“92% of teachers believe technology has a positive impact on student engagement in learning.” 

What Makes a Good Classroom?

The essential priorities for successful classroom management remain the same regardless of whether learning is virtual, hybrid, or in-person. This article will explore what constitutes a good classroom, common obstacles concerning new classroom technologies, and how Edtech can help overcome these barriers and support teachers and students in their needs and goals.

Relationships and Communication

Barrier: Concern by educators that a technology-focused learning model can isolate students, increase dependence on devices, and jeopardize interpersonal connections.

Cultivating robust teacher-student relationships within a classroom environment is important. Edtech can bolster these connections by complementing and amplifying the human-to-human experience. When students are absent or educators are dealing with large class sizes, communicating with all students equally while nurturing a positive learning environment can prove challenging. Instead of isolating students, Learning Management Systems like Google Classroom and Brightspace allow students to interact immediately with their teacher and classmates, regardless of whether they are in the room physically or virtually. These platforms can also enhance peer-to-peer relationships. Group assignments can be challenging if students are required to be in the same physical space to complete their work. With online discussion forums and real-time knowledge sharing, all content is accessible to all students synchronously, and students are not limited to a time or place. They can collaborate, share ideas, and work together at any time, from anywhere. 

Collaboration and Equality

Barrier: Educators often lack confidence in the positive outcome of new technologies and are skeptical that Edtech can have a favourable impact on student learning.

Communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, that allow for student collaboration, have revolutionized group work and team assignments. Not only are students able to work collectively on projects in real-time (without location challenges), the contributions of each team member are visible at each step. This can motivate students to engage both with each other and with the content, while staying accountable to their peers. An educator can also track students who are struggling or not contributing, and is able to provide timely, specific and personal student feedback while the project is in progress. In addition, students can access software to support different learning styles. For example, students who require assistance for reading or writing, can use digital support like texthelp to accommodate their learning needs, creating a more equitable educational environment. When educators utilize technology to facilitate connection and optimize equitable learning, these platforms can streamline the teaching process and promote connection in the classroom.

Engagement and Feedback 

Barrier: Educators can view learning a new digital tool as one extra responsibility for them to undertake, especially in an environment that already involves a constant flow of information and entertainment.

Learning outcomes are best when students are engaged. Students are more likely to apply themselves when content is interesting and they receive responsive and instructive feedback. While a digital classroom can give students access to unlimited information, Edtech permits educators to streamline and focus what information students are engaging with and how. Grading tools allow specific, detailed feedback at a faster rate, and are indispensable to the digital classroom. By allowing immediate and personalized responses, grading essentially becomes a conversation between a teacher and student. This can foster a deeper understanding of the content while strengthening the teacher-student connection. Platforms like Kahoot and Prodigy that gamify learning or Unimersiv and Discovery VR which offer educational experiences through virtual reality can also greatly enhance student engagement, while promoting focused learning. As mentioned above, different students have different learning styles. Gamification of content and experiential learning allow teachers to create unique, relevant and creative opportunities for students to engage with how and what they learn.

Interaction = Engagement 

Productivity and Time Leveraging

Barrier: A common objection to Edtech adoption is, “I don’t have time to learn and navigate another platform.” 

Grading hundreds of paper-based assessments with a red pen can be tedious and time-consuming. Using online grading solutions, educators can grade three times faster while leaving more formative feedback for students. AI assessment tools allow educators to draw on automated support to refine their grading process, saving time to enhance commentary or create other learning opportunities. Platforms that automatically grade multiple choice exams and/or simplify marking tasks (without affecting a student’s direct learning experience) boost productivity and increase efficiency without hindering the personal interaction between teacher and student. While navigating a new platform may involve  some investment of time at adoption, the time-leveraging benefits are far-reaching.

“81% of students feel that digital technologies improve their grades and efficiency.”

Reflection

Educational technology will inevitably continue to evolve and further impact the educational landscape. While there will always be challenges with the adoption of new technologies, if the focus remains on student engagement and essential learning priorities, teachers and students can use these tools to promote a powerful and participatory learning environment. 

Which AI assessments, student feedback and grading tools are right for you? Learn more.

“In partnership with our university and college customers, we’ve made it possible to display university specific in-house mental health support resources in the student courses page in Crowdmark,” says Michelle Caers, Crowdmark’s CEO. “This feature is part of our ongoing commitment to support mental health efforts at our partner schools.” 

In the last thirty years, campus support for student mental health has come a long way. Once treated as a personal challenge that students faced in isolation, mental health is increasingly acknowledged as a significant factor in overall student wellness. 

Fostering mental health efforts has likewise become an increasingly important aspect of student life and campus community programs, and for government bodies seeking to support that work. In October 2022, EdSurge published an article detailing the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to fund this important work, including two grants programs backed with $280 million in funding “to help young people access mental health care.”  

“Even when there are supports available to students, like a student wellness center or extra help, it’s hard for students to find those and navigate them, not because there’s no information, but almost there’s just way too much information. The students who are already feeling like they don’t belong or they’re feeling a bit frozen are not able to seek out the resources they need because the volume of information is way too much.” – Dr. Lindsey Daniels, University of British Columbia

But as Zara Abrams notes in “Student Mental Health is in crisis. Campuses are rethinking their approach,” published on the American Psychology Association’s website, mental health is increasingly under siege. 

In her article, Abrmas interviews Michael Gerard Mason, who is an associate dean of African American Affairs at the University of Virginia and a college counselor. Mason observes that “Counseling centers have seen  extraordinary increases in demand over the past decade,” with staffing positions swelling to match. “Our counseling staff has almost tripled in size,” he tells Abrams, “But even if we continue hiring, I don’t think we could ever staff our way out of this challenge.” 

The pandemic lockdowns were a significant contributing factor to the mental health challenges facing students. In a research snapshot published in Cureus in 2020, the authors cite the shift to online formats, changing assessment methods, travel restrictions and the pandemic’s wide impact on “health, safety, family well-being, career prospects and the global recession” as overall contributing factors to increased mental health needs.   

In addition to staffing increases, other popular campus-led responses include: 

• Adding more mental health education efforts and making screenings more accessible 
• Making counseling services more accessible, especially for remote students 
• Offering peer-support programs
• Promoting healthy lifestyles, safe and inclusive environments and community-building activities

Student mental health, and technology’s role in supporting it, is also a major consideration at Crowdmark. 

“Whenever our team considers a change to the student workflow in our grading solution, the downstream impact on students and their mental health is part of the discussion,” says Michelle Caers, Crowdmark’s CEO. “There’s anxiety with all grades and feedback. Students may feel pressure to perform, especially if they intend to apply to post-secondary degree or professionalization programs where grades play a large part in the application process.” 

The shift to online systems and digital feedback means that course work can follow students throughout their day, without equal opportunities for collaboration and connection. 

“If students are having fewer face-to-face interactions in the run of a week than they did when learning was always done in a traditional classroom setting, that experience may contribute to feelings of social isolation. We think deeply and often about our technology’s role in that ecosystem,” says Caers.      

For university or college partners participating in the Student Mental Health section rollout, students logging in to check grades, submit work, or receive feedback will also see a phone number or website link for the institution’s mental health supports on their courses page.

“The pressure students can feel to excel is real, and unanticipated feedback and grades can make anyone feel overwhelmed or upset,” says Caers. “We want to make it easier for students to access the help they need by making contact information accessible within the platform. Our hope is that by taking away the ‘look it up’ step, we’ll help more students get the support and care they need.” 

If you are interested in listing your institutions resources in Crowdmark, please contact support@crowdmark.com. 

Beginning with the first wave of lockdowns in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic changed many aspects to how the world works and learns. With a hybrid workflow and a user base across North America, Crowdmark has a unique vantage point on the pandemic’s continuing impact on higher education and online learning.  

In the last of this three-part series, we explore the future of remote, hybrid and return to class models, and our thoughts on where the field may move next. 

Online learning: A permanent part of the strategy mix

As lockdowns ended and life resumed more of its typical pace in 2022, Crowdmark began fielding more inquiries from instructors actively looking for grading and assessment tools. In-person learning has once again become a regular part of the classroom experience, but that doesn’t mean that virtual tools have fallen out of the mix.

“By this point, the educators I speak with have already tried a couple of online teaching tools,” says Virginia Woodall, account manager. “They know they need a better solution and are actively looking for the best fit. There’s also shortened evaluation and procurement processes at many institutions for this kind of software compared to what we had before the pandemic.”

Michelle Caers, CEO of Crowdmark, agrees. “Some industries saw a spike in use during the pandemic  and then a massive drop off as people returned to in-person options. Peloton is a good example of this. In contrast, digital education has experienced sustained growth following a rapid adoption period. The pandemic accelerated the digitization of education by at least 10 years, and usage will only continue to grow. Forward-thinking schools are already planning for the next pandemic, and a short- and long-term strategy for online learning is part of that planning.”

Part of the reason for the growing adoption is that the pandemic forced educational institutions to re-evaluate their strategies for learning and meeting student needs. “People want to work from home and have flexibility in their learning options,” says Michelle Caers, CEO. “With this changing environment serving students’ needs is a huge priority. Educators require effective tools in order to provide a learning experience that works for everyone. For example, some of the schools we work with offer a blend of in-person, online and hybrid learning. It creates an opportunity for institutions to offer a tailored experience.”

Picking the class format that works best for student learning

Do you remember the ‘everything you see here is now in your pocket’ meme?

That photo demonstrates the ubiquity of smartphones in the modern era while also showing us how quickly our technology progressed over time. 

In a sense, the pandemic’s effect on online learning was similar. Education shifted for students, instructors and learning institutions as remote, hybrid and in-person classes all become possible within the same semester, and there’s no returning to the previous era.

“Innovation was the one big constant through this period,” observed Michelle Caers. “We see it in class delivery and marking now. In the future, we may move to fully digital assessments that can be completed anywhere with electronic paper and a stylus. What’s important is that we keep human interaction centered within the learning experience.”

Artificial intelligence is likely to play a part in that evolution, as we saw in our earlier series on the rise of chatbot technology.

“It’s interesting how trends circle back in software,” Caers notes. “Pivoting to focus on the online environment was the right decision for Crowdmark in March 2020. Because of recent concerns around artificial intelligence tools like chatbots, however, we’re also seeing demand for paper-based assessments come back into focus to ensure students are actively applying their knowledge.”

Crowdmark: Primarily remote for the foreseeable future for life

Like the instructors and students who use our solution, Crowdmark employees suddenly found themselves doing everything online and glued to their computers for long hours during the pandemic.

“The mental health struggles in those first few months were universal,” says Jamie Gilgin, head software developer. “Like the faculty, students and teachers we work with, we also adjusted to having our loved ones and roommates at home all the time. The wider social isolation and loneliness were a persistent challenge. At the same time, remote work also allowed us to hire talent from across Canada. Crowdmark now has employees from St. John’s to Vancouver.”

“We grew steadily into 2024, more than tripling the team as we grew to meet demand,” Caers agrees. “Our team is small enough that we weren’t widely impacted by larger trends that emerged during the pandemic’s later stages, such as the Great Resignation or Quiet Quitting. We do get together in person periodically to develop things like our product roadmap.

“Crowdmark was built around strong collaborative values,” says Caers. “We model them internally, on projects and when problem solving. It helps to foster that connected feeling that’s so important to strong teamwork.”  

One of the pandemic’s more bizarre lasting effects is the way it froze time for many people.“It’s hard to believe that 2019 was five years ago,” says Caers. “I caught a recent episode of The Morning Show that flashed the show’s characters back to the cusp of the pandemic and all its inherent changes. Watching it immediately brought back my own memories. On some level, it still feels like 2019 was last year, though we’ve all changed and grown.”

Crowdmark was founded in 2013 long before the global pandemic upended everything about how the world works and learns. With a hybrid workflow and a user base around the world, we had a unique vantage point on how this global event changed higher education.  

In this three-part series, we’ll explore how Covid-19 changed the way higher education teaches and grades, highlight our team’s unique window on the pandemic and share insights from the data we collected during this period. 

When the world shut down

March 2020 is likely vivid in your memory. Covid-19 cases rose in cities like Wuhan in January and Italy’s Lombardy region in February, leading to global lockdowns by the middle of March. 

Flights and large gatherings were among the first events to get cancelled, followed by in-person office meetings, followed by . . . nearly everything. Celebrities like Tom Hanks announced they caught corona. Going to the grocery store abruptly became a fraught experience.

At the time, it wasn’t clear how the virus was spreading, only that large numbers of people were getting sick. We now know that Covid-19 is spread through airborne particles exhaled by infected carriers, even before they develop symptoms. And we all learned more than we ever wanted to about social distancing.

A sharp pivot to virtual classes and online assessments

As schools closed around the world, all learning was moved online for better or for worse. It was an immense undertaking. Educators of all stripes quickly had to become experts in running online classrooms and delivering online assessments.

“The Covid-19 pandemic had three distinct phases in education: A scramble to implement solutions with whatever was familiar and available; the make-do era marked with fatigue and burnout; and the current era of strategic thinking about hybrid models,” says Michelle Caers, CEO of Crowdmark. “Before the pandemic, virtual learning and digital grading platforms were present in education. Early adopters were proficient and extolled the benefits, but there was no wholescale reason for their institutions to disrupt in-person learning until the 2020 March lockdowns.” 

Digital adoption was rapid and intense. Understandably, finishing the term was a big priority for many educators since exams were looming and students were concerned about completing their terms or degrees.

Crowdmark itself has a long culture of remote work. “We’ve always had a remote-first culture,” says Caers. “At the start of Covid, we had six people and a few shared desks in a co-working space in downtown Toronto. Ahead of the lockdown, the bigger tech companies located near us announced they were sending their workers home. Health Canada hadn’t yet made a formal announcement, but I decided it was best if everyone stayed home and stayed safe.” She pauses. “People were expecting it to be only a couple of weeks”.

When lockdowns were announced, institutions large and small moved their classrooms online virtually overnight. Some schools opted to cancel exams while others made do with their existing tools. 

Crowdmark’s team fielded many support calls from existing users and new institutions urgently looking for help. In the earliest days, users adopted Crowdmark’s homework workflow as it existed to meet their urgent virtual exam needs. 

Other instructors opted to restructure their syllabi, taking high-stakes exams of 70 percent or more off the table while making smaller tests or assignments available. A long time Crowdmark user and Statistics professor from York University generally administered multiple smaller tests during COVID to “reduce her student incentive to cheat on any one assignment” given the lower stakes while also reducing performance pressure.

Recognizing the pressures educators were under, Crowdmark offered free access to the platform and daily training sessions until May 31, 2020. 

“Supporting our community of educators during challenging times has always been our top priority,” says Caers. “Providing free access helped them to ensure learning continuity while also helping to keep students healthy and safe. It was an easy decision, and we saw many other software companies make similar offers shortly thereafter. People were doing their best to help however they could.”

A truly global user base in eight intense weeks

“Crowdmark’s functionality allowed marking teams to make flexible choices, but some remained committed to the large exam format,” says Jamie Gilgin, development lead. “We realized our existing workflow wouldn’t support timed exams and pivoted all our development efforts to build out a synchronous and asynchronous exam workflow instead, adding new features as fast as we could build and test them.” 

Crowdmark also doubled its support team from mid-March to mid-May in 2020. “The volume of support requests meant we were still working 14 hours a day, seven days a week,” Caers remembers. “Even when we ramped up our team.” 

One early decision for the Crowdmark team to navigate were requests to implement online proctoring tools for exams. “We made a conscious decision not to support surveillance tools that monitor what students were doing in real time. These tools were fraught with equity and privacy issues along with questionable effectiveness. They exacerbated an already high stress situation for students ,” says Caers. “Our culture focuses on trusting people, respecting their integrity, and delivering the best possible experience.

“Rather than support online surveillance tools, we opted to help our users find ways to test students’ analytical thinking while showing their work,” Caers explains. “It’s not impossible to cheat while doing that kind of assessment, but it requires a lot more effort.”

At the peak of 2020’s spring exam period, Crowdmark fielded over 50,000 requests per minute from time zones around the world. “People forget that when students were sent home, they returned to places all over the world,” says Caers. “Responding to their infrastructure needs while supporting their instructors was a huge but exciting challenge for our team.”

In part two of the series, we’ll cover the rapid iterations Crowdmark’s system underwent during Covid-19 and the middle phase of online learning adoption during the pandemic.

We’ve covered the rise of ChatGPT and AI-driven chatbot technology , along with the impact of this technology on grading and its implications for academic integrity .

This time, we’ll explore how the Crowdmark team and system use AI tools.

What’s the Crowdmark approach to artificial intelligence?

Crowdmark has been using artificial intelligence to support grading since 2016. Crowdmark’s formal policy on artificial intelligence is to free educators from tedious administrative tasks so that they can focus on providing rich formative feedback to students. 

“We do not seek to replace educators by grading with AI as we see teaching and learning as a fundamentally human-to-human experience.”says Michelle Caers, CEO

This developing area is of considerable interest for the company given its broad potential impact on grading and higher education.

“Crowdmark’s approach to artificial intelligence is quite strategic,” continues Caers. “Our mission is to improve student learning through assessments: that’s always our priority. We believe students learn best when they receive thoughtful feedback from their instructors. All our technology is deployed to serve that mission.”

Jamie Gilgen, Crowdmark’s product development lead, agrees. “In general, we automate anything that does not have bearing on a student’s direct learning experience, such as getting content into the platform or organizing it for grading teams. That’s always been part of our planning. We oppose solutions that automate point values or responses for open response questions. We never want to minimize or replace human-to-human interaction.”

How Crowdmark’s Platform uses AI now: Optical Character Recognition

In 2016, Gilgen leveraged existing artificial intelligence technology to sort and match student work. Her script analyzes the handwriting sample through an AI function called optical character recognition (OCR). Its convolutional neural network functions a little like a human eye to allow the platform to ‘see’ the handwriting, recognize the characters as letters, and match them to information in the student’s ID record within Crowdmark’s platform.

Optical Character Recognition automatically matching a student with their Administered (in-person)  Assessment  

“Initially, I spent a long time working through handwriting samples to check the algorithm’s output,” says Gilgin. “I penalized the algorithm when it failed, as opposed to identifying positive results, which helped it to get better at selecting the correct input. That technology has improved a lot since then and we are currently exploring new ways to improve this automation.”

“This code, which uses AI to match handwriting to known letters, removes significant work that the instructor would otherwise have to perform to read the handwriting and manually tell us who the work belongs to,” continues Gilgin. “That kind of lift, which doesn’t interfere with the learning process, is an obvious place where AI helps us to win. The user never experiences the AI’s work, but its presence makes their use of Crowdmark infinitely better.”

More AI uses: Marking multiple-choice bubble sheets

When the platform first launched over a decade ago, Crowdmark didn’t include marking bubble sheets. “We were focused on our core product which was to enable educators to digitally grade handwritten work,” Caers explains. “But over time we saw an opportunity to include automated marking of multiple choice bubble sheets. By leveraging artificial intelligence, educators can use regular copy paper for the answer sheets, which don’t require expensive proprietary machines to mark the responses. This approach seamlessly fits in with our paper-based assessment workflow.”

Crowdmark’s first iteration of this tool was built over three to four months, and then upgraded to be more accurate and allow more questions per page. 

“We use the same OCR technology that lets us sort handwriting samples to mark multiple choice and true/false questions,” says Gilgin. “If our system can’t recognize a given response, the human marker is invited in to moderate those answers.  

What does the future hold for Crowdmark and AI? 

“We’re keeping an eye on the market. There are companies using large-language modules to read student work, analyze it and provide feedback,” says Gilgen. “We’re opposed to building around solutions that de-center faculty input and 1:1 interaction.”

That stance reflects Crowdmark’s academic origins. Dr. James Colliander, the company’s co-founder, is a mathematics professor who came up with the idea to solve his own marking challenges by tackling the rote aspects of marking, not the human interaction.

“We do see opportunities to offer better-quality feedback with AI,” says Paul Mitchell, product designer. “We could use sentiment analysis to help graders see where they’re more critical in their marking and where they’re more lenient, either within an individual’s comment set or across a marketing team.”

Without AI tools, that kind of tone analysis can only be done by spot-checking by the lead instructor. “Given the time commitments our users already have, that kind of quality check is sporadic and labour-intensive. Making it easier to give marking teams feedback on their tone and bias, or to compare the work of graders within a marking team, could be a value-added tool for our community,” says Gilgin.

As Crowdmark considers new ways to integrate AI tools into its platform, educators can be assured that the team’s focus will be on protecting human interaction above all other priorities. “We’re unwavering in that stance,” says Caers.  

Looking to try out Crowdmark in your courses? Sign up for a free trial today.

Last time, we covered the rise of ChatGPT and AI-driven chatbot technology and their impact on grading in higher education. This time, we’ll dive into some specific use cases and the million-dollar question: Whether it’s possible to detect chatbot-generated content in student work.

Protecting academic integrity while supporting student learning has been a joint priority for academic communities far longer than chatbots have been in the zeitgeist. On some level, cheating has existed for as long as there have been students.

For example, in My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, Susan D. Blum cites the Chinese keju exam for entrance into the country’s civil service as one test with a 1,400-year history of students trying to circumvent its requirements.

In 2007, long before chatbots were on anyone’s radar, Maclean’s published a lengthy report claiming over fifty percent of Canadian university students cheat when submitting written work.

Given the existing challenges with encouraging academic integrity in student populations, it’s no surprise that the rise of chatbot technology is a growing concern on academic campuses. Earlier this year, we talked to the Crowdmark community about AI and student work.

We heard:

• “I don’t know enough about AI, but I want to learn more.”
• “Students know how to find AI tools and use them; we have no choice but to address it.”
• “I don’t know how to stay ahead of my students and their knowledge and use of AI.”
• “Students don’t know what’s allowed and how they are permitted to use AI.”
• “In some ways, AI has less bias (e.g., doesn’t care if handwriting is neat), but there’s so much potential for deeper bias when using generative AI to create more relatable questions or discussion prompts: Its cultural, social, racial, gender perspective is limited to dominant Internet narratives that reflect the datasets their learning language modules were fed.”

Where have Crowdmark instructors allowed chatbots to be used in their classes?

• “I’ve used generative AI (ex: ChatGPT) to make questions more relatable to my students’ interests.”
• “We’ve entered learning outcomes and asked generative AI to write a real-world prompt for the discussion board.”
• “I’ve used generative AI to make learning outcomes clearer for my students.”

Chatbots: An endlessly patient tutoring assistant  

Chatbots do have potential to help instructors to plan lessons, update material, or extend concepts for students who are struggling.

In an article by Claire Bryan for The Seattle Times, Min Sun, a University of Washington Education professor, described chatbots as potential lesson planning assistants. That help could range from recommending “different levels of math problems for students with different mastery of the concept,” to asking a chatbot to provide a student with tailored assessments to help them catch up to their classroom peers.

Sun also touches on the possible advantages to allowing students to enter a dialogue with the chatbot, learning in conversation rather than being spoon-fed an answer. It’s perhaps not what Socrates envisioned when devising the Socratic method, but such is the state of learning in 2023. 

How this work will overlap with the labour of teaching assistants and human tutors remains to be seen. If you’re an instructor, it’s safe to assume that students are willing to experiment with chatbots.

Can you tell when a chatbot has been used in student work?

Unfortunately, the short answer is no.
Several companies in the education technology space offer chatbot detectors. These tools process text to determine if it was written by an AI, but false positives are very common. 

“I’ve spent time playing with chatbot tools,” says Paul Mitchell, Crowdmark product designer. “On one level, I’m shocked at how good they are. If you ask a chatbot to write text for an app in a user-experience style, for example, it’s very good at delivering short, punchy text. When you ask it to write for an academic audience, things get trickier.”

Through his role, Mitchell considers the downstream effects of technology choices. “You have to think about the dangers that present themselves when a detection service delivers a wrong answer,” he says. “A false positive could mean a student is penalized even if they didn’t cheat, and that challenge partly explains why some institutions won’t implement automated detection. Trust is a two-way street and unreliable detection tools make it very easy to overstep that line.”

Most notably, OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, quietly sunset their own detection service earlier this year. “They pulled it down in July,” says Mitchell. “If the market leader doesn’t trust its ability to deliver accurate results, presumably with access to a huge amount of data, that tells you something. For now, detecting the work of chatbots is a challenging problem to crack.”

What’s the future for chatbots in higher education?

While ChatGPT’s speed at changing how we work with technology feels mind boggling at times, it’s equally clear that AI-driven automation tools aren’t going away.

“I like to think it’s going to become something like Wikipedia,” says Mitchell. “It’s collaborative, there’s a lot of input from online crowds, but you take what it does with a grain of salt. Wikipedia is a great jumping off point when I’m researching a new topic, but I don’t go there for news about recent events, especially when they’re highly politicized.”

For now, those jumping off points may include asking chatbots for feedback on:

• Your project outline or lesson plan: What are you missing?
• Where to iterate: What other examples could you cite to refresh or extend your thinking?
•  Spelling, grammar, or logic gaps: What’s missing in your work?
• Brainstorming new directions: Where else could you take a topic?  

In the meantime, Mitchell sees Crowdmark’s instructor base adapting coursework to smaller, bite-size chunks rather than one big assignment, many of which are being done on paper in class.

“I remember taking high-stakes exams where my mark was predominantly dictated by one day’s performance,” he says. “Tests like that don’t let you evaluate learning along the way. We’re seeing more instructors break up their assignment work to allow students to focus on specific skills and knowledge. Many of these assignments are given and completed in class, making it harder to use chatbots.”

“The flip side,” he continues, “Is that marking then becomes more intensive. There’s more work to give feedback on, which is exciting from Crowdmark’s perspective since it allows for more dialogue between students and instructors. This type of marking approach is less vulnerable to chatbot use.”

For now, it’s safe to assume that your student population is experimenting with these tools and that clear guidelines and policies will create less ambiguity about how chatbots fit into your classroom.

Last time, we covered ChatGPT’s 2023 launch and the rise of AI-driven chatbot technology, along with the general impact of this technology on the higher education space. This time, we’re diving into grading and feedback.

Where can tools like ChatGPT benefit student grading?

In our first post, we noted chatbots have a clear role in the rudimentary work of correcting student text: they catch spelling or grammar mistakes or assess text for gaps. For students calibrating to the expectations of a post-secondary arena, chatbots may be a useful source of initial feedback.

But the amount of text a chatbot can ingest and crunch in a single query is also limited. Depending on who you ask and what tool you’re using, that figure ranges anywhere from 8,000 to 25,000 words.

So, while no one’s easily using ChatGPT to write a coherent thesis-length piece of work, it’s inevitable that chatbot applications will become more robust with time.

One area that’s already getting that lift is computer science.

The code doctor will see your homework now

As with many STEM fields, gaining mastery in software development is a technical and challenging process. 

Tools to help coding students produce better work are nothing new. Journalist and developer David Gewirtz has written about existing code debugging tools and ChatGPT’s current abilities and shortcomings for reviewing code, including rewriting regular expression code and finding errors. 

TL;DR? It’s early days and chatbots aren’t great at functional code—at least, not yet.

So, submitting raw chatbot code in lieu of doing the assignment isn’t in the best interest of students or the people who grade their work.

However, Amy Haddad, who writes books and tools to help people code in Python, likens reading code for software developers to athletes who watch their game films to improve technique. In her view, doing so teaches you to “see patterns,” “learn new strategies to solve the same problem,” “improve code design,” and get better at “spotting bugs.” And chatbot code may eventually become abundant in that literacy effort.

But the benefits aren’t limited to new developers.

In the corporate world beyond academia, “Some software teams struggle to properly document their code,” says Jamie Gilgen, Crowdmark software engineer. “Documentation helps people new to your team learn how you work, makes code handovers simpler, and ensures consistency and cohesion in what you build. Ultimately, that practice results in better products. But it also requires discipline to do well. Assigning code documentation to a chatbot could be a perfect solution for teams with this pervasive challenge, assuming it’s capable of understanding your needs.”

For now, chatbots may offer a useful first screen for errors before handing in an assignment or in a self-marking exercise.

We’re not going back to the pre-automation world

While ChatGPT’s speed at changing how we work with technology can feel mind-boggling, it’s equally clear that AI-driven automation tools aren’t going away.

“Ignoring chatbot technology won’t make it go away,” says Michelle Caers, CEO of Crowdmark. “Our goal should always be to augment what human beings can do, and not replace the creative work of people. As a software company in the education space, we work to leverage automation that helps people teach and learn in tandem with automation, not in opposition to it.”

Founded in 2012, Crowdmark was created to help educators scale their time by automating the administrative parts of assessment. Using the system, instructors collaborate with their marking teams to bank questions and comments on student work. Over time, they collaboratively build libraries for assignments and exams within each course.

Once assembled, this content can then be reapplied for multiple student cohorts and across semesters, automating the hassle of manually recreating the same assessments. Grading with Crowdmark allows effective comments from individual markers to be shared across the team, lets teams grade handwritten or digital work, and gives instructors more opportunities to assess the grading feedback for overall consistency, ensuring an equitable experience.

Some instructors are going back to paper-based tests or administering assessments via devices without full Internet capacity, the results of which can then be assessed through Crowdmark. Like chatbots, the Crowdmark system can also interpret handwriting and apply its content for other uses.

“In general, educators choose to use Crowdmark to give the richest possible feedback to students. They understand the positive impact that their time and energy can have on someone’s learning journey,” says Caers. “Yet, scribbling out the answer to the same problem thirty times makes few graders happy. Marking can be an endurance exercise, especially for large classes. We want to help graders bring the same rigour and energy to the last paper they mark as they do to the first.”

Protecting copyright and intellectual property remains crucial

It’s also worth noting that in August 2023, U.S. courts signaled that we cannot assume work created with automation software will receive the same protections as what humans generate.

According to Reuters, the judge ruled that, “a work of art generated without human involvement cannot be copyrighted.” The ruling followed a similar case where, also according to Reuters, the U.S. Copyright Office, “rejected an artist’s bid for copyrights on images generated through the AI system Midjourney despite the artist’s argument that the system was part of their creative process.”

Part of the problem lies in the intellectual property folded into language learning modules, much of which may have been gathered and fed to algorithms without the explicit permission of its creators.

Internet artwork is one source of chatbot content ingested without permission. In another notable class action case, authors George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and others are suing Open AI for copyright infringement. The authors argue that the company’s alleged decision to use their work without permission endangers their “ability to make a living.”
It remains to be seen where intellectual property will line up with chatbot outputs.

What do chatbot, copyright and IP trends mean for educators?

As chatbot technology iterates and spreads, it’s clear we’re still in the early cycle of adoption. Fostering experimentation with grading tools is a necessary part of moving with the times, but may carry unforeseen risks. 

“It’s been almost twenty years since social networks like Facebook were launched,” says Paul Mitchell, Crowdmark product designer. “While their inventors foresaw some outcomes, many developments—both positive and negative—were entirely unforeseen. Implementing chatbot technology across an organization may also pose similar risks and benefits.”

“Protecting your intellectual property was something we explicitly thought about when building Crowdmark,” says Caers. “Once your course is built, the comments you and your teams spend time creating can be shared and re-used within our closed system in ways that foster collaboration across marking teams and support student learning while protecting your work. Our goal is always to seamlessly reuse and reapply your content while helping you focus your time on activities that foster deeper learning.”

As the technology evolves, properly storing, organizing, and applying comments with improving automation tools will help educators to focus on what matters most—a personalized approach to student learning.

If you are looking to save yourself time grading, while providing richer feedback for students, sign up for a free trial of Crowdmark!

Burnout can be a dangerous mental health condition. If you feel like you’re struggling with burnout, you are not alone. This article contains strategies that may be useful, as well as links to mental health resources. Please do not hesitate to seek help.

For the first time, a significant number of instructors who have spent years relying on traditional assessment methods had to abruptly shift their teaching style, assessing students entirely online. Remote education is not a completely new landscape. Still, the change in pace and volume of assessment required for online learning and the fatigue caused by remote teaching have led to instructors facing unprecedented burnout.

Fortunately, there are methods that instructors can use to manage themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. In this post, we will offer effective strategies to help you feel less overwhelmed, including: lesson planning suggestions, tips on remote instruction, and information on how to organize yourself for working and learning from home.

Signs of Instructor Burnout

The danger of teaching burnout is that it’s insidious—it creeps into your physical, mental, and emotional well-being and goes unnoticed until significant health changes appear. Recognizing the signs and taking action before severe effects take hold is essential.

Signs of Teaching Burnout

1. A lack of enthusiasm and energy—just going through the motions and cycles of teaching
2. More than the usual fatigue and exhaustion at the end of the day, or waking up feeling exhausted
3. Failure to check necessary equipment/materials and ignoring small details
4. A decrease in passion for teaching that students and colleagues themselves can recognize
5. Arriving at the classroom (physical or virtual) at the last minute before it starts and leaving immediately
6. Dealing with boredom related to the course content and a lack of commitment to the material
7. Difficulty focusing on students’ questions and ignoring their comments
8. Forgetting student’s names and essential details about their personalities, needs, and abilities
9. Loss of humor and the inability to smile when teaching
10. A sense of dread when getting out of bed

Experiencing any one of these symptoms is not due to personality flaws or a “bad attitude”: they’re signs that you’re dealing with teaching burnout, and it’s time to take urgent stock of your self-care.

Practical Tips to Deal with Teaching Burnout

Fortunately, you are not alone, and strategies exist for handling teaching burnout when teaching remotely. The most effective way to start this process is to take a step back and examine both your approach to teaching and your routine.

Most importantly, remember that what you are feeling is normal and understand that you are not the only one feeling this way. When dealing with a mental health crisis such as burnout, it is essential not to change everything at once, at the risk of feeling more overwhelmed. The best thing you can possibly do is take a break from teaching.

If a break is not within your reach, there are ways to help manage your mental health while continuing teaching. Here are five suggestions, many of which have been recommended by teachers. Start small by trying one thing one day, and go from there.

Review and Revise your Routine

• List everything you have to do at specific time slots to organize your schedule.
• Create a schedule of things you need to do that can be completed with more flexible timing.
• Group related tasks together and execute them simultaneously (i.e. sending emails, marking papers). This way, you can get more done at once.
• Make sure to schedule a time for breaks, eating, and self-care.
• Use technology to automate and streamline recurring processes (i.e. Crowdmark to make online grading faster and easier).

Check your Workspace Ergonomics

• Keep your computer screen about 25 inches (arm’s length away) from your face.
• Practice the 20-20-20 rule to reduce eye strain—that’s looking at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.
• Keep the contrast and brightness of your screen balanced.
• Adjust your seating and screen position so that you are not slouching or engaged in the forward head posture.
• Consider the use of ergonomic keyboards and mouse to reduce strain on hands.

Practice Appropriate Physical and Mental Self-Care

• Establish a bedtime routine, exercise regularly, and eat a balanced, nutritious diet.
• Use apps and technology to help you stay on track with these routines.
• Devote time to an artistic or athletic hobby each day.
• Take moments throughout the week for mindfulness activities such as journaling, meditation, puzzles, etc.
• Carve out opportunities for mindful reflection or simple quiet time.

Connect with Others

• Speak with colleagues about teaching-related challenges and exchange ideas on how to minimize the burden.
• Meet with new individuals in virtual events or public ones.
• Schedule time to speak with your family members, friends, and relatives.
• Visit a mental health professional if you do not feel comfortable sharing your frustrations with others.

Seeking Help for Teacher Burnout

Teacher burnout is an age-old problem in the education world. Just like remote learning is not a new experience for students and instructors, neither is burnout.

It is possible to minimize the effects of burnout by adjusting your pedagogical approach and methods of self-management. Do what works for you, and do not be afraid to abandon what does not. Putting yourself first will help to focus your energy.

Creating awareness is the best option to ensure you can manage your feelings and create hopeful moments in times when stress and anxiety may feel the worst.

For help dealing with a burnout-related mental health crisis:

• Search for and access your institution’s mental health resources
• Check out Edutopia’s Teacher Self-Care resources
• Reach out to your peers through Happy Teacher Revolution
• Check out the Garrison Institute’s Creating Awareness and Reslience in Education (CARE) programming

Adaptive Teaching Style

In his first years as an instructor, Sean’s teaching style mimicked that of professors he considered to be good teachers. However, Sean believes in continuous research to provide the best learning experience for his students. So, as the years passed, he developed a unique approach by taking the time to educate himself on newer concepts in teaching and learning. Not only does he research trends in pedagogy, but he studies psychology texts that help him better understand the mental processes that lead to learning. He uses his research to incorporate cognitive science strategies into his teaching style.

Sean finds that applying these practices makes it easier to motivate students and sets clear expectations for what he, as an instructor, expects from his students. Further, Sean finds that understanding the psychological aspects of teaching and learning helps him better understand his students. This is important, he says, because, when students feel as though their instructors care about their learning, they are more intrinsically motivated to engage in class.

One key concept Sean has incorporated into the classroom is active learning. For example, he may ask students to think on their own about a math question for a few minutes; then, he instructs them to discuss the question with their neighbor. By having students think through and discuss concepts out loud during class, Sean is able to hear and better recognize gaps in learning. He can then address issues during class instead of allowing students to silently struggle with these challenges at home.

Advice for Other Instructors

For any professor interested in taking a more adaptive teaching approach, Sean suggests exploring non-academic works such as the book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Similarly, one area of study he recommends researching is the testing effect. Some of the key concepts revolve around retrieval practice and spacing out learning. These practices have been part of Sean’s approach to empathizing with his students’ learning mindset.

Another first step, Sean says, towards developing an adaptive style is active observation of student behavior. For instance, if students are regularly skipping assignments—choosing only to review the solutions—an instructor may choose to adapt assessments in a way that more strongly encourages students to further engage with the work. When looking to adapt assessments to encourage engagement, instructor Michael Evans recommends assigning weekly assessments that build towards heavily weighted midterms and finals.

New technology also helps professors become more adaptive in the digital age. Sean is open to incorporating technological tools into his teaching. He finds that the most useful tools are easy to use and user friendly for students. Sean has been an avid user of Crowdmark because it helps him stay current in his teaching approach.

Crowdmark and Adaptivity

Sean loves Crowdmark’s ability to make grading more flexible for instructors and TAs. As an adaptive professor, he appreciates that grading on the platform is more efficient and facilitates more collaboration than traditional grading methods do. As someone who places a lot of emphasis on feedback, Sean finds it helpful that Crowdmark keeps assessments and marks in one place and makes it easy for instructors and students to review previous feedback.

Sean is constantly looking for ways to improve his teaching, and Crowdmark has been a great facilitator in his teaching journey. Crowdmark not only makes his life easier, but improves his students’ experience as well.

Structuring Evaluations

In the years since he began teaching, Michael has reduced the number of assignments he gives. This change is due in part to Michael noticing a pattern wherein students waited for answers to be posted rather than completing their assigned work. Additionally, classes with greater numbers of assignments had higher occurrences of copying. Since uncovering these insights, Michael has continued to lecture and give students weekly assignments, but his course grades are weighted towards the midterms and the final. The comments below reflect teaching upper level Statistics and probability courses which can sometimes have very large enrolments.

To support this structure, Michael emphasizes to his students that the weekly assignments are the building blocks for the high-stakes assessments. He further discourages collusion and cheating on high-stakes assessments by making these assessments very lengthy, thus making it difficult for students to find time to cheat. Michael also makes up his own questions for all his exams so the students will not be able to look up previous years’ assessments or test bank questions online. Whenever possible final evaluations are in-person.

Through this approach, Michael has found a strong correlation between work on assignments, and marks on the midterms and final. When his students complete the assignments given in class, their grades on the midterm and final exam reflect the work they put into these regular assignments. Because the midterms and final are open-book, and there are no surprises, students who put in the work and do the assignments are likely to do well.

Feedback and TAs

To ensure students have as many learning opportunities as possible, Michael is generous when offering office hours. He offers in-person and online options for conversation, so students have as many opportunities as possible to seek help. During office hours students have the opportunity to discuss concepts they have questions on as well as seek overall feedback about their performance.

Not only does Michael make himself accessible in this way, but he delegates a number of TA hours for answering questions as well. Because he often has large classes, it is difficult for Michael to answer every student’s question. Increasing availability and access to TAs helps students get the assistance they need.

Crowdmark and Assessments

Michael has been using Crowdmark for several years and says it comes in handy for administering exams. When conducting classes online, Michael has found Crowdmark’s assigned assessment workflow helpful for hosting digital finals and midterms. For his in-person classes, Michael utilizes Crowdmark’s administered assessment workflow to allow students to complete paper-based assessments that can be uploaded for digital grading.

Michael likes that the Crowdmark platform gives instructors easy access to all their assessments. He finds it easy to use, and he appreciates that Crowdmark’s Customer Success team provides speedy and thorough responses when he needs assistance with feature use.

If in doubt, Crowdmark’s Customer Success team can troubleshoot issues, facilitate training, or process feature requests.

Although marking one question again and again can be faster, some instructors like getting a sense of students’ overall understanding of concepts and seeing whether the test, as a whole, was well received. Instructors we have spoken with, though, often prefer grading one question at a time when working with grading teams or when marking for large classes.

The Benefit of Grading One Question at a Time

In a recent interview with Alan Ableson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University, we asked which works better for his grading teams.

Hands down having one person mark one question the whole way through….You get a clearer picture within the confines of one question than you ever can trying to skip across all of them.

Alan goes on to say that, across grading teams, this method increases:

• Time savings for graders
• Focus and consistency of grading
• Understanding of where students are coming from

Even when not grading as part of a team, Alan recommends this method when grading papers that come in late. He finds that changing gears to go through each question can be challenging, and reviewing one question helps to focus his thoughts on one concept at a time.

Additionally, Alan notes that some may be concerned that the teaching assistants’ learning experience may be diminished by this style of grading since they may still be grasping the nuances around some higher level ideas. To address this concern, Alan recommends using the one-question-grading technique when marking low-level classwork. In these instances, TAs already know the material being tested, and their ultimate goal is to deliver a large amount of marked papers as quickly as possible. Accordingly, it is in the best interest of the instructor to make their job more efficient and more palatable.

How Crowdmark Helps Grade One Question at a Time without Paper Shuffling

People currently using Crowdmark as well as those who are considering purchase often ask how grading on our platform works.

Crowdmark makes grading remote exams easy and seamless. On your assessment screen you’ll see submissions organized by question. This allows graders to grade individual questions for consistency. You can also have the individual graders grading different questions simultaneously. We invite you to watch this video to better understand the remote exam grading workflow.

Are you a Crowdmark user interested in more help with using the platform? We have many more YourTube videos and help documents. We also offer individualized trainings to help you or your teams grt a better grip on effective assessment with Crowdmark. Check out the help center or get in touch with crowdmark support for assistance.

Pre-Assessment Preparation for Smoother Grading

Whether you are interested in assessment design or better managing students’ reactions to their grades, it helps to have a plan for success before you begin assessing.

Regrade requests are inevitable. And agreeing to them without a master plan can reduce valuable teaching and assessment time. Learn how to approach re-grading in a fair and efficient way.

Regrade requests are inevitable. And agreeing to them without a master plan can reduce valuable teaching and assessment time. Learn how to approach re-grading in a fair and efficient way.

Working with Teaching Assistants (TAs)

As with anyone new to a role, TAs can often require more attention than other members of your grading team. To ensure success of all your grading team members, think about:

• Dedicating your energies towards a comprehensive TA training program.
• Building a strong, well-defined working relationship with your TA.
• Introduce a grading app to streamline the process

Plus, watch these videos to understand how your colleagues handle TA and grading-team collaboration:

If you are currently using Crowdmark, we also invite you to learn from Alan Ableson, Assistant Professor in the department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University, discuss his team grading procedure.

Workflows for Faster Assessment

Once you feel comfortable with your TAs, it’s time to put some thought into your grading workflow. Consider these thoughts on ways to streamline your team’s grading process.

We learned a lot about online learning and grading workflows that are useful online and in person. Discover how your grading workflow can improve with a few simple ideas.

University of Oxford researchers delved into best practices for grading policies. Add these quick tips to your toolbox for grading faster while giving richer feedback.

Using Technology to Grade more Efficiently

Thinking you may want to introduce more technology into your grading process? Take advantage of these resources for deciding how to approach grading technology:

• Are you Suffering from Grading Nostalgia?
• Can Technology Make Grading Easier?
• New Term, New Technology: Helping Teams Adjust to New Technology

For years, experts debated whether the traditional grading system works the way it should. Many even argued that the system feels fundamentally broken.

This system is put into perspective because many students and instructors opt for online learning and teaching. This changes the dynamics of the classroom because traditionally, midterm and final exams would be written in person.

Whether you’re teaching an Advanced Calculus course that focuses on the tangible equation, or an undergraduate film study elective, the question is the same: how do you strike a balance when it comes to assessing your students? How do you effectively collect student work and grade it effectively without resorting to multiple-choice exams?

Remote Learning, the Classroom, and the Grading System

The traditional grading system relies on some familiar elements—quizzes, test scores, homework submissions, classroom participation and regular attendance. However, grading with this criteria is dependent on the physical presence and involvement of students and instructors.

Remote teaching involves being heavily dependent on technology which is not always perfect. Instructors need to be able to adapt to potential technical constraints while also figuring out how to go about grading tests and assignments.

How do instructors and faculty accurately assess assignments submitted by students, filtering the Wikipedia or internet-sourced answers from the original analysis from a student’s mind? How do instructors reach students who don’t have access to high-speed internet and a suitable computer?

Online Grading Approaches to Remote Learning

It’s important to remember that your teaching methods need to be adjusted for online marking to be effective. The way you instruct your students online won’t be the same as teaching them in person. You have to account for technical difficulties, learning challenges faced by individual students, file management and more.

Two of the most recognized forms of fair online grading are pass/fail basis grading and the option to drop a course with no academic penalty.

The Pass/Fail Grading Option

Universities throughout North America, Europe and elsewhere have embraced the pass/fail grading system. It works as its name suggests—students are given a simple pass or fail, rather than a percentage value or a letter grade.

The pass/fail option allows students in good standing with their courses to maintain their academic reputation. It also safeguards students from penalization due to circumstances that may affect their performance due to adjusting to remote learning.

Of course, there are some downsides to this method. For some fields of study, a letter (or numerical) grade is important because it can give students a standard on where their work succeeds and where it fails.

One student at the University of Alberta, Ethan Kreiser, started a petition explaining his reason for rejecting the mandatory use of a pass/fail system:

“We as a student base, have paid money to receive a letter grade, not a participation ribbon,” he says. “For students applying to medicine, law, pharmacy, dentistry, grad school, scholarships, and many other fields, not providing the choice could damage their futures.”

Dropping a Course with no Academic Penalty

Some students now have the opportunity to drop a course without facing any academic penalties. This arrangement allows students who have second thoughts about a course grade to drop it before a specified deadline.

However, under certain circumstances, students in universities are being allowed to drop a course without it having any effects on their transcripts. Of course, the concern here is that dropping the class, if it is essential, can impact their future eligibility elsewhere, the ability to finish their degree on time and their career path.

The above are not foolproof options for online teaching, nevertheless, they are viable methods for helping students stay on track academically. They are go-to solutions that give students the lifeline they need when adjusting to a digital-only learning environment.

Tips to Make Grading Work When Teaching Online

To better understand how to make online grading work when teaching remotely, it is essential to understand the Three Bridges of Learning. They revolve around three models—content coverage, personalized learning, and inquiry-based learning.

With traditional content coverage, the instructor presents information in the form of a conventional lecture and textbook summarization. The instructor then grades students employing tests and quizzes, which evaluates what students have memorized.

With personalized learning, the instructor relies on a digital platform and offers content and lessons at a pace and path that aligns with an individual student’s needs. Students are graded based on their effort (primarily on their usage and time spent on the platform) and their growth (number of grade levels completed over time).

Lastly, there is inquiry-based learning, which relies on student collaboration to create projects and solve problems. Instructors measure students based on their process or products—in other words, the solutions to a problem.

With many students now heavily enrolled in distance learning and virtual classrooms, traditional content coverage will not work by itself.

Yes, you can still grade students with tests and quizzes, but the rigid structure of in-class instruction will not work when dealing with students who are limited by their devices. The ideal way to grade students online is to combine elements of the personalized learning and inquiry-based models mentioned above.

How to Make Online Grading Work

• Grade Students Less Frequently: It may seem counterintuitive, but grading less will make your grading more effective. For example, weekly grading (instead of daily assessment) eliminates the need to chase students down for missing assignments. It allows students to integrate their workload more easily into their schedules.
• Grade Productivity More Than Material Retention: Relying too much on tests and quizzes while teaching students online may not always be effective. The memorizing of material alone does not mean that your students are learning correctly. However, factoring the time a student has spent using a platform or engaging with the material can give you a much better indication of their participation with the assigned work.
• Grade More Intentionally: You can still grade them fairly. Based on the time and effort they spend on the course work—which you can measure by their communication with you—you can give them a grade that reflects their potential.
• Grade in a More Streamlined Fashion: Ultimately, the more steps you can eliminate in the grading process, the fewer hiccups you will deal with online. Using an online grading tool will streamline the grading process, making it easier to leave rich feedback to improve student learning.

Make Online Grading Work

Modified grading, streamlining assignments and gaining a better understanding of the technology you are using and what your students are using will go a long way to improving the experience for faculty and students alike. Grading students differently with an “online first” mentality will not end all pain points students and instructors will have, but it will help.

Instructors and students face the challenge of the traditional assessment system changing significantly when opting to learn remotely. It is understandable for teachers to feel somewhat flustered. But grading students online doesn’t have to feel like a lost cause.

With tools like Crowdmark’s grading software, creating new flexible approaches to grading is possible. It’s possible to assess students fairly without undermining or overlooking their performance.

Pop quizzes may be a stereotype of high school television shows, but many educators love using them as an assessment tool for their students. Their main purpose is to identify which students understand the subject matter and where others may be falling behind.

Despite this assessment’s utility, some educators worry that the pop quiz is too stress-inducing to be helpful. In addition to worrying even the best-performing students, they can be highly disadvantageous to students with learning challenges or disabilities. Their efficacy becomes even more complicated with many students now opting for online learning.

This article examines whether students’ knowledge, understanding, and exam grades can be positively or negatively affected by pop quizzes. We’ll then demonstrate how to implement them successfully if you choose to use this type of evaluation in your classroom.

The Efficacy of Pop Quizzes

Several studies have sought to examine how effective pop quizzes are in both a secondary and post-secondary learning environment. One study of University of Saskatchewan undergrads found that anonymous pop quizzes, administered as a multiple-choice test, effectively identified problem areas that required additional study. They also helped boost class attendance.

However, another study of undergraduate medical students found that students given pop quizzes performed poorly on exams, especially when quizzed frequently. Pop quizzes may also prove difficult for students who struggle with test anxiety. The spontaneous nature of these quizzes is an added stressor and may result in students not performing as well.

Disability advocates also emphasize the importance of accommodations for students with learning challenges. However, accommodation can lead to classmates waiting for their peers to complete the quiz, or students needing accommodation leaving the classroom to take the quiz elsewhere. Both experiences expose students to undue attention and stress.

Pop Quiz Alternatives for Online Learning

Now that many students and teachers are doing remote exams and assignments, it may be time to rethink how we approach pop quizzes.

Instead of administering traditional pop quizzes, educators can take those principles and apply them to other forms of assessment. For example, instructors can:

1. Provide a list of quizzes on their online learning platform and give instructions to students to complete one every week on their own time.
2. Use the types of questions they would ask on a pop quiz to spark a group conversation following the lesson.
3. Ask students to make up their questions based on the material they just learned and trade them with a partner.
4. Schedule one-on-one discussions with students and ask them questions about the lesson in person.
5. Administer an open-book exam instead, giving students the chance to demonstrate their knowledge without putting them under pressure.

Rethinking Pop Quizzes for Remote Learning

Remote education provides an excellent opportunity to examine how and why we assess students’ learning and employ some of the assessment methods mentioned above. If a pop quiz is a critical piece of an instructor’s teaching strategy, it may be worth considering a quiz that counts only for learning or as a participation grade and not towards the student’s final grade. This way, the quiz serves its original purpose—to reveal gaps in understanding—without penalizing students.

Ungraded pop quizzes can play a role in better final exam results. A student’s memory recall from the quizzes is more reliable when the anxiety-inducing aspect of it being graded is eliminated.

Find More Remote Education Resources at Crowdmark

Remote learning has become a more accessible option for both teachers and students. We’ve been working hard to support educators through our easy-to-use grading platform and educational resources.

To find out more about how Crowdmark can work for you and learn the platform’s basics, including how to grade a test or assignment like a pop quiz, get in touch with us to start a free trial today.

Editor’s Note: As we head into each new school year, it is important to revisit the tenets of education. Among those is the process by which learning is measured. We take this moment to resurface this post that discusses methods of student assessment in teaching and learning.

From my perspective, grading is purely numerical and involves a weighted average of all course assessments over the course of the semester. Assessment is much harder than grading, and it can be done in a few ways. All of these are valid measures of student learning, and all of them can be used in a single course (although not usually on a single assignment!) to measure student learning.

Student-Self Assessment

• When? This type of assessment is better done towards the end of the course.
• What? It measures a student’s improvement against his/her own previous abilities.
• How? A great way to assess student progress is to compare a single student’s performance on a placement exam or midterm with the same student’s performance on a final exam.
• Why? This is a fairly accurate way of assessing how any given student has become more capable in the tested subject matter. For example, has the student learned to calculate a derivative? To identify a compound subject? To conjugate a Spanish verb?
• Caution: This is where inflation comes most easily. Every student should improve to some degree over the course of the term. Your task is to quantify that improvement. In order to do that, you need to have a plan before you start grading: if Ellie started out with no prior abilities and is now muddling along at average level, is that worth a C to you or a bit higher? Or if she started out doing amazing work but has stagnated, do you still want to give an A? You should have these possibilities in mind as part of your learning outcomes before starting the assessment process (or even better, before the course begins).

Student-Peer Assessment

• When? This type of assessment can be done at any time.
• What? It measures a student’s skill in a particular subject area vs. the skill of the class as a whole.
• How? This can be used for a variety of different assessment types: projects, papers, tests, and homework. I tend to use it for long-form answers on tests and for essay assignments.
• Why? Especially for a novice grader (or if you’re back grading after a long hiatus), comparing students helps determine the class’ set point (i.e., it’s pretty easy to tell what “average” is and adjust your letter system accordingly). This is also a useful way of determining what the class understood best from the unit and what needs further review.
• Caution: Beware of favoritism. If Johnny is constantly coming to office hours but still doesn’t understand the difference between mitosis and meiosis, he can’t get bonus points for trying.

Student-Teacher Assessment

• When? This type of assessment can also be done at any point in the semester. It is necessary for a placement test (if that test is graded).
• What? It measures a student’s skill in a particular subject area vs. an ideal of what the instructor thinks a student ‘should’ know at that level of study.
• How? This can be used for a variety of different assessment types: projects, papers, tests, and homework. I tend to use it for more fact-based assignments, such as cloze exercises.
• Why? The first time you assess students, you will need a comparative measure of some sort. Past experience, either of earlier student groups or of the subject matter, will help you accurately assess their performance.
• Caution: It is very easy to be too harsh with this type of grading measure. Obviously an instructor will know more than his/her students! Be prepared to give the first few another quick once-over to recalibrate your expectations.

And remember that key to all three is still feedback. Even the best students need direction to improve.

Written feedback is a mainstay of educational practice, especially in liberal arts disciplines. Though popular, there is evidence that students can often misunderstand or misinterpret written feedback. Additionally, written feedback is commonly placed in the margins of a paper, which can lead to students focusing on the letter grade rather than the feedback. To redirect students’ attention away from grades and help students see feedback constructively, consider combining verbal and written feedback.

An Instructor’s Account of Feedback and Student Understanding

A student of the Humanities and Social Sciences, most of my assignment feedback was relegated to the margins of a Word document or ream of paper with the occasional paragraph at the end summarizing my grade. In many of my courses there was the opportunity to engage in dialogue with the professor or teaching assistant; however, being a typical student, I rarely used that opportunity unless I felt obligated.

As a teaching assistant, I can count on two hands the number of students seeing me during office hours to discuss the margin notes I laboured over to improve their writing and critical-thinking skills. Instead of a discussion on the content and theory however, office hours were often spent challenging or negotiating the letter grade in the margin or final page.

Combining Written and Verbal Feedback to Strengthen Student Understanding

To reframe grading and assessment as a collaborative, rather than confrontational, experience David Gooblar takes a different approach to both feedback and office hours by involving his students in the learning assessment process. After students read the margin feedback, Gooblar schedules 20-minute meetings where he reads the draft aloud and asks the students what they think of their work.

This query brings feedback that is often relegated to the margins into a formal discussion, giving the students agency over their work and encouraging them to engage in metacognition. After the discussion, students often leave thinking more about how they can improve their work rather than the graded test.

Practical Advice for Giving Verbal Feedback to Strengthen Student Understanding

As an instructor, I use this in-person dialogue to engage with students and help them understand and act upon the comments in the margins and—through Crowdmark—the graphical and textual feedback anywhere on their assignments.

I also use these individual and group meetings to instill the following meta-cognitive habits for writing:

1. Read the completed assignment aloud in front of a mirror. This is one of the most effective ways to evaluate the flow of your paragraphs and identify awkward passages.
2. Read the assignment backwards with a red pen. When reading your own work, it is easy to miss grammatical errors and typos. Going backwards makes common splices and homonym mistakes much more evident.

Final Thoughts on Effective Instructor Feedback for Student Understanding

Written feedback is most effective when taken out of the margins and brought into dialogue with students. While the specific techniques mentioned above may not be a strong fit with your courses, a little experimentation can lead to the right mix of verbal plus written feedback for your students.

No matter what form verbal plus written feedback takes, instructors interested in this technique need to set expectations at the beginning of the term. Inform students of the approach and explain the steps as well as timelines for written feedback and verbal followup. Setting the expectation for students that these dialogues will occur with their teaching assistants or instructors will encourage students to read the feedback in the margins and integrate them into future work.

Additionally, students will be prepared to have a collaborative discussion rather than a confrontational one, and that is when real learning can begin.

Interested in more on strengthening student understanding? Read more here:

AIED is a growing industry that has seen increased demand due to the pandemic. Consequently, AI-driven educational systems have facilitated a change in learning environments and made remote learning less overwhelming for students and educators. With the transition back to in-person learning, there is a growing interest in implementing more AI technology in person as well as remotely. While AI is no replacement for human-based education, there are some benefits to incorporating technology into teaching and learning.

Personalizing the Student Experience

Personalization is a key factor in changing the way students understand course materials. Regardless of program, every student has a unique combination of personality, learning style and cognitive ability. As such, some students can grasp theories and concepts better than others, and some students, who grasp information more slowly, fall through the cracks. Increasing personalized learning not only caters to the student’s learning style, but helps to ensure that fewer students fall behind.

One way in which AI-based learning systems can personalize experiences is by assessing each student’s strengths and weaknesses and identifying where they need to improve. A major player in AIED is Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). An ITS is a student-centred technology that acts like a human tutor and provides personalized feedback to the student when completing assignments, homework, and other required activities. China has implemented the largest ITS in the world with its Squirrel AI program. The Squirrel AI program, which uses algorithms, provides personalized learning for students in kindergarten through grade 12.

Another major software in this realm is Cognitive Tutors, a program by Carnegie Learning that aids students who are struggling in math. Cognitive Tutors was shown to improve student performance on examinations, and its wide distribution allows tutoring to be more accessible to students. Additionally, the large influx of data can help when the system needs to make improvements. Such improvements can include adjusting tutoring practices to better ensure student understanding.

These are just two of the many examples of AI systems being used to help personalize learning in environments where educators struggle to meet every student’s personal needs. With the right AI, personalized learning can be attained by more students, thereby boosting confidence and making their learning more engaging and fun.

How AI Impacts Educators

Another trending AI technology can help educators to identify key areas of the curriculum that a majority of their students are struggling to understand. Use of this technology can also create a more adaptive and innovative classroom experience and reduce the amount of time instructors need to answer the same questions over and over.

Chatbots are gaining in popularity and are a type of AI that can interact with students and answer questions. An AI chatbot used for school inquiries was tested out at a university in Spain. The students were able to ask questions about different resources at the school and the AI provided automated responses that were correct over 90% of the time. Chatbots can be useful for administrators since data collected about types and frequency of questions can be useful for determining what other resources and systems can be adopted by the school to simplify the student experience. Similarly, educators can incorporate chatbots to compile frequently asked questions which they would go over in class.

What’s Next For AIED?

As the market share of AI grows and our progression into the “new normal” continues, the use of AIED will surely continue to expand. Critics fear that AI, such as automation will result in the displacement of educators. However, these systems are meant to work in partnership with educators to improve the classroom experience. AIED is an essential tool for educators because it can help enhance the learning experience for students and helps modernize the classroom.

AI is the future, so it is pertinent for schools and educators to invest the time and effort into incorporating this technology in the classroom.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) introduced a two-stage exam format in its Faculty of Science in 2011. Today, the science department uses this format in-person and online for higher stakes examinations. Both instructors and students laud the two-stage exam format, with studies finding that collaborative exams increase overall student engagement and comprehension of the course materials.

While two-stage evaluation formats have been used for lower stakes exercises and quizzes in classes across several academic disciplines, UBC was one of the first schools to formally incorporate the format into high-stakes assessments, such as midterms and final examinations.

How Two-Stage Exams Work

The two-stage exam is administered as follows:

• Stage 1: This is a standard examination process where students complete the test alone.
• Stage 2: Immediately following Stage 1, this is a collaborative process where students (groups of 3-4) complete the test again. Students must come to a consensus on the answers and hand in a single copy of the test.

Grades from both stages of the exam, independent (75% to 90%) and collaborative (25% to 10%), are combined for the total examination mark.

There are certain factors that need to be taken into consideration when performing a two-stage exam. Class size is important to think about because this process can get complicated if the class is relatively large. Timing is another factor to consider given there needs to be time to do the assessment individually then do the group collaboration afterwards. The logistics of forming groups and getting everyone together also adds to the overall timing of the assessment. If two-stage exams are to be considered an option, a lot of planning and organizing is involved, but it can be worth it.

Enhancing the Learning Experience with Two-Stage Exams

The two-stage exam format has yielded positive results for UBC. One of the most promising findings is that average exam marks have increased with the collaborative exams. Students are provided instant feedback on their performance instead of having to wait days or weeks for results on traditional exams, which often do not include formative feedback. This instant feedback contributes to higher student engagement in all aspects of the course as well as overall learning and comprehension.

Another possible reason for UBC’s success is that the collaborative aspect to the exam mimics a classroom setting. The pseudo-classroom setting allows the student to feel more familiar with the material, and it helps with recall. Research finds other benefits of two-stage assessments, including increased positivity in the classroom and an increase in performance. Allowing for more interactions with peers creates a more positive environment and better classroom cohesion. The group aspect of the assessment may help reduce a student’s anxiety surrounding examinations. Moreover, students were shown to improve their critical thinking skills and were able to retain more information.

This method also impacts how students respond and interpret feedback. Instead of relying on the teacher’s feedback alone, these group discussions allow for the student to have more internalized feedback. Students are able to make better comparisons to what they did wrong and where they need to improve. Hearing feedback from peers was seen as being more detailed and gave students a better understanding of their own answers.

Future of Two-Stage Exams

Several critics have pointed out potential limitations in the two-stage exam format, including students who may dominate the group discussion and students who let their peers do all the work. Despite these criticisms, UBC has found nearly 100% student engagement, likely because students have to study for the independent portion which contributes to the bulk of their marks.

UBC, which ranks 37th in the 2022 World University Rankings, has found the two-stage exam format to be beneficial for both its faculty and students. With the success it has had at UBC, two-stage exams may become a more prevalent standard used in post-secondary institutions across the world. This adoption may grow even more due to the ease of implementing two-stage exams in remote learning–through the use of breakout rooms. Two universities in the US, at the beginning of the pandemic, designed some of their online exams as two-stage assessments and hope to continue using them in the future.

Currently, there are several universities and colleges in Canada that have started implementing the two-stage testing format in some of their classes. With the shifting landscape in education, it is important to adapt to new methods of assessing students in order to enhance the learning experience.

Updated article originally posted July 18, 2017

While classic assessments are an important part of higher education, their specific timing—typically at the middle and end of courses—may represent an oversight. The traditional timing of exams makes it difficult to judge learning at various junctures during the term; these junctures provide opportunities to assess and address students’ understandings of the concepts being taught. Correction of this oversight is at the core of the micro-assessment model (sometimes referred to as classroom assessment techniques), which attempts to test students in small but targeted ways to understand learning comprehension throughout the term.

The Basics of Mico-assessments

In essence, micro-assessments are small tests designed to quickly judge student comprehension. The most effective micro-assessments are two-way: they yield responses which both influence instructor pedagogy and provide formative student feedback. There are myriad questions micro-assessments may probe in-class, including the understanding of core concepts and principles, application of theory to practice, and comfort with activities and assignments. Responses to these assessments can illuminate difficulties that may have gone unnoticed and allow instructors to nimbly address them by spending more class time on a subject, providing additional resources, or making changes to instructional style.

Of course, there are many different types of micro-assessments. The following are the most popular:

• Minute Paper – After a lecture or activity, pose a question such as “what is the most important thing you learned from class today?” Give students 1–2 minutes to write down their responses, and then collect them. The responses provide useful insights into whether students are understanding what you determine to be the most important concepts.
• Muddiest Point – Ask students to identify what they find most confusing or difficult to understand. If the majority of a class shares a difficulty with a specific subject, more class time may be spent on it. Individual difficulties may be addressed one-on-one.
• Application Cards – Ask students to come up with real-world applications of a theory they are studying in class. This may be done in groups, through class discussion, or through Minute Papers.
• Classroom Polls – Allow students to provide anonymous feedback on course-related matters. At specific times throughout the semester, write a few questions relating to course delivery on a blackboard and leave the room for five minutes while students write feedback and suggestions. When you return, address each question and comment with the class.

These are only a few examples that allow for more personalized learning and two-way communication between instructors and students. Consider implementing or developing your own micro-assessments to ensure everyone—students and instructors—are on the same page during class.

Micro-assessments in Remote Learning

Micro-assessments may seem like a spur-of-the-moment in-person activity, but all of the models translate well to the digital learning environment (both synchronous and asynchronous courses). Learning management systems (LMSs) allow for time-sensitive tests, and can be made available at specific times. There is the option of making these assessments group based, which stimulates class discussion. Other polling sites also allow interactivity with live visualizations of results.

Mico-assessments: Finding the Right Space

Innovative pedagogical practices are often difficult to think about in an applied sense. But to start with micro-assessments, it might be useful to think of what type of class would suit this approach best. While this approach would be beneficial in all classes, due to the more personal learning aspect, micro-assessments would not be as effective for large, first-year classes.

Instead, upper-year undergraduate classes might be the prime ground for pedagogical experiments. The relatively smaller class sizes and advanced knowledge of students allows for more meaningful debate, fostering of knowledge, and attention to personal learning that is difficult to replicate in larger environments.

Micro-assessments offer an intriguing option for instructors who aim to better understand student learning throughout the term. Moreover, they allow for greater participation, and can work in both in-person and remote learning contexts. By not apportioning one specific time of year for assessment, instructors can quickly discover what content is misunderstood. Beyond informing teaching practice, consistent assessment also helps students understand their own learning. In the right context, micro-assessments may be the next improvement for your classroom.

Interested in more perspectives on assessment design and innovative teaching? See more here:

• Exploring Students’ Progress with Authentic Assessments
• Multiple Choice vs. Written Assessments
• What Makes a Quality Assessment?

For educators new to the world of EdTech, the concept alone may be daunting. The basic premise is “creating and using technology for education”, but beyond this, there is an entire industry and an assortment of complex pedagogical theories involved in fully understanding educational technology. Nonetheless, educators are consistently told of the benefits to integrating EdTech to enhance teaching and learning. While knowledge of benefits is helpful, it leaves educators wondering how to proceed.Where does one start when looking to integrate educational technology?

EdTech Basics

Just as there is no one-size fits all pedagogical approach for student learning, there is no single educational technology platform serving as a panacea for all educational environments across the world. To better think through appropriate educational technology solutions, it may be useful to revisit what EdTech actually is.

EdTech is a wide term, and includes both software and hardware. On the former, examples exist with learning management systems (or virtual learning environments) like Brightspace, Blackboard, Canvas and Moodle, and more targeted software like Kahoot for live and interactive quizzes. Similarly, grading and assessment platforms, such as Crowdmark, fit into the EdTech software category. New developments in AI can also fit alongside these software solutions.

EdTech hardware can very broadly include any form of technology that can help instructors (laptops, tablets, mobile devices, wearable technology, etc). Hardware can also include much more specific education-specific products like Smartboards, projectors, or classroom clickers. In light of these distinctions, it may be helpful to think of them all–software and hardware– under the umbrella of “EdTech tools.”

So why do we use EdTech tools? Quite simply, they yield an array of benefits. Primary among these benefits is the ability to enhance teaching and learning, with most researchers citing EdTech support of individual-based approaches as a key advantage. Consider the examples of predictive analytics and data-driven adaptive teaching. Each shows a capacity to target disengaged students and acknowledge problems with material comprehension before it is too late to improve a student’s performance and understanding. Many forms of EdTech, like these, are also capable of collecting useful data that can inform future pedagogical practices.

Integrating EdTech

Every piece of EdTech is different, but a set of universal principles can be followed to support a successful integration. Below are three tips for a successful application of EdTech in both in-person and remote learning contexts. These have been developed for the institutional level, but can also be adapted to individual classrooms and everything in-between, depending on the scale of the intended integration.

1. Vision and patience – Integration—both technologically and socially—does not occur immediately, and it will encounter a number of setbacks during the transition. Unfortunately, many institutions give up after experiencing setbacks within the first year, trying another platform with the same approach while expecting different results. Instead, stick to it, and consider how various “champions” or role model EdTech users can be studied and learned from. Use them as a guide for how to best find technological learning solutions.
2. Two way symmetrical communication – Open and transparent communication between education technology providers, academic administrators, and educators is integral for successful implementation.Provide educators and staff who will be using the technology with dedicated on-site training delivered by either a representative of the education technology company or the institution champion. After the training, ensure there is an open channel for communication between academic staff and the educational technology company to ensure any integration and troubleshooting issues can be resolved quickly.
3. Regular data analysis – Encourage educators to regularly analyze and act upon classroom data. A weekly analysis may help educators identify where students are struggling, allowing them to intervene more effectively through individual support or by dedicating more time in lecture to specific subject matter.

Before adopting a new educational technology, ensure your institution has these three factors in place. These three environmental factors may make implementation much smoother and potentially more cost-effective.

Advancing EdTech

EdTech is not as complicated as it seems, due to the fact that the general focus of all companies in this sector is to enhance the learning process. Importantly, EdTech should always be seen as a support– not a replacement–for teachers. With this in mind, integrating any form of technology into a classroom provides teachers a new way to engage students and promote educational success. In today’s increasingly technologically driven world, ensuring students are well-versed in the most recent technological advancements also prepares them for the real world. By understanding the nature of EdTech and following a few simple strategies, this can be easily achieved.

Interested in more on EdTech? See our other blogs:

Inquiry-based learning is a reversal of typical teaching and learning models. Instead of the instructor teaching the class, knowledge construction occurs through a set of questions posed by students. Engagement is shaped through this process, which creates heightened interaction between all members of the class.

In essence, inquiry-based learning hinges on student responsibility. Mainly, they are in charge of four interrelated aspects: regarding students’ own learning

• Finding what they want and need to learn
• Finding the resources that best support what they are learning
• Self-reporting on the effectiveness of resources and the management of their own learning
• Assessing and reflecting on the progress and outcomes of their own learning

Many higher education institutions adopt inquiry-based learning in certain programs and settings. It has typically been employed as a way to engage and prepare undergraduate students for success in the rest of their academic and professional careers. In these specific university contexts, the sandbox-style of inquiry pedagogy—as opposed to the more linear structure found in most courses—begins with a student’s innate curiosity of a topic, and encourages them to follow their own path in comprehending its core concepts.

Inquiry-Based Learning Examples

While each application of the inquiry model may be different, a good example exists with McMaster University, a pioneer in inquiry-based education.The following elements stem from McMaster’s offerings, but most inquiry models share these following beneficial elements:

• Structured around a specific field of study in which students will explore their own areas of interest (e.g., STEM, social sciences, business, or health)
• Teaches students about the field’s appropriate research methods and tools
• Provides students with training in using library resources, recognizing and reviewing appropriate research (i.e., primary, secondary, tertiary)
• Encourages reflection through regular progress reports

Inquiry-Based Influences

Understandably, not all institutions are able to allocate the resources to develop full inquiry-based courses; however, these same elements may be implemented on a micro level, through in-course assignments and projects. The inquiry model does not have to be implemented in its entirety to be beneficial. Exposing students to self-directed learning and appropriate research methods early in their academic careers—whether through a dedicated course or class project—improves their probability of academic success and retention. There are many ways to adopt inquiry-based methods into more traditional in-person or remote learning scenarios.

One way to integrate inquiry into more traditional course designs is to simply ask students what they wish to learn. When developing a syllabus, consider leaving gaps and collaborating with students to determine what would be best to fill these. While not fully in line with student inquiry, this approach does support certain aspects of the thinking surrounding flexibility.

Along these lines, it may be useful to develop one open-ended assessment. With this type of assessment students freely choose the topic and questions. This assessment type allows students to think about what they are interested in and how to learn about it.

Inquiry-based learning involves reflection, so thinking through possible ways to spark introspection is also another way to consider the practice of inquiry-based education. Self-assessments targeted at metacognition or micro-assessments administered throughout the term both achieve this goal.

Inquiry: Benefits and Challenges

No discussion regarding inquiry-based learning should be without mention of the various drawbacks to this approach. First, the inquiry model is difficult and time intensive in terms of university course management. The model is one that works best when the instructor is experienced or trained in it. Second, assessments can become complicated. Ways of measuring self-learning are more difficult, and since the model situates content as more abstract and self-defined, it is hard to know how to measure learning.

Even with all of this mind, the inquiry model still stands as a prime example of innovative pedagogical practices. While it may not work in every classroom, it might be useful to consider how some inquiry-based strategies can leak into traditional course design. This way, instructors are getting the best of both worlds: the structural security of typically university courses mixed with some innovative approaches to assessment and self-selected content.

Interested in more on Innovative Pedagogy, Assessment and Course Design? Read more here:

Strengths and Weaknesses of Blended Learning

To start, it is important to look at the underlying foundations of blended learning. Norm Vaughan from the University of Calgary explored the impact of blended learning on all actors involved–students, instructors, and administrators. For each, he was able to establish a basic perception of benefits and weaknesses:

• Students – Preferred time flexibility and enhanced learning outcomes, but experienced technological hurdles and issues around self-regulating time.
• Teachers – Noted the benefits of student engagement and flexibility, but also highlighted the issues of time in course redesign and technological supports.
• Administration – Suggested that blended learning is forward thinking, innovative, and cost-reducing, but the limitations include the fitting of blended learning towards institutional goals, resistance to change, and complex organizational structure.

Robin Castro, writing in Education and Information Technologies, provides a more recent overview of the key emerging dynamics in blended learning for higher education, emphasizing that it is difficult to fully determine the effectiveness of blended learning due to the variances in how technology is used. While the multimodal nature of blended delivery is universal, the actual specifics of implementation vary too widley to make sufficient judgements about its efficacy.

Blended Learning Models

Blended learning can be realized through several differing models. These are conceptualized and termed a little bit differently depending on the source, but, in the Educause Review, Heather Farmer outlines six models. These six form a spectrum based on two premises: instructor involvement and synchronousness. For example, in the popular flipped classroom model, students complete a set of asynchronous online learning tasks before attending in-person sessions that emphasize peer-to-peer engagement and knowledge-building exercises. In contrast to this model, there is the self-directed model, in which all components can be completed following the student’s self-assigned pace, asynchronously.

In the middle of the spectrum comes the Integrated Lab Time model, which starts with a synchronous component and then turns into asynchronous. The taught concepts are done in groups, and the applied aspects of learning and in-class assessments are located asynchronously online.

Each model has an assortment of pros and cons, meaning the application of each cannot be universal and require case-by-case considerations. However, decisions on which to apply can be governed by an interrelated set of binaries: synchronous or asynchronous, student pace or instructor pace, independent centric or group centric, alongside matters of environment and accessibility.

What does Blended Learning Look Like?

Beyond the theoretical ideals, one can better understand blended learning through the courses of Alan Ableson from Queen’s University. Alan operates a flipped classroom for his large (200+) first-year courses. For these courses, he has his students complete asynchronous modules prior to in-person sessions that are then structured around discussion and interactive question and answer periods. This eschews the traditional lecture format by repurposing class time as peer and instructor engagement time.

Blended Learning and Educational Success ‘

In a discourse where much time is spent comparing face-to-face and online learning, blended learning represents what the future may look like. By marrying in-person learning with the advantages of online learning, the model presents a significant step forward in EdTech integrated innovative pedagogical practices. However, it is not without its challenges. While flexibility and accessibility are enhanced, the transformation of course materials and pedagogy to the blended format is a complex endeavor. This being said, with examples such as Alan Ableson’s classroom, blended learning is proven effective under the right circumstances.

Interested in more on blended learning?

A number of students balance their online education alongside work and family commitments. These factors, along with the lack of in-person interaction that defines online courses, often contribute to a loss of motivation in continuing with studies. Fortunately, an increasing number of institutions are using predictive analytics to change the culture and experience of online learning.

Predictive analytics alerts help educators to see the data that flags students as at risk. With this data in hand, instructors are better equipped to offer academic assistance and resources to students who need them.

Why Predictive Analytics?

Institutions that have shifted towards a culture of early warning and feedback have noted gains in retention and graduation.

In one experiment with predictive analytics Strayer University significantly increased online student retention. By identifying at-risk students and providing them with highly targeted and personal support, the overall number of students considered to be at risk within the experiment decreased by 17%.

Similarly, Georgia State University states that Black, Hispanic, first-generation, and low-income students graduated at rates at or above the rate of the student body overall since the widespread use of predictive analytics at the institution began.

These institutions are showing that with a focused effort, notable success can be achieved. Individual instructors can implement smaller scale analysis and begin the cultural shift needed for massive gains.

Classroom-Level Predictive Analytics: What Data is Important?

In a traditional class, an instructor is able to identify at-risk students through a number of factors, including in-class participation and assessments. The data provided by online student activity provides similar data, allowing instructors the ability to motivate and support students the moment they show signs of struggle.

Using information from an LMS or VLE, instructors can assess student progress. For instance, Strayer University is tracking how much time students spend on assignments, watching lectures, accessing optional resources, and posting on discussion boards. These insights provide a holistic view of entire classes and individual students, allowing instructors to provide personalized support.

When thinking about what data to watch, focus on engagement. How much time students spend with course materials is important. Alongside that information, traditional metrics such as attendance, class participation, and grades will help create a full picture of whether students are likely to be successful in a course.

Considerations for Intervention

Once you have established what data to base your interventions on, you will need to decide how best to improve your students’ chances of success. University of Central Florida’s Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository suggests a few steps for communicating with online students whose behaviour has been flagged.

First, think about when to message students. Instructors commonly connect with students during course milestones, including at the end of the first week, shortly after a major assessment, and during the final week to withdraw from classes. Picking the right times to discuss student progress ensures that course success is already top of mind for the student.

Next, decide whether your potential method of contact aligns with the student’s current behaviour. For example, if the student has not been logging into the LMS or VLE, sending a message via that medium is unlikely to have an impact. In this situation, sending an email may be more effective. In more severe cases, instructors may want to consider setting up one-on-one conversations with the student to review course expectations and concerns.

Randy Weinstein, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Villanova University, suggests that the personal touch is key. While students may not respond to an automated message, having an instructor reach out personally is likely to garner a better response. Be thoughtful, and personalize your message where appropriate.

Finally, tailor your messaging to the behaviour of concern. For instance, if the student is receiving low marks, you may want to message them about tutoring services or remind them of office hours and resources that are available.

When thinking about reaching out, remember that positive reinforcement is as important as constructive feedback. Reward successful and improving students with encouragement.

Learn more about intervention and personalized instruction:

For over a decade, higher education has looked to big data for supporting teaching and learning practices. While institutions have access to enormous unprecedented amounts of information, they have struggled with how to meaningfully use the massive amount of data collected about every student. Educators find themselves wondering What does the data really say?

Big Data in Practice: Taking a Lesson from Healthcare

American physician-economist, Christopher Murray, was a pioneer in using big data to change global healthcare policy, practice, and funding. Understanding that the devil is in the details, Murray used individual data points to identify the true causes of issues and the best solutions to address them. Until this point, best practices for healthcare had organizations using broad data to inform their focus, often resulting in fighting or funding the wrong thing.

A Forbes post discussing big data argues that higher education is at risk of misinterpreting and using data the same way. The increased pressure institutions face in reporting on educational technology and innovative teaching may result in broad solutions designed to assuage funding bodies. However, without careful consideration of what the data is actually saying, big data applications face the risk of being “based on everyone and relevant to no one.” The key to education not falling into the same trap is making good use of macro- vs. micro-level data.

Using Big Data to Improve Student and Teacher Performance

In 2012, City University of New York (CUNY) educators identified eight categories for applying educational big data. These categories ranged from evaluation of students’ performance to testing and evaluation of curricula.

According to this study, several institutions used macro-level data to implement learning analytics applications. These systems included:

• Northern Arizona University’s Grade Performance System, which sent emails to students to inform them of academic issues as well as share positive feedback.
• Purdue University’s Course Signals System, which was designed to bolster student performance and learning outcomes with real-time, frequent, and ongoing feedback.
• Ball State University’s Visualizing Collaborative Knowledge Work, an analytics application that encouraged continuous formative evaluation among collaborators. While these systems have faded from the spotlight since their original launch, they built the foundation for big data innovations in higher education teaching and learning.

For instructors who are interested in using micro, or classroom and individual, data, EDHEC Business School and SmartData Collective highlight starting points for intervention in the classroom.

Adapting Teaching Style

Discussions of big data can be overwhelming, and typically do not feature enough details regarding teachers. This oversight in teacher relevancy can be rectified by looking at how big data may assist teachers in reconceptualization of course structure.

Traditionally, lesson plans are created at the beginning of a term and remain unchanged as class progresses. However, course analytics and assessment design can play a key role in the identification of misunderstood content. Analytical measures can determine the difficulty and comprehension of a specific question, allowing instructors to identify when a class, as a whole, is grasping a concept.

An instructor can, then, change a teaching plan based on information about the class’ educational progress. For concepts that are proving more challenging, instructors can assign additional practice and readings as well as asynchronous learnings to ensure core competencies are learned. Similarly, instructors can pace the course faster at points when the class shows mastery.

Personalizing Student Learning

In the same way that educators can assess student performance and learning outcomes at a class level, they can determine challenges and successes on an individual basis. Once issues have been identified, educators can intervene by sharing extra resources to help struggling students improve their understanding of core concepts. Similarly, high-performing students can be given the option to engage more with a topic via supplementary content.

The Future of Data

Data is already challenging preconceived notions about the ability to predict and evaluate student success. This growing resource fuels both hope for better learning and concerns about data privacy and data bias. We must be careful as we make decisions about its integration in our institutions.

Of note, too, is that despite its great potential, the data is only as good as the data collection method. Designing meaningful, performance-based assessment as well as employing appropriate analysis is essential to successful teaching and learning with big data.

Ready to learn more about assessment design in education?

Understanding a complex field of study is often like assembling a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. At first, students may be able to identify the foundational corners and build a border of theoretical knowledge. However, comprehending the minutiae of the subject may feel like staring into a jumble of jigsaw pieces (e.g., lectures, readings, and practicums) that will not fit together.

In these instances, it may be useful to think about the nature of academic knowledge-building processes. In higher education, graduate-level expertise and beyond is established through both a general foundation of the field as a whole, and a much more nuanced comprehensiveness towards a small sub-field or topic. In contrast, undergraduate courses typically cover a much greater topical scope.

But how does this approach translate into the classroom?

Starting with the Corners: Strategizing Learning

The answer to building towards expertise may be with the jigsaw learning strategy, which is a cooperative teaching method premised on supporting students in effectively learning a concept. This method helps a student become an expert on a single sub-category and then transfer knowledge to their peers, who are experts on other aspects of the topic. More specifically, the jigsaw learning strategy works in this way:

1. Identify and group students into a concept area with 4-6 subtopics. In a course such as sensory processing, some concepts to group students in may include auditory, visual, olfactory, vestibular, and touch sensations.
2. Assign each group member a subtopic. In this example, students within the visual processing group will become experts on subcategories such as stimulation, transduction, transmission, and perception. Unlike traditional group work, students will initially develop expertise on their subcategory through independent research and study. Each student may also be required to complete topic-specific assignments and keep a learning blog.
3. Have students participate in a content consultation with experts from other groups. Subcategory content experts, such as those focusing on transduction stages, will consult with peers from other groups focusing on the same topic. This allows students to learn about how their process works in other categories, while discussing strategies on how to best teach the information to their respective teams.
4. Encourage internal group presentation. With each member now an expert in their respective subcategories, teams will put the whole puzzle together by presenting their research to each other.
5. Assign class presentations. Now that each team understands each aspect of their topic, they will present their findings to the entire class for reflection and discussion.

While jigsaw strategies require considerable planning and effort, they are useful strategies for students who are learning complex topics. In theory, the students are provided all the pieces, and by focusing on their corner, they can put together the whole picture. This approach works for both in person and remote learning.

Assessing the Jigsaw Strategy

Understanding the effectiveness of a jigsaw approach requires the consideration of two aspects: (1) its application as a collaborative learning instructional strategy and (2) how students feel about this practice. An article published in the Journal of Educational and Social Research directly engages with these two questions through a research project on achievement of second-year undergraduate students using the framework.

The results from this study were overwhelmingly in favor of the jigsaw strategy. Students in the experiential group showed greater success on the tests, and importantly, they felt positively about the cooperative approach to their own learning. The researchers found that all types of students (even those shy about sharing their opinions), benefitted from the environment that stems from jigsaw. Given this finding, the jigsaw approach may be considered as a way to motivate disengaged students. The researchers suggest that the approach be used mid- to late semester, and that instructors participate in training programs to properly facilitate the method.

Consider the Researcher

As a final note, it is useful to think of the ways the jigsaw approach would be beneficial for instructors who are also researchers. Having students deeply probe sub-fields may be a learning process for instructors, as it could be an area instructors, as generalists, do not have a high familiarity with. Thus, the jigsaw is not only student preferred, but helpful in case the instructor’s knowledge has a few missing pieces.

How to Manage Large Classes

Alan has a thoughtful approach to delivering large classes that hinges upon his experiences and understanding of students. He has a keen awareness of the many roadblocks to learning and motivation that exist in these contexts, and has employed an array of practices–both pedagogical and technological–aimed at engaging students. For many years, Alan has moved his classes away from the traditional lecture format and operated a form of blended learning. In essence, this consists of pre-recorded lecture videos, followed by live sessions that function as question-and-answer sessions.

Alan notes that the hybridity of his courses is targeted at increasing student-content, teacher-student, and student-student interactivity since these relationships are difficult to nourish in the traditional “being talked at” lecture format. The key to Alan’s style of interactivity is finding the right questions. Overly simple questions inspire little to no debate; overly difficult questions cause misunderstanding and concerns about the structure or wording of the question. While the “sweet spot” questions can be hard to find, Alan says, there is nothing quite like “the buzz in the classroom when you get a really good question.”

A Holistic View of Crowdmark’s Benefits

Alan has been using Crowdmark for 8 years, during which he has gained a strong understanding of the various functionalities in application to his classroom. Managing hundreds of assessments and multiple TA’s, Alan terms Crowdmark his “large class, saving my sanity tool” that turns stacks of paper into neatly organized submissions.

Alan calculates that Crowdmark has bumped up his team’s grading efficiency by 25%, noting that this is valuable time saved without compromising the quality of feedback. Alan finds that having TAs mark a single question across multiple individual assessments leads to more consistent scoring across graders, and this consistency leads to fairer grading of students. Similarly, Alan finds that the comment library also assists with consistency of feedback, allowing graders to respond with the appropriate solution or comments that revolve around similar mistakes.

Beyond grading fast, Alan has discovered an array of other features that assist his course in varying ways. Organizationally, Crowdmark allows Alan to check his grader’s work, edit grades, and manage cases of academic integrity with greater ease. Moreover, grade reviews are streamlined in Crowdmark because it is easier to find and see various elements that important to this process (who graded it, clarity of comments, etc.).

Lessons from a Power-User

A lot can be learned from Alan’s methods for teaching large-scale classes. His decision to opt for the blended format has allowed for greater interactivity amongst his students, and his integration of edtech solutions finds him using the best of what the digital world offers.

Want to learn more about how Crowdmark improves grading experiences?

Exams can be stressful for both students and instructors. To maintain a sense of calm, it is important for instructors and students to feel ready for exam day.

Whether you are teaching online or giving in-person instruction, this article will help you visually and verbally communicate exam protocol and structure to students–ensuring everyone feels prepared before the exam begins.

Provide Exam Visual Cues

It is essential to provide visual cues for how long an answer a student should write. For example, use physical white space, a certain number of lines, a word count within the exam question or several points associated with the question. This approach sets students up for success by giving them a chance to think about how much of their knowledge they should articulate and preventing them from over-writing.

Prepare Students with a Materials Checklist

Another critical step is to communicate what a student should use or what tools a student will need during the exam. Giving an itemized list of suggested materials, such as a calculator, is incredibly valuable for giving students more confidence to perform better during the examination.

Offer Time Management Suggestions

Break down how students should use the exam period and how much time they should spend on each section. For example, “15 minutes for planning, 45 minutes to execute” helps structure how students use their time and gives them an advantage if they follow your advice. Helping your students practice proper time management can also reduce panic writing, prompting students to plan their exam sessions for optimal results.

Give Verbal Reminders

In addition to time management advice, you can further help your students by providing verbal timing cues during the exam. While the exam is in progress, you can offer verbal cues to let students know how much time they have left in the exam period or make them aware of their current progress. By announcing important time markers like one hour left, thirty minutes left, etc., your students will better understand their progress.

You can also use verbal cues to give your students a benchmark of their progress. Let your students know when they should have completed a specific section or a rough estimate of where they should be in the exam. For example, “Thirty minutes have passed. You should have completed the written portion of this exam.”

Share the Grading Breakdown and Details

Let your students know ahead of time how you will grade their exam and what they should keep in mind while completing the test. A rubric is a common way to share marking guidelines. Although grading criteria from one question to the next on the same assessment may seem repetitive, it is important to remind students about your expectations.

Tell Students to be Conscientious of Spelling and Grammar

Regardless of the course subject, remind your students if you plan to deduct marks for spelling and grammatical errors. Many students may rush their answers without proofreading their exam submission. If you tell students ahead of time that they may lose marks for language usage mistakes, they will likely be more careful when submitting an exam.

Advise Students to Review Their Answers

Students facing exam anxiety often race through their tests as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this leads to many mistakes or missed questions. The most important thing you can teach your students is to double-check every page before they click submit. Avoidable errors that are not caught before submission can significantly affect the student’s final grade–whether the mistakes are spelling and grammar errors or entire missed sections.

You can assist your students in remembering to review by:

• Reminding your students when the exam begins
• Reminding your students near the end of the exam period
• Giving your students an additional 5-10 minutes after the exam period to proofread their work before final submission.

Familiarize Students with Assessment Platform

With an grading platform like Crowdmark, you can create exams and administer them to students through an easy-to-use interface. Both students and instructors benefit from the use of digital grading software and apps. However, using new technology for the first time during a test can needlessly increase stress.

When using a exam app, consider giving students a chance to see and interact with the assessment interface before the exam. Becoming familiar with the platform will go a long way to reducing pre-exam stress for students and helping them feel more comfortable with using technology for assessments in the classroom.

Reducing the Stress of Exams

Whether you are new to administering exams or you are a veteran, there is always something to learn about easing exam anxiety, Preparation and organization are key. The tips above are just the beginning of the ways in which you can help your students succeed. There are many more techniques to explore on your journey to better assessment.

Want to learn more about effectively administering exams? Read more here:

Being an educator means spending a lot of time on administrative maintenance. These tasks included everything from setting up your classroom to grading papers and marking incorrect answers—sometimes by hand.

Although our day-to-day habits and responsibilities have changed, the reality is that educational institutions still rely on tried-and-true testing methods like exams to find out whether their students have fully absorbed the lesson material. Fortunately, using digital grading software like Crowdmark can help make this process easier. This ease is due to streamlining the design, implementation, and grading of exams.

To show you just how much Crowdmark can improve the grading and assessment process in education, we share these steps to highlight how Crowdmark can save instructors both time and effort when compared with traditional grading.

Exam Creation

When educators create an exam using Crowdmark, the process looks just like traditional exam creation. Instructors can type content into Crowdmark directly, or they can attach a file containing a previously-created assessment. Additionally, with remote assessments in Crowdmark, students are sent a link to submit assessments remotely in their accounts, from any device with a browser and internet connection. It’s that easy.

Assignment Submission

Assignment submissions on Crowdmark are much safer than email because it offers an organized space for teachers to conduct assignment submission instead of using a crowded email inbox. There is no need to search for attachments to download or worry about a student’s email going into your junk or spam folder.

Grading

Crowdmark’s robust grading tools are vital time-savers for teachers and educators. Once assessments have been submitted, it is easy for teachers to grade them from anywhere, using any device.

Grading teams can make text comments, annotations, or symbol features using the grading toolbar or click anywhere on the page to write freeform corrections or annotations.

The keyboard shortcuts and comment library also allow teachers to copy and paste frequently used comments or notes, cutting down on the amount of time they spend grading.

These helpful features are part of what makes grading with Crowdmark 3x faster than marking by hand.

Distribution of Grades and Feedback

Once grading is complete, educators can efficiently distribute grades and feedback using a one-click email feature. Once an instructor grades the assessment, it is available in the student portfolio for the student (or their parents) to find.

Creating a Successful Exam with Crowdmark

Most educators already know how to create a successful exam that will challenge their students while still ensuring it can be easily read and understood. Crowdmark simply takes your knowledge and expertise and makes it easier to reach your students.

With Crowdmark, creating a great exam, distributing it to your students, and receiving the completed work is easy—and grading with Crowdmark is where educators will experience even more meaningful time savings.

Exam Fundamentals

Exams—like all other forms of assessment—are tools for demonstrating evidence of student learning. This is what makes them popular as cumulative assessments in courses or as standardized entrance evaluations. While educators more regularly associate assignments and projects with specific learning outcomes, final exams remain isolated tests measuring what has been discussed and taught in lecture. This is the element of exams that typically incurs the most criticism due to the number of significant pitfalls that stem from this approach. But what is the alternative?

Barbra J. Tewksbury, writing in the Journal of Geoscience Education, details her teaching experiences moving away from examinations. As students may be familiar with classes structured around exams, Tewksbury notes that “successful teaching without exams requires the use of alternative structures that are at least as effective for both motivation and assessment.” Guided by this premise, Tewksbury assigned students a written or oral assessment each week that required a detailed synthesis of theory and data; she found that this method produced the following positive results:

1. The level of knowledge comprehension required for these written and oral assessments was, generally much higher than that of an exam.
2. Whereas with exams students tend to “cram” and learn material close to the exam date, with the more frequent assessment model, students engaged with the course material prior to class, which helps learning and allows for richer discussion on course themes. In essence, learning is not strictly for the exam, and it is properly conducted over the entire term.

These insights may be something to consider as a way around the final exam. However, there may also be ways to rethink final exams themselves, rather than throw them out entirely.

Exams as Learning Experiences

To fully discuss evaluation methods, it may be useful to revisit why exams are popular in the first place. The nature of exams does make them the clearest and simplest form of assessment. Moreover, their longstanding presence means most educators stick to the exam model by virtue of it being the model they were tested with. Exams also lend clear performance data; accordingly, they may be favored by administrators.

Beyond these rationales, the use of exams may be better justified through an approach that sees them as learning opportunities rather than pure measurements. Fortunately, this approach requires no significant exertion of effort or design. To focus on using exams as learning opportunities, give some exam prep work by identifying each exam’s intent and tying that to a specific learning outcome. Once you identify these two pedagogical factors, the appropriate format (e.g., multiple choice, essay, proofs) and structure (e.g., in-class, take-home, two-stage) will become clear.

For example, when designing an exam for a senior-level accounting class, it is reasonable to infer that most students intend to earn their professional accounting designations after graduation. Therefore, by designing the final assessment to be similar in question type and format to an official CPA exam, student course outcomes will be measured by also being aligned with professional expectations. This makes exams more useful and offers students something beyond what they may retain from “cramming”.

The Future of Exams

While exams may, at times, be supplanted by other types of assessments, or supplemented and given less weight, they are still the main way to test students’ learning of course material. This status does not mean that the nature of exams should continue to follow traditional thinking. By framing exams more around learning outcomes, they retain their value as measurements of educational success while also becoming more integrated into course learning and helping students.

Assessments for students means grading for instructors, which is why mid-term and end of term can be stressful in higher education. These periods have become seasons unto themselves—with people becoming routinely overwhelmed and overworked at these junctures annually. But, due to the gift of foresight, this time of year does not need to be overwhelming. Everyone knows assessment time is coming, and with a few strategies in mind, grading can be a lot easier.

Strategies for effective grading are not as challenging to conceive as they may seem. In fact, a solid set of guidelines can be developed through an awareness of three major components: grading efficiently, giving good feedback, and avoiding educator burnout. With these considerations and some tips from Kevin Gannon from Grand View University, in mind, the hectic stress of mid-term and end of term can be relieved.

Grade Efficiently

When looking to grade effectively, organization is the place to start. Using a calendar–digital or physical–can help to visualize work and manage grading time. While this requires some front-end effort, it is ultimately worthwhile.

Similarly, rubrics are an important organizational tool. They are huge time-savers, and especially help the grading process in large courses with multiple TAs. From here, the process of chunking–splitting up assessments into more manageable chunks–will make the task seem much less daunting.

For assessments requiring more verbose feedback, consider using speech-to-text software—like Google Docs—to transcribe oral comments. Transcriptions or audio recordings may then be copied into the assessments to provide students with rich feedback. This technique can save time otherwise spent writing comments to students.

Beyond these organizational techniques, using an online grading app can be particularly helpful for TA management, submission organization, and grading process centralization. Grading apps are the key for efficiency, as grading software, such as Crowdmark, offers a variety of grading tools that streamline exam marking. Moreover, Crowdmark seamlessly integrates with any major LMS or VLE including Brightspace, Blackboard, and Moodle.

Provide Good Feedback

While many instructors focus on how to make grading easier, the importance of good feedback cannot be forgotten. Fast grading is compatible with solid feedback, but educators must make a conscious effort to fit the two together.

While rubrics are a good tool for efficiency, it is important to discuss the rubric with the students—addressing any concerns they may have, and clarifying any problems to help demystify the assessment process. Moreover, reviewing rubrics with students before administering an assessment will likely result in more structured submissions.

There are many resources designed to guide thinking about how to create a rubric that works as both a grading tool and an assignment guide, A guide from DePaul University, for instance, helps to give structure to conceptualizing the type of rubric would be most meaningful for your purposes.

This guide categorizes the rubric into two main types: analytical and holistic. Analytical rubrics are simply organized in a matrix of skill and achievement. For example, with an essay, formatting could be the skill, and the various ranks of achievement could range from “needs improvement” to “exemplary”. On the other hand, holistic rubrics link achievement to success overall.

Both models have strengths and weaknesses; analytic rubrics provide more specificity in dilleniation, but make it difficult to target the performance of certain skills. Analytic rubrics are also harder to create, whereas holistic rubrics are easy to make but do not inspire much reflection due to their simplicity.

Once settled on a rubric, an instructor can look to increase grading efficiency. Often, multiple students make similar mistakes. Thus, creating one thoughtful articulation to speak to each common issue and reusing these notes when a common error is identified saves time and allows grading teams to give consistent feedback to all students. Moreover, standardizing comments for common mistakes leaves more time to give richer comments on other areas of the work.

Avoid Burnout

It is important to remember that grading does not happen in a vacuum; teaching and learning do not stop when it is time to grade. With all of these workload aspects peaking at the same time each term, it is imperative to adopt measures to protect mental health.

To prevent burnout during exam times, consider developing or heightening self-care habits, including maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Further, look for these early signs of the onset of burnout: an unusual sense of fatigue, difficulty focusing, and a sense of dread, among others.

Since grading is a major workload component and can spark burnout, think about possible preventative measures. Prior to the term, perhaps implement new types of assessments that break from traditional forms that may become monotonous to grade. Moreover, something as simple as workspace ergonomics can really help, especially in remote learning contexts. If burnout does occur, the best course of action is to take a break.

Packing a Mid-Term or End-of-Term Survival Toolkit

The biggest tool educators have to mitigate the stressful effects of mid-term and end-of-term grading is preparation. Knowing the season is coming, and having faced it before can go a long way to future success. When hit with a storm of marking, keep in mind the various strategies offered here. Staying organized, finding ways to manage grading workflows, using an online grading software, and strategizing feedback without compromising its quality are all ways to make the season easier and combat the possibility of burnout.

Looking for More Grading Tips? Check Out:

TA Management Research

Much research has been conducted on the role of the TA in shaping learning behavior—outlining not only their significance but their potential. However, much of the effectiveness of TAs may rely on how they are trained. A group of researchers from University of North Carolina Wilmington profiled the literature and outlined several factors that led to the effective performance of TAs, including mentoring, pedagogy, and skill development from targeted training programs.

Their conclusion supports structured TA training to help institutions experience an array of department-wide positive outcomes. Importantly, a structured approach results in TAs receiving training for their future as faculty members. TA training as a part of student graduate development is, therefore, more than a short-term goal; it is, rather, early-career professional development.

TA Management and the Instructor

From the perspective of the instructor, TAs are vital to the delivery of courses. They can be strategically employed for both teaching and administrative purposes. However, success in both of these categories may hinge upon a strong interpersonal relationship between instructor and TA. This finding is from Andrea Jardí, Rob Webster, Christina Petreñas, and Ignasi Puigdellívol, who highlighted that “personal affinity, open communication, the sense of belonging, and professional compatibility are key to feel at ease” in the relationship.

In addition to the instructor-TA bond, there are other considerations for how to direct the TAs to maintain a well-delivered course. Alan Ableson of Queen’s University, finds that in general, having TAs mark a single question increases efficiency and consistency in grading. However, this is coupled with a consideration that some TAs may benefit from a “global view” of assessments for their own understanding. For Alan, this can be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the TA’s level of study, experience with the topic, and experience as a TA.

TA Management and TAs

The final piece of the puzzle fundamental to the understanding of TA management is the actual TA. Their unique role in the higher education ecosystem must be thoroughly understood in order to properly manage benefits for all involved. Yoonjung Cho, Myoungsook Kim, Marilla D. Svinicki, and Mark Lowry Decker assess TAs and measure their concerns using a classic threefold framework of teacher worry: concern about self (proficiency and status as a teacher), concern about task (teaching duties), and concern about impact (student learning). They conclude, chiefly, that “concerns with class control, external evaluation, task and role/time/ communication represent teachers’ worry about something about which they may feel incapable or deficient, or which they perceive as being undesirable and problematic.”

These findings suggest that TAs may feel inadequate and incpmpetant. This could be related to the wider phenomenon of “imposter syndrome” many graduate school students face. So, what are the solutions to these problems intrinsic to the nature of being a TA?

As previously mentioned, training programs are a way to increase TA effectiveness, but comprehensive research suggests that individualized training adds value to this broad training focus. Stacey L. Young and Amy M. Bippus found that TAs “reported being more likely to choose prosocial behavioral alternation techniques to manage students after training. They also reported significantly higher self-efficacy across three instructional areas: management, student involvement, and instructional strategies” when an personalized approach was taken.

A Holistic View of TA Management

The literature tells us that training is the key to competent and comfortable TAs, and that programs that target specific functions of their role have proven effective. Taking the position of the instructor, TAs are useful for course teaching and management, but they must be strategically directed in relation to their identity as a student. Finally, by looking at the student perspective, we see a common thread of concerns, all of which could likely be significantly reduced through training programs. While all of this can be used as a guide, it should be premised on the notion that the TA is beyond a temporary employee that helps alleviate pressures of the instructor; instead, TAs are the future of faculties, departments, and universities, and they should be nurtured and developed at this critical stage of their learning.

Interested in more on the collaboration of instructional teams and educator development? Read more here:

Evaluation of student learning has always been at the core of educational practice. As educators continue to re-evaluate why and how to assess students, there is a growing movement that is using hard data to drive assessment goals and student learning outcomes.

But what is data-driven learning, really?

Data-Driven Instruction: A Brief History

In the early 2000s, legislation in the United States forced schools to report on student performance and learning outcomes. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became the basis for a new program that evaluated schools and alloted federal funding based on evaluation of students’ performance. While arguably well-intentioned, in practice, the drive to improve outcomes resulted in students memorizing content to faithfully replicate in a standardized testing environment. This phenomenon frequently replaced student skill-building and organic learning. It also became a self-fulfilling prophecy which ignored the systemic disadvantages faced by schools in marginalized communities.

Increasingly problematic, the NCLB was replaced in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which removed much of the federal government’s role in allotting funding for education, and expanded the criteria for determining “success” at the school level. Critically, the ESSA also required evidence-based planning for interventions where marginalized groups, such as minority students, English language learners, or low-income communities, are consistently underperforming.

Using Evidence-Based Education in Supporting Student Success

While no government policy on education will be perfect, the NCLB and ESSA have given rise to a new form of data-driven instruction that has changed “focus from ‘what was taught’ to ‘what was learned’.” Instructors who use quantifiable, evidentiary data for measuring student learning are becoming increasingly able to pinpoint the distinctions and turning points that separate students who have difficulty from those who succeed. More importantly, they are finding that they are able to see the reason for these disparities.

Between 2010 and 2015, research on data-driven instruction was focused on using the data that has been mandated by the NCLB in a way that will circumvent the pitfalls set forth by the Act’s legal framework. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s 2010 work Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Instruction gives a blueprint for educators to use data in this way, and is still used in professional development for schools moving towards this approach. Since 2015, researchers have focused on drilling down to the granularities of where students become divided, in order to close achievement gaps in education. Instructors are finding intervention points earlier and more effectively within a student’s learning journey, as shown in this study from Taiwan. In order to do that, they need Big Data.

In the book International Perspectives on School Settings, Education Policy and Digital Strategies: A Transatlantic Discourse in Education Research, an instructional technology team from the University of Twente makes a compelling case for the use of “Big Data” in education settings. In this case, “Big Data” is defined as having the characteristics of:

• Volume: involving large quantities of data
• Variety: having a large number of data sources
• Velocity: ensuring the data is continuously updated

To obtain this data, instructors can use a multitude of sources, from student evaluations to national test results to online tracking. A scholarly review of research on Big Data in education from the years 2014–2019 concluded that a combined online learning approach may be an ideal way to gather data. The contents of the review “give new insight to universities to plan mixed learning programs that combine conventional learning with web-based learning. This permits students to accomplish focused learning outcomes, engrossing exercises at an ideal pace. It can be helpful for teachers to apprehend the ways to gauge students’ learning behaviour and attitude simultaneously and advance teaching strategy accordingly.”

How Crowdmark Supports Data-Driven Instruction

If this is the case, Crowdmark is in the valuable position to provide instructors with data to help drive instruction and predict student outcomes. Instructors are currently using Crowdmark for innovative data analysis, including

• Extracting text entry on student evaluations to analyze responses at the start and end of a course.
• Exporting grades from individual assessments for further data processing.
• Tracking student outcomes across assessments, with data by question and by assessment.
• Using the student results under multiple choice analytics to provide metadata for predictive analytics.

Crowdmark also provides data to students in the form of Performance Reports showing their progress across assessments, as well as links to the instructor feedback on their highest and lowest scoring questions. And we continue to build analytics across the platform to better inform your teaching practice.

Interested in reading more about data and education?

• Big Data, Assessments, and Adaptive Teaching
• Predictive Analytics Hold Great Promise for Improving Student Performance
• Predictive Analytics for Online Education

In many ways, successful higher education hinges on assessment, whether it is assessment of overall student learning or of teaching effectiveness. Valuable assessment measures the comprehension of concepts and the development of skills, which depends, in part, on effective teaching. To properly evaluate teaching and learning, though, quality assessment creation is essential. But how can educators achieve the lofty but realistic goal to measure the educational process? To answer that, take a closer look at content and authentic assessment.

Content and Design

Researchers from the Center on Assessment—a constituent research group at Stanford University—encourage a total reconceptualization of the debates surrounding what makes a quality assessment. While many discussions center on assessment question types, the Stanford Center suggests that content should be at the core of assessment design. The Center’s interdisciplinary research and focus on developing content that drives toward testing a mixture of “central disciplinary knowledge and skills” led to the creation of six “design features” to keep in mind when crafting assessments:

• Focus on and measure core disciplinary concepts and skills. – Disciplinary concepts and knowledge are subject specific and require judging the student on matters that are important to the field of study. In science-based areas, big ideas and how they relate to the field as a whole should be explored via assessment. In the humanities, a selection of texts that are touchstones of the subject can be used to pinpoint conceptual knowledge. For assignments that are more skill-based, identify key competencies that are developed out of the field. For instance, science may test problem-solving methods whereas humanities may seek writing and argumentation as developed skills.
• Integrate theory and practice. – Beyond the abstract ideas, students must be tested on how they can move beyond the theoretical to incorporate ideas into their own thinking and real-world applications. In science, assessment questions may be framed more around specific articulation of a particular issue (ex: applied engineering or design) and in the humanities, questions may be oriented around specific social phenomena.
• Maximize access, and minimize bias. – Think about how the content-based question is written. Is it plainly articulated? Strive to develop assessments that avoid steering questions towards certain answers.
• Evaluate reasoning, rather than focusing on the response. – Structure grading criteria around the assessment of reasoning. If you leave the question somewhat open-ended, you will be able to reward the thinking processes behind the question rather than strictly the right answer.
• Use authentic source material and case studies. – Require students to either think about or actually use materials and methods in line with the discipline. This method helps to align students’ thinking and responses with the style of the discipline. For sciences, consider hypothesis-testing frameworks; for humanities, use primary source materials.
• Strategically use technology-enhanced tools to increase accessibility and understanding. – Integrating technology into assessments enhances the complexity of questioning, and promotes critical thinking through the use of edtech-specific media or other materials. Digital technology in the classroom is always a welcomed and innovative way to promote learning.

Consider Authentic Assessment in Higher Education

These discussions surrounding assessment design lead to a rumination on the nature of authentic assessment. Briefly, authentic assessments are those designed to “foster disciplinary behaviours and ways of thinking and problem solving used by professionals in the field.”

The benefits of authentic assessments are widespread, but mostly relate to the fact that they prepare students for the workforce and offer them a new type of assessment experience. In the sciences, authentic assessments may expose students to scientific presentations or case studies, and in humanities, policy briefs or reports are appropriate. Authentic assessments may not be the best choice in every context, but mixing in one on occasion will prove to be an interesting new take on the assignment genre.

Innovative Assessment in Higher Education

Rethinking assessments does not mean a radical change; assessments do not have to fundamentally change nor do they need to be thrown out altogether. Instead, a slight alteration to the way they are oriented may be in order—moving from the specifics of design to the more broad way the types of content are selected and articulated.

Consider employing some of the insights from Stanford’s research in your next assessment. Or, to go a step further, synthesize multiple insights, and make an exam that tests disciplinary knowledge and its application via a clearly explained set of questions using technology or media. Now, that, would be one quality assessment.

Interested in more perspectives on assessment design? See more here:

In university course management, the learning management system (LMS) or virtual learning environment (VLE) has become a centralized hub for all matters pertaining to the class, whether for in-person or remote learning. The syllabus, assessment instructions, submission portals, evaluations, grades, and course announcements all exist primarily on the LMS. While the centralization of core management dynamics onto one platform is hugely beneficial, the complexity of course delivery via an LMS can lead to headaches. However, adhering to a set of basic principles can ensure a stress-free LMS course presence.

LMS Organizational Techniques

Given the breadth of material stored in one place, the actual structure and placement of information is significant. Every LMS–Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, among others–is different. These differences mean that what can be done organizationally varies, but the same general approach applies: create and apply a consistent organizational strategy.

A guide created by the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Queen’s University, provides a solid foundation for thinking through course organization.

Questions to ask Before Organizing Your LMS

Prior to developing the organizational strategy, instructors should define the course makeup. Is the course built on synchronous classes, or does it operate as an asynchronous classroom? What structure governs the material? Of the many choices, some popular models are:

• Pyramid – Content and skills are sequentially built in an attempt to reach a specific peak at the end of the course.
• Module – Content is self-contained within sections, and the order is not important.
• Spiral – Content is sequential, but earlier sections are revisited later in the course—to view from a different perspective.

While all are popular and many more exist, the most likely structure in higher education is the module design.

Once instructors recognize and define these aspects, they can select an organizational strategy by determining a plan for how the course design will be delivered, including: by week, by module, by skill, and by topic. For example, it may make sense to organize a weekly synchronous module course into 13 weeks with 4 modules. Whereas, an asynchronous pyramid course could, reasonably, be arranged by skill.

Resources to Consider When Developing LMS Organizational Scheme

Beyond organizational strategy, instructors need to consider allocation of course resources. Always be clear about which course aspects will be placed in what area of the LMS. Focus on consistency: pick one organizational scheme, and stick to it.

Course Readings and Materials

Course materials can be placed in the week, module, or skill. Or they can be placed in a separate section altogether. While the organization of these resources can seem straightforward, organizational structures can become complicated when library systems are integrated. This complication arises because links to library-supported resources typically force the user off the LMS. However, ensuring you are clear and consistent about where materials may be obtained is what remains essential.

Assessment Descriptions

Since assignments occur throughout the term, instructors often question where to place documents that detail assessment instructions. Commonly, assessment instructions are placed solely on the submission page, on a specific subsection of the LMS, or within the module during which it is due. Each of these options represents logical placement of instructions, so consistency remains the key.

Assessment Submissions

Where and how to submit an assessment is perhaps the most important facet of the LMS organizational design. Some options include submitting in a specific assessment tab, submitting in the specific module, submitting via a course calendar, or submitting through an LMS-integrated external platform—like Crowdmark.

When thinking about submission approaches, keep technical failure and platform capabilities in mind. Have a backup plan listed for students to use in case the submission portal fails. Email or an external dropbox, for instance, may be viable backup options. No matter what primary and backup mechanisms you choose, you will need to understand and communicate the submission limits (file size, file format, late submissions, etc.) of submission platforms.

LMS Course Dissemination

Beyond organization, the main aspect of effective LMS usage is communication. Developing a specific communication strategy alongside your LMS organizational strategy will ensure the platform is being used optimally to manage your course. Again, while every LMS is different, there are a few core concepts that can be addressed with every platform.

The dissemination of course announcements is typically the primary communication need within an LMS. These announcements may include scheduling notes, upcoming deadlines, syllabus changes, housekeeping items, and university news. To decrease the likelihood of students missing announcements because they were unaware of where to find them, it is crucial to pick one specific way for announcements to be delivered to students:

The most clear option is the announcement feature on the LMS. All major LMSs offer this functionality, which notifies students when an announcement is posted. Messages are then clearly archived, and easy to refer back to at later dates.

Alternatively, some instructors prefer to make announcements via mass email. This method allows for a higher level of awareness since students may check their email more often than the LMS. Keep in mind, though, that email announcements can become messy when referring back to previous announcements, and emails may get lost in inboxes.

Building a Tidy and Communicative LMS

While organization can seem like a difficult aim, the principle of consistency can provide a greater sense of ease for all involved. Further, making full use of communicative features and ensuring all course material locations are articulated with clarity significantly reduces stress in the long term.

Learning is complicated enough, so taking the organizational and communicative steps that make for a high-functioning LMS is a worthwhile endeavor for effective teaching and learning.

Interested in more organizational and communication strategies?

Effective teaching and learning are a regular topic of pedagogical discourse, so it is reasonable that the role of the teacher is occasionally thrown into question. These discussions are fueled by developments in edtech, questions about student learning, and other advancements in the sphere of higher education. But how valid are predictions about instructors being superseded by technology?

The death of the teacher’s role in education remains largely overstated; we will always need instructors, and this becomes abundantly clear by looking at how similar threats to the existence of teachers have come and gone.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

MOOCs–which came to prominence as a form of remote learning in the mid-2010s–operate with a simple premise based on a few core features: open-access online, diversified learning materials (pre-recorded videos, readings, and assessments), limitless enrollment, and importantly, no present-instructor. Typically, they are offered by universities or private companies and facilitated on a MOOC-specific platform, such as Coursera or edX.

Despite the original innovative concept and approach, the problems with MOOCs have been well documented. In sum, students drop out with alarming frequency; the most likely completers are those who already possess advanced degrees. Additionally, access to high-speed internet presents a challenge for rural and disadvantaged students interested in these open courses. And while free online content alongside traditional instruction tends to help students, it may be less effective on its own. This means that with no instructor, learning is less productive.

While there was a renewed interest and discourse surrounding MOOCs in light of increased remote learning in 2020, the same issues persist, meaning the ideas and promises of MOOCs continue to be unrealized.

EdTech

While teachers can easily be defended from the presence of MOOCs, edtech may, at times, appear more threatening. Software replacement has an array of seemingly game-changing innovations; most prominently the objective grading of standardized questions has gained some attention.

While the basic premise of automated grading can appear desirable, it does not provide the rich and formative feedback that is helpful for student learning. This is why instead of replacing teachers, most edtech is designed to work in conjunction with teachers as a means of assistance. Many forms of instructional software explicitly exist to direct teachers’ attention towards struggling students.

In this area, Paul Dowland suggests that analytic solutions are “particularly suited to large institutions with a high teacher to student ratio looking to quickly identify specific students who are having problems and require extra help,” but cautions that teachers are still necessary: “One-on-one meetings can uncover details that data analysis is unable to provide.” Both a personal touch and additional accountability can increase student success.

Edtech can also provide beyond-the-classroom resources to help struggling or disengaged students. For example, while artificial intelligence (AI) may appear threatening to the teaching profession, most educational AI applications exist as extra support for students.

Students Need Teachers

The teacher is alive and well, still serving as the central cog in pedagogy. The teacher is far more likely to be monitoring a computer’s activity than yielding to it in expertise. MOOCs could not compete with the incomparable value of a teacher’s personalized approach, and software is not aiming to get rid of instructors but rather help them in avenues such as identifying student struggles and grading efficiently. This synergy between human and machine has and will make education better. But it will continuously require increased attention to the types of software, technology, and training that would best serve an individual classroom.

Interested in more EdTech and innovative pedagogical developments?

Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Connecting AI and Education	Change the Game: Innovative Teaching and Gaming	Collaboration in Curriculum Design

Greek Philosophy: Experiential Learning

Socreates, Plato, and Aristotle, are the clear starting points for philosophical application—given their wide influence in the philosophy of education. As Paul Stonehouse, Pete Allison, and David Carr suggest, one of the ways to evaluate the work of these thinkers is by focusing on their conceptions of experiential education. For Socreates, his elenctic method is the idea that learning exists through questions that identify what the student knows and does not know. This can be more clearly and practically articulated as the role of the teacher as merely a facilitator, “thoughtfully assessing where the student is, and prompting the student’s own discovery.” In a similar vein, Aristotle contends that “experience provides the raw material for reflection” and that “as knowledge is gleaned from each particular experience, more general understanding is developed.”

Taking the Greek premises to the digital learning world, it is clear that there is a significant emphasis on exchange and grounded real-world applications. Discussion is a major aspect of learning, with the teacher becoming a guide for self-actualized educational tasks. Class discussion may seem to fall out of favor in digital environments, but there are plenty of ways to apply pedagogical techniques and technology to facilitate conversation, both student-to-teacher and student-to-student. As for real-world style learning, educators are exploring ways to incorporate edTech, and orient approaches more in tune with teaching 21st century skills.

Pragmatism and Educational Approaches

Experiential learning is also a central focus for many in the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. A key example of this is the work of John Dewey, whose ideas presented in his books School and Society, Democracy in Education, and Experience in Education are major touchstones in the philosophy of education. Leonard J Waks notes that, for Dewey, considering education requires a consideration of classrooms, which seem to spatially reflect the ways in which learning is to occur. The classroom is the flowchart of knowledge dissemination, it, quite literally, stages the relationship between teacher and student, based on layout. This represents a specific type of problem wherein students are structured en masse into an inactive scenario; “in such an arrangement, there is no room for thinking, which is inherently active.” Dewey’s rejection of this spatially-constituted learning environment equated to the model of experimentalist education that sought to overcome these boundaries.

This position eschews traditional teacher-student dynamics and constitutes an alternative where “student thinking replaces rote memorization and shallow understanding at center stage; from the start, students are situated in activities that require them to experiment with ideas as they pursue ends that matter to them”. Dewey’s examples were art lessons, gardening, and nature study, but with this premise comes a clear connection to the digital world.

While many features of the learning community Dewey envisioned are impossible online, various forms of technology could offer similar experiences. Virtual reality (VR) in STEM education, for example, creates an almost limitless classroom, by offering realistic visualizations of a variety of learning scenarios. Students can learn through application, vai a digital environment. Moveover, there have been several moves already to translate practical studies into remote learning. In these ways, online learning is compatible with Dewey’s thinking, which leads Kelvin S. Beckett to write that “if [Dewey] were with us today, teaching online, he would guide and lead learners as they all together sought to renew their scholarly and professional communities.”

Applying Post-structuralism in Education

Applying post-structuralist thought to education is inherently complex because many of the thinkers in this area do not explicitly write about education. However, as Chris Drew notes, it is still a useful subfield to pull from for thoughts on learning.

One example of educational application of post-structuralism, according to Drew, is with Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic thinking, which is about looking at the different ways of thinking about things rather than finding the root of knowledge. Rhizomatic thinking facilitates forms of rhizomatic learning, wherein “knowledge is negotiated, and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premise.”

Negotiated knowledge is an increasingly prevalent idea in a highly technified world. Accordingly Jenny Mackness, Frances Bell, Mariana Funes apply a rhizomatic model to the design of a massive open online course (MOOC). They found that “many participants could relate to and welcomed the anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical characteristics of the rhizome, but that knowledge and understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual principles of the rhizome was more difficult.” Each class was situated around a question (ex: “Embracing Uncertainty,” “Community as Curriculum,” etc.), and no objectives were outlined. This approach exemplifies how this type of design changes the teaching and learning process. This diversion from traditional pedagogy can, by extension, be considered when thinking through higher education course and assessment design.

Philosophy in Education: Takeaways

While online learning seems new and canonical works of educational philosophy seem old, these ideas provide a helpful basis to understand the pedagogy behind the digital learning world. Educators can raid these ideas to find what works best for their classroom. From Greek philosophy, we get an emphasis on discussion, a component of learning that should not be forgotten in remote contexts. The pragmatists offer a consideration of experience, which invites us to think about ways to make online learning more applied and practical. Finally, the poststructuralists give us a lens to see knowledge, which influences how we approach assessments and course structure in higher education.

Overall, with some creative application, philosophy may help us move forward in remote learning.

Interested in more strategies for online learning? Read more here:

One of the most noticeable differences between higher education STEM and Humanities courses is their approach to assessment design. Commonly, STEM use multiple choice questions (MCQs) and Humanities use writing. These strategies are generally thought to be completely opposed, with little to no symmetry between them. However, despite popular belief, there may be a way to achieve a harmonious coexistence between the two.

There is no set rule on why STEM and Humanities have separate assessment styles. The divide may be attributed to a comfort professors have with teaching the way they were taught, a need for students to learn core concepts before integrating them into real-world solutions, and/or a lack of time to alter course design.

The assessment-type preference also has a significant connection to subject matter. Hard sciences lean towards specific ‘right and wrong’ answers and tend to align with multiple choice assessments. Meanwhile, society and culture are more abstract and lend themselves to written argumentation.

What do MCQ and Written Answers Assess?

David Nicol, writing in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, provides a solid analysis of the differing scholarly perceptions on MCQs. “Many researchers discourage the use of MCQs, arguing that they promote memorisation and factual recall and do not encourage (or test for) high-level cognitive processes.” Others maintain that multiple-choice questions’ ability to assess “depends on how the tests are constructed” and contend that “they can be used to evaluate learning at higher cognitive levels.”Debates about MCQs are consistent, unresolved, and ongoing. Oftentimes, MCQs are judged in direct comparison to their counterpart, written assessments.

With written assessments, there is less discussion surrounding what they attempt and achieve. Since “writing” is a bit broad, it is easiest to formalize an understanding of this assessment type as either long or short answer questions. Ostensibly, these types of questions offer a different challenge, as they do not offer any options of answers; rather, they offer a prompt that inspires critical thinking. This is what leads to the perception that written responses are more effective in supporting higher level thinking However, this type of assessment is often foregone due to practical challenges regarding grading. Especially in online learning, MCQs allow instructors an ease-of-use assessment design that works well for team grading.

These discussions come to a head in Megan A. Smith and Jeffrey D. Karpicke’s 2013 article, which includes findings that “challenge the simple conclusion that short-answer questions always produce the best learning, due to increased retrieval effort or difficulty, and demonstrate the importance of retrieval success for retrieval-based learning activities.” These researchers emphasize the significance of retrieval in learning, as it is a measurable form of educational progression. This leaves educators with an unclear picture of which way to go.

A Question of Hybridity?

In an effort to find a solution to how to effectively utilize the two seemingly opposed assessment designs, some suggest that a targeted mixture of both may be the most effective way to enhance retrieval. In a 2014 article from The Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers tested students throughout a term with a mixture of quizzes that used MCQs and short answer questions, and simply found that the act of testing students helped them perform better on the final exams—with no distinct relationship between the results, quiz design, and final exam design.

What could this mean? As long as questions are well-conceived, they will assist with retrieval. One extension of this could be that the content should match the method; whether the question can be answered best with multiple choice or written depends on a judgment call by the instructor. This was the traditional root of the STEM vs Humanities approach.

For scientific questions like chemical compound nomenclature, MCQs are appropriate. For philosophical questions like “how does Deluze interpret Spinoza,” written answers are more effective. However, what may be so frequently lost in these generalizations is the value in the other approach. For STEM instructors, maybe including a written question surrounding some type of theory of controversy would help students think more critically and abstractly about their subject. Similarly, Humanities instructors could mix in some MCQs, directed at testing comprehensive disciplinary fluency.

VR Research

VR in education is a trending topic in the academic literature, with many researchers focusing on how the process of immersion impacts learning. A group of researchers from Queen’s University outlined the theory behind using VR. This theory fundamentally revolves around an understanding of what VR can offer by “reshaping the taught process into an interactive experience embodied in the objects of the virtual environment.” More specifically, the virtual environment created allows for the experiential, real-time interaction with virtual representations, and the ability to “visualize abstract concepts and the dynamic relationships between several variables.” These virtual environments allow for exploration in settings normally inaccessible to traditional teaching methods (for economic, geographic, and safety reasons), which is what gives VR significant potential for students in STEM.

Tiffany Leung, Farhana Zulkernine, and Haruna Isah from Queen’s also situate VR within several pedagogical theories. VR fits strongly with constructivist learning theory, as this position suggests that learning is best achieved through environmental interaction and learning-by-doing. Beyond constructivism, situated learning theory–with its contention that learning should be contextualized within its own occurring situation–benefits from VR’s capacity to facilitate more interactive classrooms. VR also aids the teaching methods of traditional learning theories, such as supplanting teacher demonstration or replacing media-induced skill building practices.

STEM and VR

In line with findings from the literature, the nature of VR’s environment-developing functionality lends itself well to STEM education. With this in mind, it is useful to consider some case studies and pedagogical models from the area that have proven the effectiveness of VR as a form of technology enhanced teaching and learning.

• Stefan Marks, David White, and Manpreet Singh investigated the use of VR in anatomical education, finding significant advantages of the technology in their two case studies on the human nasal cavity.
• Jack Pottle overviews two case studies on the integration of VR in medical training. The University of Northampton study uses VR to train nurses—supporting the creation of clinical skills and soft skills. The University of Oxford, which features peer-learning benefits, uses VR simulations for medical teaching.
• Polina Häfner, Victor Häfner,and Jivika Ovtcharova developed a methodology for VR in education, emphasizing the importance of exposing students to VR given its significance in the engineering industry. They also suggest that course design, task specification, and work groups are the key touchstones to a successful integration.
• Akhan Akbulut, Cagatay Catal and Burak Yildiz conducted a study on the use of VR for computer engineering students. They found that students who were taught using VR systems scored 12% higher on the final assessment than the students in the control group.
• Sean Maw at the University of Saskatchewan led a team that developed TrussVR, an immersive virtual reality software that assists engineering students in their understanding of truss design.

VR in Online Learning

As discussed, the key educational benefit of VR technology is its ability to create experiential—or practical—learning scenarios. Thus, the power to visualize any situation from any place raises the question: Can VR be used in online learning? The answer is likely yes, but applications are still in the early stages.

Enrico Gandolfi writes that VR fits with online learning models because they both share the basic premise of creating a virtual world. VR seems like a possible solution for the lack of practical, applied learning methods in remote environments. However, accessibility concerns still hinder the adoption of VR in online learning. Regardless, there are continued software developments—such as LectureVR and AltSpaceVR—that could be of use when VR becomes more affordable for institutions.

The Future of VR-based Education

While video games can be a valuable component in education, there are a myriad of other ways in which VR can be a means of integrating educational technology into learning.

With the creation of a virtual learning environment, VR fits with many theoretical models of education. Moreover, in application, it has proven to be a valuable addition to most classrooms. On top of all of this, a study showed that many students reported positive experiences with virtual learning spaces. However, this study did show that there were an assortment of technical difficulties as well, which showcases the accessibility issues of VR.

While cost remains a significant problem, systems are becoming more affordable which makes the future for VR in education bright.

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Peer-to-Peer Education Approaches

Do students learn as much from each other as they do from the teacher? Researchers have been attempting to understand this question for a long time. This interest is rightly substantiated given how significantly peer engagement strategies influence teaching and learning practices. However, as with a lot of pedagogical research, hypotheses are difficult to test due to methodological issues regarding the measurement of learning and what constitutes educational success.

This difficulty is what resulted in research—such as an article from the late 1980s appearing in the International Journal of Educational Research—to compare peer-to-peer strategies to other strategies of the same nature. Researchers William Damon and Erin Phelps picked three techniques: peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and peer collaboration. The research focused on two elements of engagement, equality and mutuality. Within their framework, the researchers’ findings suggest that only peer collaboration offers high levels of both equality and mutuality. The researchers found that one reason for these high levels is the educational value in joint problem-solving. With peer collaboration, solutions are devised with multiple individual perspectives, which allows students to think outside of their own mindset

In more recent years, peer-to-peer approaches have been rapidly gaining in popularity, prompting an assortment of new scholarly insights. Such work emphasizes an understanding of models, and takes aim at more specified contexts. Martin Stigmar, for instance, compiled 30 pieces around this debate, and produced the general finding that peer-to-peer strategies are most beneficial for the development of generic skills. Moreover, Stigmar included studies that outlined the positive influence on the instructor.

Strategies for Peer Communication

Typically, research conceptualizes peer-to-peer learning as an in-person process. As such, most offerings from the literature offer strategies for the materialization of peer engagement in the classroom. However, with some creative application—combined with a consideration of the online environment—there are ways to achieve a high level of peer-to-peer engagement.

• Online discussion – The most clear way to get students to interact with one another, promoting online discussion, can be aided by a series of instructor-led practices. These practices include adopting a facilitator-type role to keep a distance, asking provoking follow-up questions, and providing visual representation to help guide the class conversations. Keep in mind the functionality of online learning tools, such as digital whiteboards and break-out rooms.
• Communication channels – While LMSs (or VLEs) like Brightspace, Canvas, or Blackboard offer communicative features between students, other chat platforms offer students a different, more personal way to connect. Encouraging the creation of a class Discord or Slack channel may help grow student relationships.
• Online group projects – Cooperative group work is one way to get students to engage with one another, and exercises in this format promote the building of collaboration and communication skills.
• Peer grading – By allowing students to grade their peers, they engage in an interesting and new dialogue that encourages reflection. It promotes their own learning by viewing assessment differently.

The Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Communication in Learning

Peer-to-peer engagement is an essential component of learning, as it fundamentally relates to the social skills obtained through educational environments. While the online world presents a significant challenge, thinking through the ways in which students can be brought together can help make the online classroom a place for students to become a

community.

Interested in more on remote learning engagement strategies?

Many pedagogical approaches are premised on envisioning and counteracting certain educational roadblocks. One potential roadblock that is seemingly unavoidable is the presence of personal electronics in the classroom. A quick look into any higher education lecture hall would reveal almost as many laptops as students.

Ostensibly, the laptop is an optimized note-taking tool, offering students this essential function in addition to the ability to follow along with lecture media materials, to access additional course materials on an LMS (Brightspace, Canvas, Blackboard, etc.), to Google search questions, and to communicate with other students. While none of these elements are inherently negative, they each fundamentally force the student to multitask. On top of this, the devices offer a portal into non-class related distractions, which further challenges student focus.

Multitasking Research

The impact of multitasking on learning is a prominent research topic. Predictably, a study from Rutgers University found that the use of personal electronic devices during lecture—when used for activities unrelated to the classroom—negatively impacts students’ grades. Professor Arnold Glass has been teaching cognitive psychology for over 40 years and has long been an advocate of technology in the classroom; however, while he continues to embrace learning technology, laptops and cell phones are no longer welcome in his classroom during lectures.

Glass’ viewpoint is partially informed by a study he and his teaching assistant Mengxue Kang conducted measuring a class of 118 psychology students’ performance against themselves. Personal electronic devices were forbidden from the classroom for every other lecture held throughout the semester and proctors were in class to enforce the rule. This meant that individual student access to personal electronics was limited to alternating weeks, creating a way to observe performance for course content and differentiate between learned material with and without the possibility of technological distraction.

Throughout the semester students were tested with a variety of assessments (daily quizzes, midterms, and a final exam). All students performed worse on material covered on days that allowed the use of electronic devices, thus proving a causal link between students’ technology in the classroom and academic performance. Despite these findings, Glass acknowledges that requiring students to put away their devices for the entirety of a lecture can be an uphill battle and unpopular amongst students. This is particularly worrisome for instructors concerned with how such policies could impact their student evaluations.

Elsewhere, a team of researchers surveyed multitasking in education literature, offering several crucial insights. While they confirm findings from Glass with similar research works, they note several other important dimensions that come out of the work in the area. One key element is time; students who multitask while studying ultimately spend more time studying, which can have consequences such as time-management issues, stress, etc.

The team of researchers also delved into the discourse on effective (i.e. observably beneficial) multitasking, which suggests that students can leverage multitasking to result in a more complex engagement with the learning concept they are engaging with. The team’s research suggests that as an activity for self-regulation, multitasking could carry valuable potential. However, oftentimes multitasking can be reduced to a quantitatively negative metric that leaves tasks incomplete.

Multitasking, Distraction, and Online Learning

The already complex notion of multitasking gains infinite layers of complexity when considering online learning. Whether via synchronous or asynchronous instruction, remote education fuses the student to their personal electronic device, making the traditional method to reduce multitasking—no technology in the lecture—an impossibility. This mandatory use of digital devices for online learning leads to an enhanced probability of distraction, but distraction does not always have to be the case.

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University took aim at technologically induced distraction, providing a series of recommendations that can also apply to online learning. These recommendations are premised on the idea that technology is not itself the problem; rather, the issue is distraction, and personal devices are merely the avenue for this. Thus, solutions derive from targeting attention:

• Pedagogical variety and interactivity – By diversifying teaching content (lectures, question periods, active discussions, interactive quizzes, videos, images, group activities, etc.), disengaged students will be more enticed to remain focused.
• Proximity – In an online context, this equates to the availability of the instructor.
• Humour – “Laughter in the classroom can make students more comfortable, lower their affective filter, encourage intellectual risk-taking, decrease anxiety, and establish a more productive student-teacher relationship.”

Minimizing Distracted Learning

Research shows that the effects of multitasking are complicated. However, distraction-free learning is more effective than distracted learning. Since multitasking has become inevitable in online learning. It may be increasingly important to look at ideas that help minimize the negative aspects of multitasking and promote engagement. The offerings from Harvard are small steps that could go a long way to helping students remain focused. But you may want to do more research to find the resources that best fit your situation.

Metacognition is the practice of “thinking about thinking.” In this process an individual analyzes, monitors, and regulates their thinking and learning processes in order to develop them more effectively. It sounds complicated, but it is actually something we do all the time. Consider this premise from John Dunlosky and Janet Metcalfe’s book Metacognition: “when was the last time you failed to recall someone’s name, but were absolutely sure you knew the name.” This tip-of-the-tongue state is “metacognitive in nature because you are having a thought (‘I’m sure i know this person’s name’) about a cognition (in this case, your thought is ‘that the person’s name is in your memory’).”

This is a handy way to conceptualize the phenomena, which in the past 30 years, has become a significant focus in higher education due to research suggesting that metacognition improves the academic success of students. As such, it may be useful to think of methods to trigger metacognition to enhance learning.

Metacognition and Self-Assessments: Keys to Deeper Learning

Thinking about one’s thinking is a form of self-assessment. and the benefits of self-assessments have been substantiated with an array of research. For example, a study done by Heidi Goodrich Andrade involves asking seventh grade students to assess their own work using a rubric. The study found that the treatment group had statistically greater success achieving student learning outcomes. This study sets the foundation for the idea that self-assessment causes deeper processing of information, resulting in increased learning.

