Building Quality into Your Courses
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A workshop centered around building quality into your courses through thoughtful course design. Discusses the use of rubrics such as the Quality Matters and BlackBoard Exemplary Course rubrics, as well as helps instructors use a blueprint to map out their own course objectives.
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Building Quality into Your Courses
- 1. Office of Learning & Technology Purdue University North Central
- 2. You’re about to: Practice building complete learning objectives Build a blueprint Identify barriers to implementing your blueprint, including academic integrity issues Use the Quality Matters rubric as a planning tool for your courses Review exemplary BlackBoard courses and what makes them “stand above the rest”
- 3. A = Audience – who completes the objective B = Behavior – what do we want them to do? C = Condition – under what conditions are they performing D = Degree – how do we know they’re successful?
- 4. http://cstep.csumb.edu/Obj_tutorial/bloomwheel.html Thinking skill Action verbs Student products
- 5. Let’s try coming up with some activities and assessments for the following objective: “At the end of the unit, students will be able to create and revise a household budget using Microsoft Excel.” How about this one? “And end of the course, students will be able to explain the processes of meiosis and mitosis in the cells of animals and plants.”
- 6. Review the sample and blank blueprint grids provided (also available in Module 2 of online course) Identify what you want students to be able to know or do, and how you will go through the process of teaching each objective/task Can this help you map out some or all of your course lessons? Let’s take a few minutes to jot down some ideas following the grid and share
- 7. Was this a difficult exercise? Why or why not? Can you foresee anything getting in your way with regard to creating or implementing a blueprint like this for your courses?
- 8. Concerns about cheating and plagiarism can be a big obstacle, and may limit our choices for assessment Luckily, there are ways to use technology to help ensure that students are doing authentic work SafeAssign (BlackBoard assessment to check student work for plagiarism) Respondus LockDown Browser (for test-taking) ProctorU and Respondus Monitor (to proctor exams)
- 9. OLT Website: http://www.pnc.edu/distance/cheating/ LockDown Browser information: http://www.pnc.edu/distance/lockdown-browser- instructions/ SafeAssign information: http://www.pnc.edu/distance/safeassign/ ProctorU information: http://www.pnc.edu/distance/proctoru/
- 10. The QM Rubric can also help significantly with the process of course development This and your course blueprint can serve as “roadmaps,” making course design much, much easier These tools will also help you identify areas in your course where you may be able to improve or alter your lessons and assessments
- 11. BlackBoard has its own rubric that it uses to identify and recognize exemplary courses Rubric: http://www.blackboard.com/resources/catalyst-awards/ BbExemplaryCourseRubric_March2014. pdf Example courses: https://ecpgallery.coursesites.com You can even volunteer to be a BlackBoard course reviewer or submit your course for the award!
- 12. Exemplary Course Tours: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLontYaReEU 1voZsmm5gDVNT6imGKnLWTp Showcase courses in our PNC BlackBoard WebEx: http://purdue.webex.com Google Docs: http://drive.google.com Prezi: http://www.prezi.com Padlet: http://www.padlet.com MS Office Templates: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ templates/ Jing and Camtasia: http://www.techsmith.com Wordpress: http://www.wordpress.com Tackk: http://www.tackk.com
- 13. Reach us at: pncolt@pnc.edu Twitter and Facebook: @PNCOLT http://www.pnc.edu/distance for all workshop notes, links, and training needs
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Building Quality in Your Courses, a look at how to build a course from the beginning that is highly understanding and contains all elements that students will need for successful learning.
- Our objectives for this workshop are to build a course blueprint using what we already know about creating good learning objectives, as well as some new information. The blueprint process will help you keep your courses on track and your content aligned with what you really want students to know and be able to do. We will also talk about potential barriers to you getting the most from your course designs, including issues with academic integrity, and we’ll also take another look at the Quality Matters rubric and some exemplary courses built in BlackBoard to help ensure that your course is student-friendly, and easy to follow and understand.
- Remember the ABCD method when choosing your course objectives. This refers to Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree, and helps us understand in one sentence who our learners are, what they’re expected to do, under what conditions they’ll do it and to, and how we will know they are successful. So, when you’re creating these objectives, be sure to use good action verbs – words that describe a behavior we can actually see, and therefore assess. Words like “know” and “understand” might mean something to us as teachers, but what do they really mean? How do assess “knowing,” since we can’t peek inside students’ heads? Instead of words like these, try verbs that have actions that can be directly observed, such as Discuss, Identify, Create, Evaluate, and Compare/Contrast. These refer to actions or behaviors we can see, and therefore we can measure them more effectively.
- Here is a wonderful and very helpful wheel for different types of verbs that can be used for different kinds of objectives. Student products they might actually do as a result that you can assess are correlated as well, so you can easily build objectives for your course just by using this handy wheel. What kinds of objectives can you build?
- Consider your own class and maybe some of your own objectives. What sorts of things do students need to know and do to be successful in your course? Remember your ABCD’s here. For example, in the first example, “At the end of the unit, students will be able to create and revise a household budget using Microsoft Excel,” how might we be able to introduce this lesson, give students activities to explore it, and assess it? “Using Microsoft Excel” is the Degree here, so perhaps some introduction on using Excel, or recalling what students already know about Excel, would be the first step. You might try to include a video demonstration of some kind, especially in an online or hybrid course. After that, you might decide to present students with a fake budget and ask them to go through and evaluate it, or rearrange it into a more usable budget format in a spreadsheet. From there, once they are comfortable with the skills, you may be able to send them off to work on their own budget spreadsheet project, and their results of this project becomes the assessment. What about in this objective: “And end of the course, students will be able to explain the processes of meiosis and mitosis in the cells of animals and plants”? What kinds of activities could be created to address this objective?
- You have been provided with sample and blank objectives blueprints from which to work on. These will help you map out your course in detail, so it may be wise to start with all of the tasks or skills students need to accomplish in your course first. From there, you can work out some objectives, and for each objective, develop some answers to the questions of what instructors do, what learners do, and what the assessment looks like. In some cases, you may have overlapping objectives or multiple objectives that are addressed by a single assignment. That’s ok, and you can work that into your blueprint grid in whatever way makes sense to you. Remember, this is your planning tool, so personalize it as you see fit. The main idea is that you should try to consider each of the columns and see where the parts of your course truly fit. If you have an activity that does not truly have a “home” in your blueprint, perhaps it is time to retire it from your course!
- Do you think you will encounter any problems or barriers along the way to implementing your blueprint? What about issues regarding academic integrity, such as plagiarism and cheating? What about issues related to technology reliability or use? There may, of course, be a number of ways to overcome such barriers using tools and resources that are already available.
- Academic integrity is a big issue for many faculty, and it can even prevent some from taking their courses into a hybrid or online format because of fears that technology may give students too many opportunities to cheat on papers and tests. In reality, the research says that students do not really cheat any more in their online classes than they do their face-to-face courses – in fact, some research even suggests that online students cheat LESS than students in live classes (http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring131/watson131.html). Nonetheless, it is never a bad idea to help students understand that you take academic integrity seriously, and that you wish for them to exhibit a high standard of ethics. Tools such as SafeAssign, Respondus LockDown Browser, and ProctorU and Respondus Monitor can help reduce cheating by acting as deterrents as well as “checkers” for cheating. SafeAssign checks student writing against databases of other academic papers, web pages, and other sources. LockDown Browser is a tool best suited for live and hybrid classes, which prevents students going from other places within their systems while online taking a BlackBoard test. ProctorU and Respondus Monitor use the students’ webcam and microphone to watch the student while taking a test and serve as a remote proctor. These may be most useful for high-stakes tests, like final exams, that are to be delivered online.
- These resources can teach you more about these academic integrity tools. In addition, in spring 2015 you will be enrolled in a course in BlackBoard that will help you get more familiar with these tools and other strategies. Students will be enrolled in their own version of this course, which will be optional for them to go through, but will always be available to them for reference.
- The Quality Matters rubric can really be an excellent roadmap for you, and can work in conjunction with your blueprint to provide you with the best possible course for you and your students. The QM rubric can help you make short work of the big job of putting together a quality course by following along with its recommendations and standards. Truly, once you get the hang of it, course design isn’t nearly as daunting a task as you might think with these tools at your disposal!
- BlackBoard has its own exemplary course rubric and even an awards recognition program that you can send your course into, or can volunteer to be part of the review team. The BlackBoard exemplary courses are posted each year with screen videos and full working demos to provide other instructors with models of best practice. It can be extremely helpful to visit these sites and tour the available courses online. These courses feature many of the same design characteristics that you may already use in your course, but may also provide you with ideas to make your course that much more engaging, or help you solve any issues you might currently be having with your courses.
- Try some of these links to find examples of what great courses can look like, and find new ways to add interesting stuff to your courses. This may help with added variety or finding new ways to address those objectives and activities you set forward in your blueprint.
- Please contact us and visit http://pnc.edu/distance for all workshop notes, links, and training needs. Thank you!