Small Signposts: Small Practices that Make a Big Impact for Instructors and Students (2pm–2:20pm ET) Presenter: Pam Whitehouse, Tennessee Board of Regents D2L Connection: Worldwide Edition Wednesday, January 8, 2020 Totally Online

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Presentation 7 of 12:
Small Signposts: Small Practices that Make a
Big Impact for Instructors and Students

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Senior Instructional Designer, TN
eCampus, Nashville, TN
• 20 years higher ed teaching
experience
• Doctorate in Learning & Teaching,
Harvard Graduate School of
Education
• Masters in Political Science,
University of Rhode Island
Dr. Pam Whitehouse

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Flowers, Darby, and Lang,
J.M. (2019) Small Teaching
Online: Applying Learning
Science in Online Classes.
San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Presentation Based On and Adapted From…

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Purpose
To significantly increase the quality and effectiveness of our
online courses without significantly increasing the time and
effort required from us.
Small Change  Big Impact

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Learning Objectives
 Apply current research from the learning sciences to create
“small teaching” activities to engage students in deeper
learning of course content.
 Effectively use universal design principles to provide
multiple entry points for teaching and learning.
 Help students and instructors begin with the end in mind
through reflective practice.

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Signpost: Start With the End in Mind
Require a low-stakes graded task that requires students to familiarize themselves
with the final assessment(s) of the course in the first week
Pedagogical Choices:
• Discussion question
• Low-stakes quiz
• Short writing assignment (preferred)
Example: Describe final assessment purpose in student’s own words.
Learning Outcome: Students and instructors gain insight into the overall purpose of
the course

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Why Would I Do This?
Benefits to students: Research suggests that students receive
significant cognitive benefits from trying to learn tasks before they
are ready. (Lang, 2016, pp. 41-62)
“Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing
of the answer when it is later supplied.” (Brown, Roediger, and
McDaniel, 2014, p. 88)
Benefit to instructors: Students get a stronger sense of instructor
presence through feedback and instructors get a stronger sense of
where students are in their understanding of the course.

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Signpost: Add Reflective Practice
Planfully require students to review module learning objectives at
various points throughout the course.
How? Students may provide an audio or written response (UDL). Instruct
them to choose 1-2 module learning objectives that are of most concern
to them and briefly explain why.
Encourage an informal and reduced-stress response.
Benefit to instructors: Feedback can be given quickly, allows instructors
to be reflective as well as reinforce their online presence.

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Why Would I Do This?
Reflection is a significant part of making learning durable.
● Retrieval: recalling information
● Elaboration: explaining course content and purposes
● Generation: developing ideas about novel use of course
content
(Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014, p. 89)

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Signpost: Make the Assessment Process Reflective
Multiple Choice Quizzes
• Allow students to copy their wrong answers into a document.
• They may rewrite the question so that their answer is correct.
• Or students may explain where they went wrong on their answer choice and link to
course content to provide evidence.
Written Work
• Scaffolding is important, even for graduate courses.
• Multi-stage feedback saves amazing amounts of time when the final work is submitted.

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Why Would I Do This?
 Formative and reflective assessment is a powerful learning tool for
students.
 Creating steps toward the larger assignment provides multiple
opportunities for students to reflect upon and deepen their
understanding of the content.
 Essential focus on process and reflection is common in F2F classes,
but often is overlooked in online courses.
 Multiple low stakes assignments support learning more effectively
than a single summative one. (Flowers and Wang, 2019)

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Signpost: Enhance Student Engagement
Asynchronous discussion is always a challenge to make meaningful
and effective.
Provide discussion highlights at the end of a discussion.
• Recognize students who have made substantial contributions to the
discussion
• Highlight the important ideas and concepts relevant to the content.
• Skim discussion posts, then copy and paste parts of most relevant
posts to the final post of the discussion. Instant study guide!

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Why Would I Do This?
 Reinforce student learning
 Highlights may serve as study guides
 Increase student motivation to write a post for highlighting
 Help students get key takeaways in the online course, just
as one would do in F2F class

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Summary: It’s Making Process Visible
 Start with the end in mind
 Reflective process is often the missing part of online
teaching
 Add periodic reflective practice
 Enhance instructor-student engagement
 Make the assessment process formative and reflective