In the higher education realm, a group of researchers from the Hong Kong Institute of Education looked at the learning process of student teachers in a Bachelor of Education program and found the “metacognitive approach supportive of their learning and self-assessment. Students were more aware of their learning and thinking processes at the end of the study. Further, “teachers involved in the project found the method demanding yet generating useful feedback which enhanced their teaching”.

Other researchers who developed metacognitive studies in higher education found a relationship “between performance and some students’ metacognitive knowledge characteristics […] high achieving students seem to be aware of more cognitive rules and to evoke metacognitive knowledge about cognitive processes and cognitive results more frequently.” These studies, and others, help to understand the importance of incorporating metacognition in the classroom, but they leave one wondering how to do so.

Incorporating Metacognition and Self-Assessments in Higher Education

There are a number of ways to encourage students to practice metacognition, many of which are easy to incorporate into a syllabus. One approach is to ask students to reflect upon the following at the end of term:

• What strategies did they use for the course?
• How did they prepare for examinations?
• How did they approach the assignments?
• Which strategies worked well and which ones did not?

The goal of this questioning is to encourage students to acknowledge their procedural study habits and evaluate the ways in which they could be more effective. It also yields the benefit of course feedback, which could be useful for assessment and curriculum design.

Another metacognitive approach, developed by Dr. Tanner at the San Francisco State University, is the “retrospective post-assessment.” Students are asked to record their preconceptions of the course material at the beginning of the term. At the end of the term students complete a self-evaluation to directly compare their current knowledge with what they believed at the beginning of the term. This allows students to directly observe their academic growth and reflect upon their learning strategies.

A third method is to have students compile a portfolio of all their work throughout a course. At the end of the term students read over their work and write an analysis of their progression. This tactic is useful for keeping students focused on continually improving their academic strategies throughout the term.

Metacognition is a valuable skill that improves the lifelong academic and professional success of students. Having students reflect on their own approach to the coursework and study habits encourages them to take responsibility for their own learning. It also fosters group reflection in the classroom, and learning is enhanced in an atmosphere of cooperation. While metacognition is not a skill that may come naturally to students, introducing activities to practise and develop the ability will better prepare them for the remainder of their academic journey.

What Affects Faculty Well-Being?

In a recent article from the Journal of Higher Education, researchers surveyed over 500 faculty members across 13 Canadian universities, attempting to measure the relationship between a number of metrics (faculty perceptions, pressure and support in relation to academic tasks, work-home conflict, and workplace frustration of psychological needs) and well-being outcomes (engagement, commitment, burnout, and health). Their findings suggest several causal links, including the likelihood of educator burnout in conjunction with work-home conflict and low academic resources, and academic pressure creating basic need frustration (which they explain are autonomy, competence, and relatedness). A key dynamic of this research is the uniqueness of the academic system, which in order to study requires a reconceptualization of common workplace theories.

Dimensions of faculty well-being are likely connected to the structure of jobs in academia. An article from Research in Higher Education suggests an application of the Job Demands-Resource (JDR) model to further examine the nature of the academic environment. The JDR is a model for employee well-being created by Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti that offers a more holistic view with additional factors taken into account.

As applied by researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences, “the JDR model proposes two broad job characteristics that relatively independently influence employee well-being: job demands (defined as job aspects that require sustained effort and that are associated with physiological and psychological costs) and job resources (defined as factors functional in achieving work goals, reducing job demands or stimulating personal growth and development).” They “argue that as long as the academics have available sufficient job resources (e.g., perceive their social environment as supportive and retain high influence over their work), they may be predominantly satisfied with the academic job regardless of the growing work demands.” This signifies well-being based on research-related aspects of academia, but what about the teaching aspects?

Faculty Well-Being and Teachers

Again, to consider the academic environment, there are different requirements for different types of faculty. While each country has their own system, there are generally different roles that require mostly undergraduate teaching and less or no research, and these may be referred to as “instructors”, “contract instructors”, or “teaching professors”, among other names. As a whole, these roles are referred to as non-tenure faculty positions. Matthew T. Seipel and Lisa M. Larson researched faculty well-being for non-tenure track faculty, applying self-determination theory (which hinges on the relationship between motivation and psychological needs), with an emphasis on administrative, departmental, personal and family supports. They note that there was an “absence of any significant, direct relations between the environmental supports and faculty well-being.” Stemming from this is the notion that there are often limited specific supports for non-tenure faculty, as they are typically offered the same supports as tenured faculty, even though their job is significantly different. The key difference is job security, an element that significantly impacts well-being. This article also highlights the need for more research into non-tenured faculty well-being, and the establishment of more direct support programs suited to their needs.

Faculty Well-Being and the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly complicated faculty-well being. The complete shift to remote education (or hybrid instruction) has brought with it a host of challenges to educators including online grading, how to handle remote learning for students without internet, using technology such as Brightspace or Blackboard to organize classes, managing student hardship and avoiding burnout. Moreover, for disciplines where in-person instruction is of great importance, the move to online harmed well-being. This was shown in a recent study, which surveyed music teachers about the pandemic and found that “collegiate teachers reported significantly lower levels of overall well-being and significantly higher levels of depression than published norms.”

While more research needs to be conducted regarding the effects of the pandemic on well-being, it might be useful to consider some institutional-wide approaches that have shown some efficacy. For instance, at the onset of the pandemic, Ohio State University worked tirelessly to promote a culture of wellness, offering an array of virtual programs–from mental health to fitness.This positive approach to showing care for faculty and finding creative ways to support them. This is at the core of faculty well-being, a responsibility of the institution to better support their educators with these difficult online issues.

Teaching online for the first time?

Learn some habits and steps that every beginner should know to feel more comfortable with delivering online courses.

Your guide to teaching and grading students online for the first time. Read how to plan your class, monitor class participants, and grade a course with ease using a grading app to streamline the process.

Many instructors are tempted to accept assignments via email, but this method can become confusing and disjointed. Learn how instructors are moving away from email-based assessment submission.

The Next Level of Online Teaching and Grading

Instructors who have been navigating the online space for some time have learned some methods for meeting common challenges. If you are one of those next-level instructors, we have some approaches you may want to add to your repertoire.

Plan your grading and make assessment more manageable with five strategies for easy online assessment grading. Plus, watch these videos to hear how instructors handle TA and grading-team collaboration, assessment of student participation, and academic integrity:

For those already using Crowdmark, learn how Cindy Fu, Associate Professor and Statistics Director at York University, works with TAs and grading teams using the Crowdmark platform.

Assessing Student Participation

Ensuring Academic Integrity Online

Gain more pivots, pitfalls, and productivity insights from our summary of the panel discussion.

Thoughts and Insights for Instructors who have been Online for Years

If you have been online for a while, you may not be sure what more you can learn. For you, we would like to share some ways to stay energized as you continue to adapt to changing times:

• 3 Distance Learning Successes from the Pandemic
• How Remote Educators can Build Self-Care Habits
• 3 Remote Learning Successes Using Crowdmark

Remote education during COVID-19 has significantly impacted educators. Educators at all levels have had a heavy load to carry from an abrupt pivot in teaching methodologies to provide additional support for students who may be struggling academically, socially, and mentally.

Many educators and teaching staff try to push through their burnout, determined to carry on as usual. However, this approach is taken at the expense of their health and wellbeing. If self-care and other good habits are not adopted, instructors can find themselves burned out and unable to offer their mentorship and support to students. Here are some ways to reframe your daily routine to ensure you are supporting your mental and physical health so that you can give your best to your students every day.

Plan a healthier daily routine

There are many different ways to build a healthy routine, but all of them begin with being intentional about your time and energy. For some people, waking up at 6 AM to exercise is the best way to keep themselves feeling their best. For others, taking time for themselves each morning to unwind and relax is essential to starting their day on the right foot.

A healthy daily routine looks different for each person. Still, at minimum, your daily routine should include regular, nutritious meals, a consistent amount of sleep, personal time to pursue hobbies and interests, and exercise to keep you physically healthy.

If you do not have a regular daily routine, work on building one today. This consistency can help keep you calm and organized, even on the busiest days.

Consciously build social networks

Working at home without seeing your colleagues in person can be incredibly isolating. Even if you live with a partner, family, or roommates, it can be difficult if they do not understand the nuances and challenges of your work.

It is often revitalizing to check in with colleagues, peers, and mentors, so you can share your challenges and work on solutions together. Take time to cultivate the social networks you have already created through work and your career, or step out and connect with educators’ broader community on social media or education-centric platforms.

Control work-life balance

With educators spending more time online than ever before, you can find yourself on-call 24/7. After all, when your office is your kitchen table or living room, it is challenging to know when it is time to shut everything off.

However, if you do not have rigid boundaries about when work stops, it is easy to keep working until you are exhausted. There will always be students with questions about assignment submission or parents who want to chat about their child’s performance.

Instead of working until you are exhausted, set reasonable boundaries and stick to them. One helpful tip is to have a ritual that you do every day between work and leisure time, like taking a walk or even just changing your clothes. A routine like this helps you shake yourself out of your work mindset.

Save time by grading online

A great way to help reduce remote education stress is to grade papers online, using a great digital assessment platform like Crowdmark.

Crowdmark makes it easy for students to submit assignments online. The educator then has access to those assignments from anywhere and can grade at their leisure, using the handy grading tools we include in the platform.

Cut down on grading work with Crowdmark

Crowdmark endeavours to assist educators with all their teaching and grading needs.

That is why we offer an assessment and grading platform that enables educators to grade paper-based and digital exams and assignments 3× faster than traditional workflows while leaving richer feedback for students. Crowdmark also fully integrates with many LMS.

Distance learning has been a common practice for years, but mandatory online education is entirely new. Students using distance learning in the past did so as a choice.

Unfortunately, because of recent health concerns, many students do not have a choice, and online learning has become essential to protect our students, instructors, and communities. Now, it is up to teachers, professors, and instructors to uphold education standards in the new age of remote learning.

Start with understanding

The first tip to teaching online might sound cliche, but it is crucial for a successful school year. Understanding that your students are just as anxious as you are, maybe even more so, is the first step to building positive teacher-student relationships.

Plan for your class

Be prepared! Plan your lesson ahead of time and make sure you have an exact curriculum in place. Teaching online is still a new modality, so being organized in your lesson plans will be vital to teaching online.

Write out each lesson plan before your session starts, and be prepared to work through every section. Remember that these sections could take longer than expected. So, be sure to leave a few minutes of room between each chapter for questions, delays, etc. The more organized you are as an instructor, the more successful your class will be.

Be prepared for technical difficulties

Regardless of how prepared your lesson plan may be, technical difficulties are bound to happen. There are too many variables to predict precisely when or who technical problems will affect. Having a backup plan can alleviate some of the headaches.

Fortunately, there are ways to prepare for these issues and plans you can put in place to solve them if they arise quickly:

• Hardwire your internet: Use a direct ethernet connection instead of relying on your Wi-Fi. Unreliable Wi-Fi is deadly to any online instruction.
• Charge your laptop: Keep your computer plugged into the charger during your class to prevent it from running out of battery.
• Be early: Log on 10-15 minutes before your lesson to load your grading programs and applications.
• Restart your computer: Restart your computer every morning to avoid lag or surprise lengthy updates.
• Record your lessons and session notes: If a student disconnects and misses part of your class, you can send them a copy of the recording rather than re-teaching the entire section. It is also good practice to provide session notes at the end of each class.

Monitor chat for questions and take Q&A breaks

Encourage your class to communicate during the lesson–whether that means ensuring students raise their hands or ask questions in the chat.

As the instructor, you can choose when you would like to respond to these questions. Reading a chat log may be a new experience for you as an instructor. We recommend taking a moment to read through the items every 10 minutes or at each chapter’s end.

Students may ask for clarification on a topic you have covered, or you may be able to answer their questions in the next chapter. The chat log should not distract from your lesson plan. We suggest having a discussion with your students ahead of time about which method you prefer.

Tips for grading online classes

Grading students’ work can take up more than half of your workweek.

Most instructors find themselves overwhelmed with papers, projects, and exams to grade and give back to their students. If this is your first experience with online grading, we have some simple tips that can drastically improve your grading methods.

• Make a rubric and stick to it: Use a grading rubric to streamline the evaluation process. Try to stay within the boundaries of the rubric you have created to avoid bias or wasting time on something that should be simple decision-making.
• Organize your teaching assistants: If you are fortunate enough to have TAs to help with online grading, organizing and setting up a proper grading system will make a world of difference.
• Divide and conquer: Divide your grading into manageable sections, rather than trying to tackle the whole proverbial pile at once.
• Give meaningful feedback: Giving meaningful feedback might take longer, but this will help your remote teaching experience. If you provide clear feedback, your students will improve their work for the future.
• Use a grading tool or grading app: Using a grading tool or app will not only organize your online grading but speed up the process immensely. Keep reading for more information about how online grading apps can transform your teaching experience.

How grading apps can help online teachers

In this new age of remote learning, online tools have become crucial to both instructors’ and students’ success. Grading apps, like Crowdmark, offer a simple solution to the ongoing issues of traditional education.

One of the chief complaints instructors, and even TAs, have is that the grading process is tedious, especially during exam time. Each year, thousands of exams are distributed, collected, graded, and then either given back or destroyed.

The examination process can be a lengthy process that is frustrating for instructors and TAs. Grading apps, like Crowdmark, allow instructors to upload the exams online and grade them digitally. Instructors can also give access to their TAs and collaborate on the grading process.

Once the instructor grades the exam, students can access detailed feedback and see their exam results without waiting for a physical copy. Crowdmark saves TAs and instructors from carting around hundreds of papers.

Here are some additional ways an online grading app could help you teach online:

• Improved turn-over time: Students get their results faster, including meaningful feedback.
• Automatic calculations: Students’ grades get calculated automatically, preventing human error when adding scores together.
• Capture and export data: Analysis of your students’ performance is captured and can be exported for easy viewing. Instructors can see a quick snapshot of their class and which students need more assistance than others.
• LMS integration: Crowdmark is compatible with Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai.

Using a grading app streamlines the grading process and makes each step easier for the instructors, their assistants, and their students. Online grading tools can also be accessed anytime from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connected device.

However, some teachers and students manage to stay afloat and do quite well despite distance learning challenges. Institutions, educators and students themselves are embracing the online classroom. Throughout the school year, schools have managed to find success despite the teaching experience being challenged with learning and studying from home.

This post will look at some of these examples of success in online education and online classes, insights to learn from, and how a tool such as Crowdmark can help make distance learning more successful.

University of Delaware

The University of Delaware is a prime example of what can happen when school administrators quickly and effectively implement distance learning protocols. Various administration and faculty members and directors of school departments collaborated and coordinated to move entire course sections online.

Among them was UofD’s Information Technologies department and the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning. Their combined efforts allowed 6,422-course sections to be moved online between March 16th and March 30th—a mere two weeks.

Although some students and instructors had some personal challenges with the migration of courses to online platforms, the overall response was positive.

Jung-Youn Lee, a plant and soil sciences professor, was initially anxious about the move, but her experiences were better than she had anticipated:

“My first class was successful—my students had no background noise issue and could hear me clearly,” Lee said. “In short, everyone was swift in helping in my department and college, which reduced my anxiety so I could focus my attention fully on adjusting assignments, course content and assessment and connecting more with my students in a new way.”

Fullerton California School District

Several schools in the Fullerton Joint Union High School District in Orange County were able to transition smoothly into virtual classes. Much of their success stems from their early adoption of Wi-Fi hotspots for students without internet access at home. Students lacking the required connections at home could pick up their Wi-Fi hotspots at school on March 16th, a full two weeks before distance learning commenced on March 30th.

Initially, the district planned to have live virtual lessons during each class period but decided to alter this plan after hearing students’ concerns about its feasibility. They decided to give teachers more flexibility with deadlines and instruction modes, such as incorporating a mix of live video instruction, pre-recorded lessons, and hands-on projects appropriate for many teachers’ distance learning.

Fullerton Joint Union also understood that students watching the same live video at the same time were often competing for bandwidth. Relaxing the rules and encouraging students to watch the recorded class on their own time meant less lag and more opportunity for students to find a quiet place to work at home. This protocol has been incredibly helpful for low-income students who may not have internet access during live classes.

Carnegie Math Pathways / State University of New York (SUNY)

Math instructors at the State University of New York (SUNY) use the Carnegie Math Pathways system to teach their students mathematical concepts. Carnegie Math Pathways employs a holistic approach to math instruction, and its use at SUNY has proven to be useful for distance learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

Karon Klipple, executive director of Carnegie Math Pathways, spoke more about the challenges and opportunities of establishing distance learning during the pandemic:

“Because the move to online learning was so sudden and unplanned for teachers, a lot of the support upfront has been triage,” says Klipple.

In addition to facilitating collaboration and offering resources and guidance, Klipple and her colleagues have “helped with setting expectations—what are some realistic goals for transitioning to distance learning on a dime in the midst of a crisis.”

Instructors work with an adaptive learning platform, which adjusts the lecture content to each student’s particular needs and progress. These instructors can also schedule regular student check-in surveys to let faculty monitor students for their content knowledge, confidence, and self-efficacy.

The initial results of the program shift have been promising. Pilot testing of the online courses showed slighter better results than the face-to-face Pathway courses.

A silver lining in distance education during COVID-19

Many teachers and students at all levels of schooling feel disoriented now that the pandemic has uprooted their traditional grading methods.

Crowdmark is a vital asset for any virtual classroom. Like some of the higher education examples mentioned above, Crowdmark provides real-time insight into grading activity so that students can access grades quickly. Instructors can grade with ease, with even the ability to automatically grade up to 200 multiple choice questions in a class assessment.

Distance education does not have to threaten a student’s learning and progress. With the right tools and processes in place, students and instructions can still meet their objectives even in the absence of a physical classroom.

Crowdmark founder, James Colliander, moderated a discussion featuring an elite panel of educators. Panelists shared how they managed abruptly shifting to online assessment during the pandemic, and how Crowdmark helped in the transition. Excellent insights were shared on topics including security and cheating, grading participation, time management and keeping your sanity while teaching remotely.

Our panelists, Laura Pavelka from McGill University’s Department of Chemistry, Cindy Fu from York University’s Department of Statistics, and Jennifer Murdock from the University of Toronto’s Department of Economics, offered valuable perspective for educators heading into the next semester of online teaching. Here is a playlist of six videos that capture panelists’ thoughts on participation, academic integrity, TAs, and assessing student outcomes:

Panel Q&A

Some critical questions were also raised by attendees during the discussion. Here are some thoughts Crowdmark has on these common challenges and situations.

How has the shift to online teaching affected instances of cheating, and student grades?

With the COVID-19 crisis, the move to fully online instruction happened so fast that there was not enough time to reflect on how to make it most effective. Students and educators were forced into a new normal that made it easier and more rewarding for some students to find ways around traditional assessment methods, even when expectations to the contrary were made clear. At the same time, however, educators and administrators became more vigilant about students circumventing the assessment format, so a large number of these students were and continue to be exposed with the help of the Crowdmark team.

While the lasting effects of these issues with academic integrity remain unclear, moving forward we have the opportunity to build up new ways of assessing student learning that make it harder and less rewarding for students to seek answers elsewhere.

What is Crowdmark’s advice to educators who are concerned about academic integrity while assessing students online?

The continuing necessity of online education has provided educators with an incredible opportunity to reflect on why and how we assess student learning. While traditional assessment formats may invite unwanted collaboration or students searching outside sources for answers, assessments that focus on students’ individual learning and voice may discourage these behaviors. Increasing the frequency of assessments as well as varying formats and weighting is another strategy that is being employed to make cheating less rewarding for the student.

Crowdmark also tracks IP addresses for student submissions. This means if copies of assessments or students’ work are found to be distributed on outside sources, we are able to crossmatch IP addresses with student profiles at an instructor’s request.

Can proctoring be considered when assessing students remotely in Crowdmark?

Crowdmark is compatible with some versions of proctoring software, however even using those there are residual security concerns with the way students upload work to Crowdmark. We’ve been working on how Crowdmark can help with this, and we’ll have more information soon.

What is Crowdmark’s advice on grading participation?

At Crowdmark we believe that assessment should be used for learning. Assessment helps students identify gaps in their learning and helps instructors recognize gaps in their instruction. Ultimately, assessment is a source of ongoing dialogue between teachers and students that can drive learning.

It is also possible to track participation with Crowdmark. In an in-class scenario, you’d potentially track attendance, hand raising, etc. Online, great options include class-wide discussions (using LMS or collaboration software such as Google polls), group submissions, or setting a number of smaller assignments as optional.

Does Crowdmark have an easy way to allow for different starting times for an assessment?

Currently there are a couple options for this. We have a Timed Assessment feature that allows you to set an asynchronous exam where a student has (for example) 2 hours within a day or a week to take an exam. To set a synchronous exam with different start times, you would use sections and multiple versions of an assessment. Lastly, you can adjust students’ individual due dates, assessment time windows and late penalties in the student’s Activity Log.

Feelings of burnout, general apathy, or a lack of motivation by the thought of grading another stack of papers is a natural feeling. Nevertheless, there are ways to make it feel like less of an overwhelming burden.

This post will examine some strategies that will help both new and veteran instructors speed up their online grading workload effectively, thus alleviating some of the stress that can come with a mountain of exams, tests, and essays.

Break Your Mass of Assessments into Smaller Workloads

The initial thought of just creating smaller “piles” of assessments may sound silly. However, much like a project plan that tackles smaller goals in the more significant project, the mentality is the same. Avoid treating a large amount of papers or reports as an entire stack. Break down the pile into more manageable chunks. This psychological hack can make grading feel less daunting.

Try grading a particular short answer question consecutively in an exam or test, working through a stack of student papers, but only grading one specific problem at a time. This way, you can focus on the significant points of just one question. Crowdmark breaks assessments down question by question to allow chunking by an instructor or a whole grading team.

Focus on a Particular Point of Feedback

Some instructors provide as much feedback as possible when grading an assignment. However, students may feel encouraged to do better by having one central feedback point for next time.

For example, if you are grading an essay, focus on the problem that underlies the entire assignment. Maybe a weak thesis? One major tip that can lay the groundwork to do better may go the distance, rather than a series of smaller feedback points. Use Crowdmark’s comment tool to provide images, links and rich feedback right in the student’s graded work.

Shorthand your Feedback, When Appropriate

With the above in mind, shorthanded feedback may take the form of simple phrases such as “be more specific” or “re-work this section.” These phrases are more like prompts and are best used when dealing with students who are capable of producing high-quality work but who seem distracted or unmotivated. It is also sensible to use this type of feedback when the assignment is focused more on students’ expression and thoughts than practicing technical skills.

Ultimately, when you use this technique, it can genuinely save you much time and effort. Sometimes just a few words will do the trick. With Crowdmark, you can notate these types of abbreviations using the freeform annotation tool or a comment library of drag-and-drop annotations.

Let your Students do some of the Grading

While students cannot grade their final assessment, assignments that use peer evaluations are vital to students learning how to self-edit.

Alternatively, a group assignment may also include a peer evaluation form for group members to submit to the instructor at the end. A peer feedback form helps a group member keep themselves accountable to their group members while also giving you an inside look from their peers on how committed each student was to the group collective. You can use Crowdmark’s group assessment tool to have students submit their collaborations for grading.

With the above examples as a framework, you can use peer evaluations to factor in a final grade for your students in conjunction with other assessment criteria.

Automate your Grading with a Streamlined Grading Tool

Use a platform that allows you to grade and provide feedback to assignments in one centralized hub or location. In addition to the tools already mentioned, We have packed Crowdmark with features that allow instructors to streamline their workflows. Our grading tool can remove some of the most time-consuming steps involved in assessments. Additionally, Crowdmark fully integrates with several LMS.

Looking for a bit More Help?

The right combination of these techniques will help reduce the amount of time and effort you spend on grading assignments. If you are not already using Crowdmark, we are happy to discuss your specific needs. We offer an assessment and grading platform that enables educators to grade paper-based and digital exams and assignments 3× faster than traditional workflows while leaving richer feedback for students. Crowdmark also fully integrates with many LMS.

What is a Syllabus?

In essence, the syllabus is formulated as a textual guide for the course. It is typically comprised of several aspects that culminate in an 8–10-page narrative that ostensibly serves as an authoritative source for all matters pertaining to the course. Jay Parkes and Mary B. Harrispoint out that the basic informative functions of the traditional syllabus fulfill the first two parts of their theoretical triad—the syllabus as “permanent record” and as a “contract.” While information regarding due dates, required texts, and assessment descriptions serve as permanent record, the premise of “the syllabus as a contract” is intricately related to the relationship between instructor and student, and thus corresponds to the more policy-based aspects (late submission policy, attendance policy, academic integrity, grading turnaround times, etc.).

The key dimension to viewing the syllabus as a contract is considering the associated “implications for what should be included in its content.” This largely means two things: clarity and consistency. The syllabus foresees possible problems and gives direct outcomes (“what happens if you miss a class?”, “what happens if you submit an assignment two days late?”, “what happens if you plagiarise?”, etc.). Alongside the “permanent record,” the “contract” is the most familiar element of the syllabus, but it is Parkes and Harris’ third dimension—the “learning tool”—that has the least amount of visibility in practice.

The syllabus has status as the point of contact between instructor and student; however, there may be room for further consideration for this document to be used as a source for learning. Parkes and Harris suggest a greater role for the syllabus, contending that “a well-designed syllabus can provide information that assists students to become more effective learners in areas that go beyond the scope of our own courses.” This translates to basing the syllabi design on the instructors’ philosophy of learning in their content area.

Parkes and Harris suggest that syllabi can provide “information about how to plan for the tasks and experiences of the semester, how to evaluate and monitor one’s performance, and how to allocate time and resources to areas in which more learning is needed.” In sum, the type of syllabus they suggest, termed a “learning-centered syllabus,” not only offers an answer for “what is the course?’, but for “how to succeed in this course.” Thus, it is filled with tips for education and success, mapping out how to develop a plan for one’s own achievement, how to self-measure progress, and how to manage time. For a more specific visualization of this method, Parkes and Harris provide a sample syllabus. However, their theorizing has one slight pitfall, as this article is from 2002, the integration of online course delivery is not engaged with.

How to Design a Syllabus for the Digital World

With the points from Parkes and Harris in mind, it might be useful to consider how to bring these ideas into the digital learning world. While the syllabus still serves the same function, gone are the days when the instructor prints out a copy for each student on the first day of class; it now exists as a PDF file on a learning management system such as Brightspace or Blackboard. But with this comes opportunity, as we can now revitalize the syllabus genre. There are three common options for interventions into the syllabus, ranging from minimal to radical:

• Collaborative edit syllabus – As a simple, yet reasonable, alternative to a pure PDF syllabus, instructors can offer their syllabus on a collaborative editing software (Google Docs, for example), which allows for comments and questions to be directly asked on the text. Students can ask questions (even anonymously if they prefer) and engage in a back-and-forth that is visible to everyone, almost mimicking the time-saving features of an FAQ. Moreover, if scheduling, deadlines, or other permanent record elements are changed, they can appear updated on the syllabus instead of via email or announcement. With this also comes the potential for collaborative curriculum design, an interesting model gaining popularity in certain disciplinary areas due to its popularity with students.
• Infographic syllabus – Many instructors grow frustrated as students continue to ask questions that can be found on the syllabus. But what if the students’ confusion is not their fault? Syllabus organization is not always logical, and many times important information is hidden within pages of other materials. In these instances, it may be helpful to create an infographic syllabus as a companion piece, distilling the more crucial components of the syllabus into one clear visual. Some considerations from the learning tool function could be used here as well. There are many easy-to-use software platforms that specialize in the infographic.
• Website syllabus – The most significant syllabus redesign idea involves crafting a website rather than a traditional document. This approach requires the instructor to organize class content with a profoundly digital mindset since a web-based syllabus allows for interactivity and a different type of user navigation. Blending the traditional syllabus with an infographic, the website maximizes and combines informative rigour with visual flavour. This approach does have some traction, and while it might seem scary for instructors without web-design experience, there are many simple-to-use tools that will help.

Sources for Innovation in the Classroom

The syllabus is not exactly a raging hot topic in pedagogical debates, but thinking through its importance and design in a digital world will reward those who understand its important place in the instructor-student relationship. Keep in mind that the syllabus is also a key determinant in how students decide which classes to take, and some institutions make syllabi public, allowing them to be sources for students deciding which program to select. Applying some creative thinking to the syllabus will go a long way.

Planning for your next term? Read more here:

• Having Productive Discussion
• Collaboration in Cirriculum Design
• Engagement Strategies for the New Semester
• Alligning Goals at the Start of the Semester

When thinking about ways to enhance learning, we often turn to theories and practices in pedagogy or Edtech, but what if students were given a bigger say in their education? At an increasing number of higher education institutions, curriculum design and delivery are a product of collaboration between students and faculty members. The goal of these pedagogical partnerships is to establish a meaningful relationship between instructors and students that leads to a higher quality of teaching, more effective course delivery, and graduates who are better prepared for the workplace. Beyond this, higher education in general strives to integrate students into a world of scholarship; in fact, researchers Bovill and Bulley argue that “without such participative opportunities early in the university experience, we reduce the possibility of students developing a deeper understanding and ownership of the content and processes of their learning experiences.”

Bovill and Bulley suggest that student engagement demonstrated through discussion or questions as well as institutional access and committee representation in curriculum design enhance commitment to learning, enhance disciplinary knowledge, and give students a greater sense of confidence towards expressing their views. As such, it may be safe to say that collaborating on curriculum design helps students develop a stance in their field. But, are universities willing to commit to including students in a process long-thought to be faculty exclusive?

Including Active Student Participation in Curriculum Design

Bryn Mawr and Haverford College in Pennsylvania were the first to pilot the collaborative curriculum practice on a campus-wide scale in 2007. Student consultants audit undergraduate lectures across a variety of disciplines and schedule weekly meetings with instructors to discuss what is effective and what needs improvement in terms of course delivery. The program does not call into question instructor authority or expertise, but rather offers different insights and perspectives of what students find distracting or engaging in the classroom.

Interestingly, both instructors and students were initially apprehensive when these programs were implemented at their institutions. At the core of this apprehension may be the notion that many students are intimidated by the perceived hierarchical relationship with instructors, and as a result, feel their suggestions may be inadequate or fall on deaf ears. However, as the program developed, these concerns have faded. Though the students’ new, undeveloped disciplinary perspectives do not lend legitimacy, especially when considering the field stature of the instructors, students’ outside perspectives often show key gaps and assumptions, and are often welcomed by professors. Once students realize that the relationship is designed to be a partnership, they become more comfortable in actively engaging in the process.

Some dissenting opinions have continued; one of the most vocal arguments from instructors is that they feel it is the students’ responsibility to become engaged with the course content; not their responsibility to redesign delivery to be more engaging. Many instructors have been designing and delivering curriculums in their own manner for years and have little inclination to change a system that works for them.

But collaborative curriculum design programs ask whether giving students a greater voice allows them to create a more intimate knowledge of the course structure and expectations, which is especially relevant given that every generation of students is different. Moreover, student insights are often tied to their experience. One professor who embraces this initiative notes that while he is an expert in an academic subject, it has been decades since he was an undergraduate, so he is not an expert on the contemporary student experience.

Important here is a note from a number of students who explain that the experience makes them more employable due to the organizational skills they gain in program development and working with multidisciplinary teams. Thus, the student perspective of collaborative curriculum design is a way to enhance education with their interests in mind.

Lessons from the Experiments and Future Considerations

While relatively few institutions have implemented the curriculum collaboration program, the results from those that have are promising. Students given a voice in curriculum development are more engaged in the classroom and perform better academically because they have a more intimate knowledge of the course structure and expectations.

In today’s world, where there is a mixture of in-person classes and online classes, educators may be willing to flex the format of traditional course design in interesting new ways. Given the breadth of new research and the success displayed in case studies, collaborative design could be more widely employed as a method of supporting teaching and learning. Students deserve to have their voice heard and should be offered the chance to take charge of their own learning.

Interested in more developments on enhancing the learning process? Read more here:

• Active Learning in the Classroom
• How to Strengthen the Teacher-Student Relationship in Remote Education
• Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Connecting AI and Education

What are High-Stakes Assessments for? What do they do?

The role of high-stakes examinations is ostensibly to provide each student the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery of a subject in a controlled environment. Two students enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce program at separate universities could graduate with the same grade-point average, but in reality possess different levels of knowledge and competency. High-stakes examinations are typically designed based on cognition, using multiple choice questions, and have become almost an industry in themselves, with study-guides, practice tests, and prep courses. A standardized test used for admission into graduate business programs like GRE or GMAT ensures that all students possess the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed. But these are only the intended outcomes.

In general many scholars encourage an awareness to the unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing. These reach far beyond just entrance exams, and are prevalent in all educational environments where high-stakes testing is in motion. When these outcomes were catalogued and analyzed by Brett D. Jones in the Journal of Applied School Psychology, he found that most unintended outcomes were negative. These are wide-ranging, from motivation to dropout rates, but perhaps the most significant is stress. In truth, high-stakes testing is anxiety-inducing not only for the student, but for the teacher, as they are responsible for ensuring the students learn enough to succeed.

On admissions testing in higher education, research since the 1980s has noted the significance of student anxiety. In a study on the GRE, researcher Donald Powers noted an array of stressors related to the test, including “the pressures of a timed test and the attitudes of test administrators” which led him to the conclusion that “test anxiety is both prevalent enough and severe enough among GRE test takers to warrant the continuing attention of the GRE Program”. As such, the question can be asked: Are the consequences of the unintended outcomes outweighing the benefits of the intended outcomes?

Validity and Barriers in High-Stakes Testing

Some have argued that the cognitive effectiveness of certain standardized admission tests do accurately capture the aptitude of a student for a certain program. These assertions sometimes rest on understanding the level of success a student achieves once they are in the program. However, some have questioned whether common student-success metrics accurately measure whether a student is succeeding in an academic program. Steven Stemler, for instance, contests the notion of first-year grade point average (FYGPA) as an indicator of success.

FYGPA is the most common metric for looking at the performance of new students, but it may not work as criteria, especially since “at some level, FYGPA serves as a proxy for the development of domain-specific knowledge; however, the theoretical rationale for this argument is weaker for FYGPA than for GPA within major, as students are typically enrolled in courses from vastly different content domains during their 1st year”. Essentially, FYGPA is the wrong means for the evaluation of student progress. So, how can institutions measure whether high-stakes assessments are effective?

For Stemler, this all leads into a bigger discussion of the mission of universities, and if these tests are actually reflective of those ideals. If a “dual-focus on the development of both domain-specific knowledge and more domain-general cognitive skills” is at the forefront, effective assessment design of admissions exams may be possible, but once students are admitted, there is no way to measure success.

So what can educators do with all of this? One key takeaway from discussions on standardized testing is simply thinking through the nature of assessment creation in the classroom. Considering the ways in which standardized tests operate, alongside their benefits and weaknesses, can help educators frame a holistic approach to assessments. For higher education administrators and admissions professionals, this may mean rethinking the use of high-stakes testing or including other, more analysis-based indicators of potential academic success. For instructors, this may mean incorporating questions and grading techniques designed to assess student learning outcomes.

For those unfamiliar with common assessment creation methods, designing appropriate assessments may feel overwhelming. To get started, check out these additional resources on the nature of assessment creation:

• Micro-assessments
• Assessing assignments: Essays, papers, and other works
• What’s the Point of Assessment Anyway
• What is the Goal of Assessment
• Tried and True? The New Face of Assessment

Practical innovation

Kylie believes that, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a pivot in teaching style and platforms, technology innovation for virtual teaching was accelerated. Organic chemistry is a major prerequisite for many science programs, which is why many students feel anxious about the subject. This, combined with the need to motivate students in self-directed learning, informed Kylie and his colleagues’ decision to offer instructor-led virtual tutorials, rather than optional teaching assistant-led tutorials during the pandemic. These tutorials allowed for an opportunity for students to connect with their instructional team regularly throughout the term, As a result, students were able to build strong connections with the instructional team, which significantly improved tutorial attendance and led to an increase in student engagement in the course.

Inside the classroom, the shift to online instruction is supporting teaching and learning in surprising ways. While practical, instructor-led laboratory sessions are a key part of learning chemistry, the shift from in-person labs to online labs allowed instructors to create recordings of the experiments, which have the added benefit of allowing students to go back, pause, and rewind as needed. Problem-solving and critical thinking skills, Kylie told us, are the most important part of undergraduate education, and this new class format forced students to continue to be resourceful, use trial-and-error and make decisions without necessarily being given a recipe or having the instructor to answer their questions as they worked.

Ultimately, comparing face-to-face and online learning, Kylie’s team found students remained engaged using online tools. Additionally, the team was able to form individual connections with students that may not have been possible in a lecture hall. In the end, students were so appreciative of the care and consideration from their instructional team that they sent thank-you cards and videos when the class wrapped up.

As McMaster returns to in-person learning, the Chemistry department will continue to evaluate using online tools. Not only has the program innovated in interesting ways, but the team has adopted remote assessment methods that have improved their workflows drastically.

How to Use the Comment Library to Give Richer, Faster Assessment

The Chemistry department at McMaster began facilitating in-person exams, take-home assignments and lab reports via Crowdmark in the Fall of 2018. According to Kylie, using Crowdmark for the distribution and submission of assessments has provided a range of advantages for his team, but most importantly its use has improved the overall accuracy and consistency of graded assessments in their large organic chemistry courses. This has largely resulted from the use of the comment library, which allows the team to pre-set comments to use on large format assessments like exams. On smaller assessments, like lab reports, graders can choose to use the comment library and/or give individual feedback; an option that helps teach graders how to give individualized feedback that is useful for students as they learn.

If you have been using the comment library for a while, you may think you know all that it has to offer. Just in case you missed a detail or two, here is a recap of Crowdmark’s comment library features:

• Crowdmark’s comment library is fully exportable and importable to and from any assessment. That means you are able to download a CSV of comments from any assessment, and edit it with items like rubric requirements or pre-set feedback.
• Comments are fully markdown- and LaTeX-friendly. This feature supports equations and expressions, links to additional resources, images, gifs, or graphs.
• Instructors can attach points to comments. When comments are added on a page, the points total is calculated automatically based on the given feedback.
• Comments can be shared with the whole grading team or not. Preferences can be set based on individual requirements
• Comments can be edited in bulk. If desired, any update made to a comment can be applied to all instances of that comment across the assessment.

For more details, check out our Help Centre or reach out to Crowdmark support.

In recent years, there have been a growing number of discussions surrounding the value of university degrees—especially in a world where employers now place such a high emphasis on skills. Often, the argument against degrees is first evidenced at the K-12 levels with problems of disengaged students who lack early classroom success and suffer a self-fulfilling prophecy deterring them from pursuing certain majors in university and college. Students who encounter difficulty with science and math in K-12 often resign themselves to that fate rather than overcoming their difficulties; these students are less likely to enter STEM programs in higher education. In this arena, there might be a lingering conception that actual degrees and skills are in conflict.

However, there is a growing notion that not all learning habits and skills are borne out of traditional classroom approaches. Many institutions are seeking out educational solutions in both the education research and edtech sectors, now incorporating more skills-based learning into their curriculums. Profiling some of these advancements may lend credence to university adoption of approaches more suited to different learners.

Where have Skills Been?

To some extent, skills-based learning has always been prevalent in universities. It is useful to think about how skills are embedded into academic training, but may lose their visibility in their contextual or disciplinary origin.

To start, what are the skills often referred to in the same breath as the “employability” buzzword? According to a field survey article from David Billing in the academic journal Higher Education, “much has been written about the importance of the graduates from our higher education programmes having the abilities which employers are said to prize most, and these are so-called generic skills such as problem-solving, communication, team-work and critical thinking”. These are sometimes referred to as “21st century skills’’, and because of their importance, assessment and teaching of 21st century skills is widely incorporated into contemporary instructional approaches. However, Billing questions the degree to which skills are actually transferable, noting that cognitive psychology “suggests instead that automatic transfer to new contexts of these desirable higher abilities should not be assumed, and procedures for generalisation should be in-built”. Thus, we may need to rethink some of the ways we teach skills.

Change and Innovation in the Classroom

Billing notes that due to these notions, universities have been pivoting some programming more towards vocations, and structuring programs to have these components built in. A simple example of this is cooperative education (co-op) programs, which place students in a workplace and value this in the form of credits. Some universities emphasize the role of these programs in their degrees, such as the University of Waterloo, which is renowned for its co-op connections to high profile tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Cooperative education succeeds by emphasizing realationality between academia and real world problems, and aside from these programs, many instructors are applying creative teaching methods with the same aim. Such is the case with the University of Saskatchewan’s Sean Maw, who has been experimenting with the use of virtual reality (VR) in his engineering classes. VR offers a type of technological-experiential learning that can help students visualize problem-solving scenarios.

Higher education in general is showing observable shifts to non-traditional, applied programs and including offerings jointly awarded with colleges. The intent here is to take advantage of differing approaches, and find value in the immersion in both. Examples include partnerships between McMaster University and Mohawk college (Bachelor of Technology) Western University and Fanshawe College (Bachelor of Science, Nursing), York University and Seneca College (Bachelor of Arts, Journalism), and Carleton University and Algonquin College (Bachelor of Information Technology). Many of these programs even have cooperative learning components.

Valuing Degrees

While it could be said that degrees are secondary to skills, higher education certainly supports skill-building. Though always embedded into higher education, the emphasis on skills has become more pronounced through new program tweaks. This suggests that universities are reacting to the desires of employers, and thinking through ways to sharpen the general skills by way of a grounded and applied transferability

Read more about innovation in higher education:

• Feature: Sean Maw, University of Saskatchewan
• Change the Game: Innovative Teaching and Gaming
• Immersive Technology in Higher Education

A recent article from researchers Shihui Feng and Nancy Law from the University of Hong Kong found that in the academic literature on AIED, ITSs represent the most frequently appearing research cluster over the past 10 years. Beyond an increasing research presence, ITSs have become entryways for many students into the world of AI. Understanding ITSs, their various manifestations, and seeing a snapshot of their present visibility in education will help to show the state of AI in education and help educators begin thinking about incorporating technology in teaching and learning.

What are Intelligent Tutoring Systems?

ITSs all conform to the same basics: online based teaching that can generate feedback with no human involvement. A form of adaptive learning technology, the core idea behind ITSs is constant—to support learning— but, the design of these human-less, tailored instructional programs has been the focus of ongoing debates since the 1960s. As explained by Nkambou, Bourdeau and Mizoguchi, the architecture of ITSs consists of four components.

• The domain model functions as a knowledge database for how the system develops, administers, and evaluates questions.
• The student model is responsible for collecting data about the student and making determinations about their state of knowledge.
• The tutoring model ties the first two components together using the information collected to inform the learning process.
• The interface component hosts the communication, which acts like a bridge between the components and the student. While some ITSs may have additional complexities, this is the essence of how they operate.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems in Teaching and Learning

While the design remains a point of contention, many ITSs are in operation today. For example, AutoTutor, developed out of the University of Memphis, functions through a naturalistic dialogue with the student. The system is capable of generating complex problems and assists the student towards finding the solution through a back-and-forth type of communicative interface. The platform is typically used for math and science, but from the earliest stages, computer literacy was the primary focus.

The founders have published widely on the effectiveness of AutoTutor as a tool for learning and memorization. The key finding to come out of research on AutoTutor’s efficacy is the significance of language—by extension, the interface component—as the program thrives by creating a constructive discourse between the AI tutor and student. This technology supports teaching and learning by allowing students to practice and internalize foundational concepts once they have learned them in class.

Another interesting profile in this discussion can be found with Ametros Learning, a Canadian company that caters towards business education with AI-simulated negotiations. The system offers a scenario in which students then engage with various characters via email that facilitates a realistic problem-solving experience.

While more traditional ITSs are hinged on instruction and feedback—essentially replacing a human tutor with AI—the Ametros Learning platform differs as it creates an experiential learning opportunity not found in classrooms. More than simply human replacement, this type of AI application targets an entirely new educational approach. This represents a shift towards more creative applications of ITSs and is a manifestation of AI’s potential.

The Future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems

ITSs are a way to see AIED in practice as a form of innovative classroom technology with potential for academic assistance. ITSs can offer a practical solution to the various obstacles students may have accessing a human tutor (cost, location, time, etc.). In some ways, ITSs could be used to complement academic support programs premised on creating accommodations for students. Moreover, ITSs have proven effective in assisting learners with clear solution-driven subjects as well as providing students with genuinely unique learning experiences that transcend what is typically offered with traditional methods. ITSs will not replace teachers, but rather, exist as a digital tool for the classroom that complements them in a myriad of ways to enrich educational practices and excite learners.

Interested in more on technology in education? Enjoy these other posts:

• Immersive Technology in Higher Education
• Balancing Technology and Tradition in the Classroom
• The 3 Factors for Successful Edtech Integration

Completion of course readings is one of the basic building blocks for achieving student learning outcomes. Unfortunately, instructors often find that students have skimmed or skipped the texts rather than given them a comprehensive review. This behaviour results in a limited ability for students to engage in class and with the course topics overall–ultimately impeding education and success.

A number of factors may be contributing to this lack of reading, and as some experts suggest, unawareness of how to read for comprehension may be one of them. Accordingly, educators may benefit from integrating reading comprehension prompts into course design as a way to increase student engagement.

Why Assigned Readings go Unread: An Instructor’s Perspective

All instructors have to deal with changing expectations. I remember being surprised by the page-long list of books I was given each week at Cambridge as “background reading”; apparently most students do not bother to read them (I certainly only read my tutors’ assigned readings when I was studying for exams).

As an instructor, I have experimented with “essential blocks”: 2-5 pages of required reading for times when students were just too squeezed with other assignments to be fully prepared for class. To my dismay, some students did not even complete that (although, to their credit, many students did far more).

Indeed, students’ unwillingness or even inability to do their assigned readings is well documented. Sheila Valencia suggests that the problem lies not in students’ work habits, other responsibilities (such as work or family), or even boredom with required material. As Valencia argues, the focus on speed over content leads to students skimming over bold words on the page and considering the task done.

This habit does not allow them to comprehend or remember what they have read. Students who learn that it is more important to finish a book than to understand it will continue these habits in their subsequent education, but not necessarily connect their reading habits to declining academic performance at the postsecondary level.

When I design courses, the readings complement what I say in lecture. They do not reiterate it. Students who only do the readings or listen to the lecture will take in 50% of class material (which is equally tested on exams). This is a low starting point, but an essential one to break the habit of low-comprehensive reading.

Helping Students Read More Effectively

A reading specialist may be a necessary support for struggling readers, depending on a student’s need. However, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Learning Center gives some active reading strategies that can assist students of all levels. The centre recommends using the skimming technique described above as a pre-reading exercise for getting a sense of important concepts. Students should use this technique to note important concepts for deeper reading later. Relatedly, students should set a purpose for reading and read end-of-chapter materials, such as discussion questions, before reading the main content.

Instructors can facilitate these behaviours by including signposts of the most important aspects of the reading(s). Signposts can take the form of directions (“Pay attention to the analysis of the Battle of Waterloo”), specific mandates (“Be ready to discuss what the formula on page 50 represents.”), or more open-ended prompts (“As you’re reading, think about a practical application of this principle.”).

The Learning Center also recommends that students be familiar with their digital reading environments. Tool proficiency allows students to take advantage of special features like bookmarking, annotation, and highlighting tools.

The Learning Center suggests that students follow these pre-reading techniques with deep reading and post-reading exercises.These comprehension tactics include reading small sections at a time, to allow time for knowledge absorption. To facilitate this behaviour, instructors can adopt modular teaching by assigning manageable reading sections in chunks. This approach differs slightly from “essential blocks” in that the student is still expected to do all the readings for the class; they are just given smaller amounts to read at a time.

Other high-comprehension techniques that instructors can facilitate include connecting reading material to real life and making note of how readings connect to course lectures and discussions. To assist in making these connections, consider giving micro-assessments that prompt students to discuss real-life examples of concepts or reflect on lecture concepts that touch on the reading material.

Assessment of this additional work should, of course, be done through a method of your choice, with improvement noted. With positive reinforcement, students may take these active reading techniques into and beyond the classroom.

For more information on instructional design to encourage comprehension, read:

• Comprehension through ConcepTests
• Are your students reading? Use multiple choice
• 5 Ways to Prevent Cheating in Online Assessment

Completion of course readings is one of the basic building blocks for achieving student learning outcomes. Unfortunately, instructors often find that students have skimmed or skipped the texts rather than given them a comprehensive review. This behaviour results in a limited ability for students to engage in class and with the course topics overall–ultimately impeding education and success.

A number of factors may be contributing to this lack of reading, and as some experts suggest, unawareness of how to read for comprehension may be one of them. Accordingly, educators may benefit from integrating reading comprehension prompts into course design as a way to increase student engagement.

Why Assigned Readings go Unread: An Instructor’s Perspective

All instructors have to deal with changing expectations. I remember being surprised by the page-long list of books I was given each week at Cambridge as “background reading”; apparently most students do not bother to read them (I certainly only read my tutors’ assigned readings when I was studying for exams).

As an instructor, I have experimented with “essential blocks”: 2-5 pages of required reading for times when students were just too squeezed with other assignments to be fully prepared for class. To my dismay, some students did not even complete that (although, to their credit, many students did far more).

Indeed, students’ unwillingness or even inability to do their assigned readings is well documented. Sheila Valencia suggests that the problem lies not in students’ work habits, other responsibilities (such as work or family), or even boredom with required material. As Valencia argues, the focus on speed over content leads to students skimming over bold words on the page and considering the task done.

This habit does not allow them to comprehend or remember what they have read. Students who learn that it is more important to finish a book than to understand it will continue these habits in their subsequent education, but not necessarily connect their reading habits to declining academic performance at the postsecondary level.

When I design courses, the readings complement what I say in lecture. They do not reiterate it. Students who only do the readings or listen to the lecture will take in 50% of class material (which is equally tested on exams). This is a low starting point, but an essential one to break the habit of low-comprehensive reading.

Helping Students Read More Effectively

A reading specialist may be a necessary support for struggling readers, depending on a student’s need. However, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Learning Center gives some active reading strategies that can assist students of all levels. The centre recommends using the skimming technique described above as a pre-reading exercise for getting a sense of important concepts. Students should use this technique to note important concepts for deeper reading later. Relatedly, students should set a purpose for reading and read end-of-chapter materials, such as discussion questions, before reading the main content.

Instructors can facilitate these behaviours by including signposts of the most important aspects of the reading(s). Signposts can take the form of directions (“Pay attention to the analysis of the Battle of Waterloo”), specific mandates (“Be ready to discuss what the formula on page 50 represents.”), or more open-ended prompts (“As you’re reading, think about a practical application of this principle.”).

The Learning Center also recommends that students be familiar with their digital reading environments. Tool proficiency allows students to take advantage of special features like bookmarking, annotation, and highlighting tools.

The Learning Center suggests that students follow these pre-reading techniques with deep reading and post-reading exercises.These comprehension tactics include reading small sections at a time, to allow time for knowledge absorption. To facilitate this behaviour, instructors can adopt modular teaching by assigning manageable reading sections in chunks. This approach differs slightly from “essential blocks” in that the student is still expected to do all the readings for the class; they are just given smaller amounts to read at a time.

Other high-comprehension techniques that instructors can facilitate include connecting reading material to real life and making note of how readings connect to course lectures and discussions. To assist in making these connections, consider giving micro-assessments that prompt students to discuss real-life examples of concepts or reflect on lecture concepts that touch on the reading material.

Assessment of this additional work should, of course, be done through a method of your choice, with improvement noted. With positive reinforcement, students may take these active reading techniques into and beyond the classroom.

For more information on instructional design to encourage comprehension, read:

• Comprehension through ConcepTests
• Are your students reading? Use multiple choice
• 5 Ways to Prevent Cheating in Online Assessment

Instructors and students build effective classrooms on a foundation of two-way communication. Teachers should work to facilitate an environment where students feel comfortable enough to freely discuss theories and concepts. This in turn will improve comprehension and retention morale.

However, engaging students in the virtual classroom is not free from challenges, as students may regard discussion as one-way communication with the instructor as their classmates listen on or spiral into unrelated topics with their peers.

Tips for Facilitation

In a recent column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Gooblar outlines the following activities for shaping meaningful discussions that benefit everyone in the classroom:

1. Ask follow-up questions Students will often provide a brief response to a question posed by an instructor without demonstrating the thought process leading them to that response. Not explaining their thought process may further confuse students approaching the question in another way or who arrived at a different conclusion. Asking students, “What do you mean by that?” or “Do you think this is true in all cases” encourages them to reflect upon their thought processes and helps overall student comprehension by exposing them to different perspectives. It will also give the student a greater opportunity to show deep engagement with the course material.
2. Use visual representation Write down the basics of each student’s response on a whiteboard during a class discussion. This visual representation of the class discussion will help bolster and focus discussion while increasing student retention. Not only are many people visual learners, but by jotting down key beats from the discussion, the students will also know what is important to keep in mind and write in their own notes.
3. Distance yourself from the discussion Despite using the above activities, students may continue engaging with the instructor rather than each other. As an instructor, the most effective way to encourage students to discuss is to remove yourself from the narrative. If you are guiding the discussion, you can refer students to reply directly to the peer who spoke last. If you want students to discuss openly on their own, reading notes or grading student papers during discussion time will deter students from talking directly to you and encourage them to discuss with their peers. Consider incorporating the follow-up question technique with this one, as students with similar or differing ideas could be encouraged to expand upon their thoughts to enrich the discussion.

Taking Discussions Online

Given the continued persistence of remote instruction for many educators, it might be useful to consider how Gooblar’s points may be adapted to online classes. While his first point translates seamlessly to a video conferencing learning scenario, the second two may benefit from some helpful knowledge of your online course platform’s functionality.

On the matter of visual representation, many platforms have a shareable whiteboard feature, which allows instructors to highlight key points of discussion for students. This will frame ideas in a similar way to Goodblar’s premise, and students may even wish to simply screenshot the frames for future reference.

Distancing yourself from the discussion may seem strange or impossible in an online classroom, but through a targeted use of breakout rooms, it is certainly achievable. Placing students into small groups in breakout rooms will allow them to have a more manageable discussion. Floating around the rooms will ensure students are remaining focused and will give you the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to stimulate conversation.

Concluding Thoughts

Students learn from their instructors, but in a democratic classroom, they should also learn from their peers. Using effective discussion strategies will help focus class dialogue and foster a more effective learning environment where students can share, challenge, and learn from each other’s ideas. While these methods may seem more challenging online, having a familiarity with some of your online class platform features will help foster a similar environment and keep students engaged.

For more information on engaging students in the classroom, read:

• The “Distance” in Learning: Are We Seeing a Rise in Disengaged Students?
• Accountable Group Work
• Engagement Strategies for the New Semester

Janelle began using Crowdmark to remotely administer exams in 2020, and has continued to evolve her teaching and assessment methods as her experience with hybrid learning has stretched beyond Year One. We had the chance to catch up with Janelle earlier this Summer and learn how she has managed to keep her students engaged and excelling.

Creative Teaching Methods and Evidence-Driven Instruction

Drawn to economics because of econometrics, which she defines as the application of statistics to economics, Janelle focuses on the learning and application of skills. While teaching a qualitative class means that some memorization and retention is necessary, Janelle likes to vary content from class to class using resources like case studies and videos to deliver learning opportunities. She also takes advantage of students working from their home computers, which allows them to run code using software that would not necessarily be available in class.

Ever the evidence-driven instructor, Janelle employs apps like Slido (a polling app available on students’ smartphones) and uses the incoming student data to create visualizations such as word clouds that show how the class answered and spark debate. She also uses Crowdmark to anonymously share exemplary submissions by showing students work that’s been uploaded in the grading interface, giving the class an opportunity to analyze and discuss contrasting solutions. Teaching remotely using Zoom, Janelle has found that students are less afraid to speak up than they would be in person, and more able to engage in this type of community learning.

Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning

Discussing why students answered the way they did helps Janelle’s class to build the type of analytical skills they need to be successful. “Communicating results is important with empirical analysis,” Janelle told us, “or else it’s not possible to do what needs to be done”. She also consistently uses these student responses and feedback to guide her own innovative practices in teaching; evaluating if students are answering the way she predicted or expected enables her to tweak her delivery to suit their needs.

When it comes to assessment and grading, Janelle spends significant time setting her students and her graders up for success. She shows her students her own workstation as an example of how to set up for remote test-taking, and gives them multiple low stakes participation assignments that require signing in and submitting to Crowdmark before testing in the same environment. Janelle also views and reviews feedback in real time with her team to make sure their grading is thoughtful and applicable. To this end, the Crowdmark comment library has proved invaluable; the filters and analytics on where and how often comments have been used help Janelle to easily quality-check and evaluate graders’ effectiveness.

How Can You Use Crowdmark for Grading with Effective Feedback?

There is many years’ worth of research showing that students who receive detailed and thoughtful commentary on their work not only perform better on the next assessment, but actually retain more information. Crowdmark was built to empower instructors to spend less time flipping through papers so that they can spend more time evaluating students’ learning.

As you are learning more about using Crowdmark for greater feedback, explore how the Crowdmark comment library not only allows comments to be reused within an assessment, but is exportable and importable into any subsequent assessment. That means when lead instructors see feedback that will be beneficial to future students, they can save it to be used again. If a comment is not the type of feedback the instructor wants to share, the comment library’s bulk editing functionality enables the instructor to remove or edit the comment across every instance where it was used—without having to search through individual student booklets.

Comments are also fully markdown and LaTeX friendly, and graders can place images, equations or even links to additional resources right on a student’s assessment.

Perhaps most importantly, with Crowdmark, student assessments can be returned easily and in a timely manner, with one click. Students are able to access their work, including the feedback and annotations, at any time by logging in to their Crowdmark account.

The student progress report also links students to their highest- and lowest-scoring questions, which makes it easy for them to access the formative feedback they need to focus their studies. When an instructor meets with a student to discuss work, it is easily accessible and highly visible, even in a remote setting.

As part of the Crowdmark community, you have access to the above, as well as a wealth of other help documents, to keep you going throughout your educational journey. If you cannot find the answers you need, our Customer Success team is happy to help.

Learn more about enhancing student learning through effective formative feedback with some of our other posts, including:

• Tight Feedback Loop: The Key to Distance Learning That Works
• How to Provide Better, Formative Feedback on Essays
• Motivate Students with Data and Feedback

Routine and unexpected circumstances impact the ability of both students and instructors to attend scheduled on-campus classes. To provide everyone an equal opportunity to study in a class, several schools, including Central Georgia Technical College (CGTC) and the University of St. Thomas have begun exploring blendflex (flexible blended) and hyflex (flexible hybrid) learning models.

These two learning models are not as prevalent as face-to-face and digital learning. However, their growing popularity is not surprising considering their innovative and agile nature. As new developments in successfully delivering these models emerge, more institutions are likely to explore using them.

What are Blendflex and Hyflex

Flexibility is at the core of these two types of curriculum innovation models. Blendflex and hyflex courses follow a single syllabus with regularly scheduled lectures, assignments, and assessments; however, students may attend each lecture either in-person, through video-conferencing, or by watching recorded lectures. The same flexibility extends to instructors, who can attend virtually or in person.

With hyflex, students are able to move back and forth between these three options at any time throughout the class. This model differs slightly from blendflex in that, with blendflex, students are often assigned to attend specific synchronous and asynchronous classes.

In a guide to getting started with hyflex, Columbia University highlights four core values that inform hyflex courses:

• Learner Choice The course offers meaningful participation modes that students can select to align with their preference for engagement.
• Equivalency Student learning outcomes are equivalent in each mode, and students can reflect, contribute ideas, and interact with peers in every mode.
• Reusability All class materials are captured and shared online for all students to access and interact with.
• Accessibility Students are able to access technology and skills to be successful in the course.

Benefits of Blendflex/Hyflex

Instructors find the hyflex model more efficient than teaching multiple versions of the same course; instructors are, for instance, able to teach one class of 120 students rather than three classes of 40. If something like a personal matter occurs, the flexibility also allows instructors to keep their courses on schedule by temporarily stopping in-class lectures while maintaining the online format.

As with remote learning, hyflex and blendflex offer a type of accessibility that in-person classes do not. International students and those who are unable to attend in-person classes for other reasons can access these classes online and asynchronously. Similarly, this type of class supports work-life balance for non-traditional students, who may also be interested in attending the occasional in-person class.

When introduced at CGTC, the model was positively received by students. Over 95% of students liked the flexibility of the model. Student performance and learning outcomes also improved. Students participating in these models had higher mean GPAs between 2014-17 than students in traditional courses.

Navigating Common Challenges

Though there are significant benefits to blendflex and hyflex, when done well, there are also some challenges. If you are interested in implementing this type of course design, you will want to plan for combating these challenges.

Be Prepared for Technology Issues

In an in-person model, a technological issue is cause for annoyance, but teaching and learning may not be strongly impacted in these situations. Conversely, hyflex and blendflex courses are heavily dependent on technology. In a hyflex classroom, a failure of technology can result in an inability to teach online/asynchronous students, or the instructor may be forced to discontinue the class.

When using technology in the classroom, familiarize yourself with each component before the course begins to help lay the foundation for success. Prepare for technology failure by acquainting yourself with your technical support resources. Always have a backup plan in case technical difficulties persist.

Increase Your Comfort with Multi-Media Teaching Styles

Teaching in different formats simultaneously can be daunting. While many instructors have become familiar with remote teaching, teaching virtually and in person at the same time can feel overwhelming at first. Discomfort can be especially intense because all blendflex and hyflex sessions are recorded for asynchronous audiences. Coordination and planning will increase your comfort when teaching within these types of curriculum innovation models.

Coordination with TAs may mean assigning individuals to monitor online chat or video participation throughout each class session. Assigning one individual to this task ensures that remote and asynchronous participants can hear and see all parts of instruction.

It will also be helpful to create class session plans that you share with your teaching collaborators. Include details on set-up, interactions with students, and how you plan to incorporate all classe modes. Preparation will help you avoid becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of hyflex courses.

Empower Students to Take Control of Their Own Learning

With hyflex and blendflex, the onus of learning is on the student. Self-motivation and maturity are required to consistently attend classes, stay engaged, and navigate personal technology issues. If students do not have the appropriate mindset, the learning benefits can be lost.

While this is a challenge that the student is ultimately responsible for, you can help students acclimate by providing structure to their learning experience. Share expectations and norms of the classroom, and employ techniques for engaging students in the virtual classroom. Be sure to involve online students in discussion and promote student interaction to increase student motivation.

Final Thoughts

It is an exciting time for innovation in the classroom. Though blendflex and hyflex are not new models, they have received newfound interest in the new age of digital learning. The flexibility of this model, especially in light of higher education’s recent need to evolve teaching methods, is appealing to both instructors and students.

While some challenges prevail, there are ways to mitigate them. As these models become more widely adopted, new ways of successfully teaching within them will become commonplace.

As you continue to explore ways of teaching successfully in non-traditional classrooms, expand your knowledge base with our other articles, including:

• Re-Adjusting Flipped Learning
• 3 Myths of Remote Learning Debunked
• How to Strengthen the Teacher-Student Relationship in Remote Education

Additionally, Sean is a sports scientist and a Crowdmark enthusiast. Passionate about using engineering and science to improve winter sports, Sean is known for his speedskating research and his innovative crash pad system for skating.

Crowdmark inquired about Sean’s many achievements as well as his innovative teaching and learning methods. He was happy to share some insights and research.

Emerging Technologies and Competency-Based Assessment in Education

In 2020, Sean was recognized by the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) for his noteworthy service to engineering education. “He is deeply thoughtful about engineering education and (has) demonstrated his interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning,” stated Andy Fisher, associate professor of engineering at Memorial University and Maw’s nominator. “He has made, and continues to make, extraordinary contributions to the CEEA and to engineering education more broadly.”

In service to engineering education, Sean looks for new ways to help students learn and apply their understanding. Inspired by students’ excitement about what they are studying, Sean has experimented with virtual reality to connect the classroom to real-world engineering. One such experiment resulted in Sean leading the team that developed Truss VR, software that helps engineering students understand how trusses work.

Another example of Sean’s innovative leadership in education is his work with competency-based assessment. Thanks to Sean and his team, Fall 2021 marks the inaugural term for USask’s re-envisioned first-year engineering program. The re-envisioned program focuses on supporting student success and mental/physical health. The new design reduces the number of disengaged students while better preparing them for upper level courses and beyond.

To build the foundation for success in the program, students are taught basic skills in the summer preceding their first term at USask. The information learned during this time fills in the gaps between students’ high school education and their first year of education in the engineering program. As students progress through the program, they are taught a broad range of competencies to ensure greater employability.

Curriculum design was a strong consideration when developing the competency-based aspect of this program. The course sequence presents material that is interconnected, so knowledge gained in one course is immediately applicable in another. Additionally, instructors frequently assess student progress throughout each course, so students have multiple opportunities to receive feedback and improve.

To enable an even more cohesive experience, assessments are given on a balanced timetable, so students are neither overburdened nor idle in any given week. Balanced time usage is further supported by consistent schedules, which include a common lunch hour that can be used for extra-curricular activities, social gatherings, or personal time.

The entire program is organized as puzzle pieces that fit together as academic careers transition into professional ones.

Using Crowdmark to Support Your Competency-Based Courses

USask’s competency-based engineering program incorporates basic-skills education and frequent feedback. If you are interested in implementing this type of competency-based assessment in your courses, there are some key Crowdmark features that we recommend you (re)familiarize yourself with.

Sharing Frequent, Valuable Feedback

Sharing valuable feedback can take time, but this is no reason to shy away from competency-based assessment. It is possible to give rich feedback to students quickly. As Sean points out, Crowdmark allows instructors to provide “better feedback to students and is faster.”

Additionally, Crowdmark gives instructors the freedom to individualize feedback for unique situations, which is crucial in an innovative learning environment.

If you are a less experienced Crowdmark user, take a moment to refresh your knowledge on the use of comment libraries and keyboard shortcuts to reduce time spent grading. Expand your knowledge with an in-depth read on how Crowdmark allows you to share richer feedback in assessments via:

• Diagrams
• Emojis
• Mathematical expressions
• Chemical expressions
• Links to online resources

This is just the beginning of the ways in which Crowdmark supports competency-based assessment and beyond.

Multiple Choice Question Analysis and Diagnosis

The most advanced of the features that will help you get started with competency-based assessment is Crowdmark’s exceptional multiple choice analytics. Crowdmark’s diagnostic capabilities help instructors understand how effective their exams and assignments are at assessing knowledge gaps.

The Crowdmark platform diagnoses three critical facets of assessments:

• Difficulty – whether questions are the proper difficulty level
• Discrimination – whether correct responses to questions are accurately identifying high-performers
• Distractors – whether incorrect answer choices are appropriately isolating students who may have a weaker grasp on important information, versus those who genuinely understand concepts

Insights gained from Crowdmark’s diagnoses help instructors adapt tests and homework to authentically assess student progress. As Sean observed, when asked about Crowdmark, “It results in more consistent grading and gives more analytics on your grading.”

Getting Help throughout Your Innovative Teaching Journey

Sean has been using Crowdmark for two years for both in person and remote learning. As a dedicated user, he said “Crowdmark is clearly superior to hand marking of papers. Once you’ve tried Crowdmark, you won’t want to go back.”

If in doubt, our Customer Success team can troubleshoot issues, facilitate training, or process feature requests.

We are here to help, and we look forward to seeing and hearing what innovative pedagogical practices you develop with Crowdmark at your side.

In fact, a 2019 study found that 56% of online college students use a smartphone or tablet to complete course-related activities. Among the most likely to use or want to use mobile technology in education are either graduate students or younger students who have grown up using digital devices in every aspect of life.

As instructors are thinking about digital innovation in education, it will become increasingly important to create a mobile-friendly learning experience for online students.

Why Students Prefer Mobile

For educators accustomed to more traditional classrooms, it may be difficult to imagine why students would prefer mobile learning. For many students, a key reason is convenience. Mobile devices can be used in situations where laptops and desktop computers cannot.

The need for convenience is especially relevant for graduate students who are typically balancing work and personal responsibilities alongside coursework. These students require the flexibility of completing tasks on a mobile device while dividing their attention between work and/or family needs.

Students are especially likely to use mobile devices for quick tasks such as:

• Checking grades
• Verifying assignment due dates
• Reviewing course schedules
• Communicating with professors and students

Though these are the most common uses overall, they may not be the most common for your students. Survey your students to understand what devices they are using and how they are using them. The information they provide can help you develop your mobile-friendly online courses.

If your students only use mobile devices for the above tasks, you have a great foundation for a mobile-friendly online experience. Crowdmark makes it easy for students to check grades and assignment due dates. Also, most LMSs allow students to review course schedules and communicate with the class.

Creating a Mobile-Friendly Online Course

Once the foundation is established, you will be able to focus on creating a mobile-friendly course. Wiley and eLearning Industry have some recommendations for adapting online classrooms for mobile learning.

Simplifying the User Experience

When a course is not designed with mobile users in mind, students can have difficulty using mobile devices for online learning.

Smaller screens and limited typing options mean that mobile students may struggle to navigate online classes. Whitespace and easy touch-navigation are vital for successful mobile learning. As you design a course, think about how close together course material links and buttons are. Also, be sure to test the look and feel of the mobile experience before pushing it live.

Another consideration is file sizes. Mobile devices load slower and have limited space and data for downloads. Use small file sizes to reduce load times and data usage for mobile students. Communicating file types and sizes will further assist students in planning their mobile device usage.

Designing Courses for Optimal Mobile Learning

Course design is integral in optimizing an online course for mobile learning. Luckily, best practices for online courses align well with those for mobile-friendly courses because both aim to reduce the likelihood of cognitive overload.

For instance, modular class design chunks lessons to help students absorb information easier. Whether students are on a tablet or a desktop computer, they will benefit from having course material that is broken into logical groupings of equal sizes.

Similarly, focusing each module on a single student learning outcome will assist students in absorbing material even when they are using mobile devices in an environment with multiple distractions.

Using Tools that Complement Mobile Devices

Using mobile-compatible and complementary tools are a basic, but essential, contributor to successful mobile learning.

PDFs are commonly accessible on mobile devices, whereas file types like .docx and .pptx are not. Consider compatibility when selecting software to create course materials. Offer content on platforms such as Google or Vimeo, that are designed for sharing content. Mobile-optimized platforms enable students to access materials without having to switch devices.

Using Crowdmark to grade assessments will also help. Our grading and assessment platform allows students to easily complete and submit assessments, whether on a mobile device or a more traditional computer.

Conclusion

As educational technology for teaching and learning evolves and digital innovation in education progresses, educators must begin to consider the needs of students who prefer mobile learning.

Although building a mobile-first online course can be challenging, creating a mobile-friendly online course can bridge the gap for online learners who learn via mobile device.

For more online and mobile learning insights, explore these articles:

• Remote Learning for Students without Internet
• Successful Online Learning – Beyond 2021
• Finding Success with Online Grading and Teaching

The Rising Trend of Digital Gaming in Education

While gamification is not new, using video games as part of curriculum design is an emerging technology trend in education.

This trend is due in part to the effectiveness of active learning, which helps develop autonomy and participation in the learning process. In active learning, educators facilitate knowledge rather than transmit it. This approach encourages students to think creatively and analytically. Employing gaming in the classroom is one way to inject this pedagogical method into course design.

Because of the relative newness of gamified learning, much is still unknown about mechanisms and methods for success. Similarly, the educational context for how to gamify an activity is limited. However, there has been some research to provide insight on a way forward.

The Benefits of Digital Gaming in Education

The potential of digital gaming’s ability to improve student performance and learning outcomes is well documented. One team of educators at Florida State University studied how students interact with the physics video game Physics Playground. The educators performed “stealthy” assessments of students to show the link between playing digital games and the players’ creativity levels. Researchers found that better performers in the game were more creative and better able to create efficiencies in game play. A possible takeaway from this study is that improved game performance could result in increased creativity and planning skills.

Another study, out of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Georgia Gwinnett College in the United States analyzes the effectiveness of video games in self-directed learning. Through this analysis, the researchers develop and discuss a framework that helps educators determine which games will enhance and build skills for self-directed learning.

In another recent gaming study, two Canadian teams, one out of the University of British Columbia and one out of the University of Regina, made a compelling case for using open-world or sandbox games such as Minecraft to enhance 21st century competencies. In their study of 12 educators from a large urban school board, the researcher teams found that collaboration and communication skills were developed and enhanced through game play. The study notes that positive results depend on how teachers incorporate digital gaming with teaching methods and student learning outcomes. Common approaches in this study include scaffolded, open, and directed/guided play to support critical thinking, creativity, and innovation.

Educational Gaming and Accessibility

One major consideration when looking at digital gaming for remote education is the divide in accessibility of technology for some students. Many students lack fast internet connections, and remote learning for students without internet can be challenging. Accordingly, researchers have also begun looking at digital games that require little or no internet connection.

A study based out of Nepal found that games accessible via a mobile app are effective as learning tools even in a low-resource environment. In particular, the use of BaghLearn was studied to see the effectiveness of integrating gaming with learning algorithm concepts. Researchers concluded that using this mobile app for computer education in higher ed helps expand problem-solving skills.

Final Thoughts

Innovation in education is set to reach new levels in the next few decades. As education continues the shift towards using digital tools for the classroom, educators will shift too. Using digital games in the classroom is just the beginning.

Whether online or in-person, technology and innovation in the classroom will become increasingly important for educating the next generation of learners. Educators who lead this new technological wave are set to see significant improvements in student performance and learning outcomes.

Read more about change and innovation in education:

• How to Create Mobile-Friendly Online Instruction
• Feature: Xinli Wang, University of Manitoba
• Innovation in 21st Century Education
• Blendflex: A New Model of Learning

Our experiences with remote teaching and learning over the past year and a half have shown that not all students are on an even playing field when it comes to accessing technology. While online courses present a great opportunity for innovation in the classroom, this model has also proven to create a barrier for some students.

Many universities have found that students lack adequate connectivity for successful online learning. Michigan State University, for instance, found that only 47% of its rural students and 77% of its suburban students have high-speed internet access at home. Similarly, two-thirds of the world’s school-aged children lack internet connections in their homes.

These unconnected students are disadvantaged when faced with online-only education options, and they can quickly fall behind on assignments and learning.

For higher-ed and school-age educators looking to provide remote learning for students without internet, we share online teaching suggestions from eLearning Industry, Classcraft, and Children’s Health Council.

Encourage Students to Take Advantage of Available Resources

When looking to provide remote learning support to unconnected students, try to identify unconventional internet connections that may already be at students’ disposal. Recommend that students research options, or provide a list of options that you have found. Options may include:

• Individual hotspot loans Some community centres, libraries, and schools offer a limited amount of hotspots for loan to individuals with unreliable internet.
• Open hotspots near students’ homes Some communities and libraries offer free wi-fi as well as quiet spaces for online courses.
• Mobile phones While this option can be limiting due to the expense of data and the usability of some educational apps, students who have no access to wifi may be able to take advantage of mobile options.

Remember that not having internet access can be stigmatizing, so do not wait until students tell you that they have limited internet. Make a point to share resources with your entire class, so students have the ability to pursue options on their own without having to single themselves out.

Communicate Expectations Early and Clearly

When equalizing the experiences of connected and unconnected students, it may be prudent to rethink class communication frequency, style, and platforms.

Plan and Communicate Course Structure

For students who have intermittent internet access, checking for frequent or ad hoc class updates and postings may be difficult. Consider offering online education activities on a regular schedule that is communicated at the beginning of the term.

Structured courses with clear schedules allow students to plan for internet usage while meeting course expectations for participation and assessment. This structured approach is especially helpful for students who may be using community options or phones with limited data plans.

Give assessments with clear instructions and expectations

Complex assessments can often lead to students asking numerous questions about what the educator expects from the output they produce and submit.

When designing online assessments, consider the student perspective. Will students want to know how much detail is expected to be shown in their solution? Will students request information on how they should format and structure their answers? Use this perspective to simplify or clarify instructions for assessments before assigning them. This approach will reduce back-and-forth and ad hoc communications that may be more challenging for students without easy internet options.

Additionally, micro-assessments may provide an option for simplifying assessments. Micro-assessments are useful because they require less explanation and instruction than a complex exam. Also, students spend less time on each of these assignments, thereby reducing the time needed for individual blocks of internet usage. These smaller blocks of time relieve pressure on students who may have to schedule community internet usage or take advantage of expensive mobile data plans.

Reduce Dependence on Internet-First Communications

Remote learning is frequently approached with an internet-first mindset. Be aware, though, that there are other options that can supplement or supplant internet-only choices. Internet communication can be supplemented with telephone conversations, platforms like Google Drive that can be used offline, physical course packets given to students upon request, and video transcripts for video content.

If you are specifically considering the needs of students on mobile phones, think about using texting-based communications that do not require data. Similarly, use grading apps, like Crowdmark, that allows the option to connect briefly to the internet to upload paper-based assessments.

Final Thoughts

Lack of appropriate internet options in the home can severely impact a students’ ability to learn online. Because of the potential stigma, students may not disclose that they are experiencing this accessibility issue. Accordingly, it is important to consider this potential barrier to learning when designing student learning outcomes and authentic assessments.

Though the above suggestions are no replacement for getting high-speed internet in every home, exploring these practices can go a long way to increasing accessibility in the online classroom.

Looking for more online education ideas? Learn more about:

• Micro-assessments
• Successful Online Learning
• Teaching Practices for Your Virtual Classroom
• Does Online Learning Make the Group Assignment Unfair?

In the first three parts of this series on education beyond the pandemic, we look at:

1. Successful online learning
2. Successful in-person learning
3. Successful hybrid learning

In this final instalment of our four-part series on transitioning beyond the pandemic, our panelists discuss what they experienced in the pandemic and what it means for enhanced education during this upcoming fall and beyond.

Meet the panelists

• Host: James Colliander, founder of Crowdmark and professor of mathematics at University of British Columbia
• Panelist: Fiona Dunbar, mathematics lecturer at University of Waterloo
• Panelist: Jana Arcibald, instructor III in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Lethbridge
• Panelist: Sean Fitzpatrick, instructor III in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Lethbridge

Panel discussion highlights

James: Did you get to know your students differently during the pandemic, compared to previous academic years?
Jana: Only having the option for remote education led to us all seeing each other’s lives outside of the classroom. Families, children, and obstacles to learning were much more apparent. It became easier to understand why a student may not be able to complete an assignment the day it is assigned. Students were also able to see instructors as people outside of teacher-student interactions. Seeing each other from a personal perspective allowed us all to gain more empathy.

James: How do real-world examples and models align with student learning outcomes?
Fiona: The pandemic had an interesting effect on student performance and learning outcomes. Being able to use a shared experience to illuminate a concept was invaluable. Using real-world examples is a great learning tool to spur ​​creativity and innovation in teaching and learning.

James: How do you assess authentic learning and engagement?
Fiona: In a face-to-face class, I can see student eyes on me or hands raised. In the virtual classroom, I use technology tools for online teaching that allow students to interact with the asynchronous material I provide. These tools show analytics on how many times videos are viewed and how long videos are viewed. Students are also able to use emoticon reactions at any point to tell me what they think of the content at any time in the video.

It was difficult, in some ways, to move from paper-based assessment to assessing students online. I tried a lot of things including group assessment. However, I received some pushback from students who did not have time to meet as a group. Ultimately, I chose not to give a final exam, but I administered term tests. My assessment focus was on mini-assignments and lower weight assessments.

James: How do you differentiate between grades and authentic assessment in higher education?
Sean: I am no longer convinced that real-time proctoring is the gold standard. I recently had a smaller class of 50 students. I allowed students in this class the opportunity to revise and resubmit assessments. While some students just resubmitted their work, I found that many students used office hours to discuss assignments and concepts. During these office hours, we discussed feedback and students ultimately showed a greater understanding of concepts that had previously alluded them. The students who participated in this feedback cycle said that this approach helped them understand that tests can be a means of learning.

Concluding thoughts

When asked what our panelists would do with unlimited resources, they identified a desire to give more and better feedback to students. With an “army of TAs,” panelists would be able to give immediate and authentic feedback to every student. As they observed, both teaching and learning are enhanced by descriptive feedback.

Crowdmark helps. With Crowdmark, instructors are able to create comment libraries for TAs to easily provide rich feedback.

As educators continue to transition beyond the pandemic, Crowdmark is here to support assessment and grading needs so educators can focus on teaching.

Contact Crowdmark today to discuss your individual needs and learn how we can help you grade 3x faster than traditional workflows while leaving rich feedback for your students.

In 2020, a cross-sectional study was undertaken to explore how distance learning affected students’ academic work. The research found that 64.5% of students indicated that the transition to purely online classes increased their academic workload, while some positive outcomes included saving time and money (from not having to commute). Another survey conducted by Barnes & Noble College Insights (2020) revealed that 42% of students see self-paced learning as a potential benefit of online learning, while 64% expressed concern about maintaining motivation in a remote learning environment.

These findings are consistent with earlier research which identified some of the perceived advantages of online learning to “include saving [students] time, fitting in better with their schedules, and enabling students to take more courses.”

With this in mind, how do you plan to set up your courses? Will you be moving back to traditional in-person learning, staying online, or employing a hybrid model? To help you weigh your options, here are some strategies and recommendations from around the world of higher education:

• John Drea, Professor of Business at Illinois College discusses his experience implementing a Choice Model, which allows students to choose whether to attend classes in person or online.
• Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation provides essential recommendations for setting up a hybrid teaching environment and ensuring the delivery method enhances the learning experience.
• SpringerOpen’s collection of literature on The Future Learning Environment: Pedagogical and Technological Perspectives shares practices on creating brand new learning environments that emphasize learning effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and engagement.
• Gaidi Faraj, Dean of African Leadership University reflects on the pandemic’s positive impacts, stating “it is also a massive opportunity to break out of old habits and create new, impactful, relevant modes of learning that take advantage of technology and this moment”

For more on learning in a post-pandemic environment, check out Crowdmark’s four-part Beyond 2021 series

In the first two parts of this series on education beyond the pandemic, we look at the more traditional course formats: successful online learning and successful in-person learning. In this, part three, we focus on designing and teaching hybrid courses that facilitate student success.

Designing a hybrid course

As University of Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence observes, course design is important for successful hybrid teaching. When designing a course,

• Communicate the learning outcomes and course schedule. Align learning outcomes, activities, and assessments. Share these expectations with students, alongside a schedule. Time management is key to success, and students need to know expectations and deadlines.
• