empathy for them and their lives can go a long way towards cultivating a learning community based on kindness and care. Learn more about compassion and flexibility in course design.
Addressing just one area can have an impact throughout a student’s life. For example, you could address the affordability of materials through Open Educational Resources (OER). Using OER will not necessarily solve all the problems students face, but it can alleviate some of the pressure of facing multiple simultaneous challenges. Learn more about OER at Ball State.
Support and check in on learners who are facing challenges. If you know about the challenges a learner is facing, it’s quite possible that you only know the tip of the iceberg. Check in on your students and offer your support, because it’s likely they are facing multiple challenges, and your support can make a difference. Learn more about the Canvas course template, which includes student check-ins.

What would you like to change about your teaching practices based on the challenges Ball State learners face? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Frustrated by your Canvas Gradebook? This new feature can help you organize your grades to see exactly what you need to see when you need to see it.

Frequent, low-stakes, formative assessments are good teaching practices in all classes, online and in-person. Assessments such as activities, weekly quizzes, peer reviews, scaffolded assignments, reflections, and group discussions all allow you to evaluate where students are at and provide feedback to help them improve their learning. In fact, a recent literature review found that students were 2.5 times more likely to pass courses in which low-stakes quizzes were used to test knowledge.

One of the biggest frustrations of this approach, though, is managing these items in the Canvas Gradebook. Having dozens of small assignments can make navigating the Gradebook a pain. Canvas has introduced a new Feature Preview that makes Gradebook much easier to organize.

With Enhanced Gradebook Filters, you can sort and organize Gradebook. Even better, you can save these views so you can quickly and easily return to them whenever you want. Here’s everything you need to know about this exciting new feature!

Setting Up Filters

Open Gradebook by selecting Grades in the course navigation. Along the left side is a new “Applied Filters” area that tells you what filters you have on. On the right side is a new “Filters” button. Select this and you’ll see a quick message about the new feature. Select “Create New Filter” to get started with your first filter.

Filters can have one or more conditions. Click the “Select condition type” dropdown and select which type of condition you want.

Assignment Group: Shows only assignments from that group.
Module: Shows only graded items from that Module.
Section: Shows only students in the selected Section.
Student Group: Shows only students in the selected Group.
Submissions: Can show items with ungraded submissions or items with submissions.
Start Date: Shows only items with a due date at or after the start date.
End Date: Shows only items with a due date at or before the end date.

After you select one condition, click “Add Condition” to create more conditions. Conditions can be combined for a wide variety of uses. For example:

Module + Submissions to show only items from your current module that have ungraded submissions. This allows you to quickly see only the current items that need graded instead of seeing all assignments in your course.
Assignment Group + Start Date + End Date + Submissions to show only weekly quizzes with submissions in a particular time range. This would let you assess students’ performance on specific quizzes, such as for preparing your instruction after a quiz.
Student Group + Submissions to show any ungraded group work. This could help you when working with student groups to fill them in on what they have done and what they still need to do.

As you can imagine, the possibilities are almost endless! Enhanced Gradebook Filters gives you the ability to create personalized “dashboards” to view your Gradebook in a wide variety of ways.

Applying and Saving Filters

Once you’ve set up the conditions you want, you’ll need to select the “Apply filter” toggle to turn on the filter.

To save your Filter, give it a name and click “Save.”

After you’ve saved a Filter, you can reapply it at any time by selecting the “Filters” button along the right side and toggling “Apply filter” to the saved Filter. You can even apply multiple saved Filters at the same time! Click the pencil next to a saved Filter to change its name.

Quick Recap

Now that you’ve seen how Gradebook filters work, we hope that you have ideas about how to use them in your course. Here’s a quick recap to get you up and running with the new filters ASAP.

Turn on Enhanced Gradebook Filters for each Canvas course under Settings > Feature Options > Enhanced Gradebook Filters.
Create filters with one or more conditions. Apply those filters and save them for easy access at any time.
Combine conditions or filters in different ways to have dynamic “dashboards” for your course Gradebook.
Consider your most common problems with grading: How could you begin to fix them with a customized view that would show you exactly what you need?

What are you excited to do with Enhanced Gradebook Filters? Weigh in below in the comments!

Edit (11/7/22): Section about how to enable Enhanced Gradebook Filters removed from article. Previously, this feature was optional and had to be enabled, but it currently is automatically enabled on all Canvas courses at Ball State University.

References

Morris, Rebecca, Thomas Perry, and Lindsey Wardle. “Formative Assessment and Feedback for Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Review.” Review of Education 9, no. 3 (2021): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3292

Sotola, Lukas K. and Marcus Crede. “Regarding Class Quizzes: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of Studies on the Relationship between Frequent Low-Stakes Testing and Class Performance.” Educational Psychology Review 33, no. 2 (2021): 407-426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09563-9

What role should smartphones play outside the physical classroom space?

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What role should smartphones play inside the physical classroom space?

What does all this mean for me?

References

1 – Allow students to work ahead.

2 – Carefully plan the pacing of your course.

3 – Plan for late work, and support students who submit late work.

4 – Encourage flexible forms of participation.

5 – Give students choices for how to complete assignments.

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6 – Chunk content into smaller pieces that students can complete in 15 minutes or less.

7 – Consider adding “pauses” to your regular schedule.

8 – Make resources that support students readily available.

9 – Ensure your course site can be easily accessed on mobile devices.

10 – Offer students the option for non-work hour meetings.

Part 1: What Ball State Students Say About Flexibility

References

An Example: Web Writing for Professional Writing Students

How This Approach Missed the Big Picture

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Charting a Different Course

Some Learning Strategies Work Better Than Others

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Preference ≠ Learning

Multimodality and UDL

References

Why Record Your Own Teaching Videos?

So What Do I Need?

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References

Who Can Get Help?

Warm and Welcoming Language

Rethinking Name and Placement

Putting It All Together: A Sample Statement

Universal Design for Learning Statement

References

How to Use the Icon Maker

Ways to Use the Icon Maker in Your Canvas Design

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Common Challenges Learners Face

Relationships Between Different Challenges

Teaching Implications

Setting Up Filters

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Applying and Saving Filters

Quick Recap

References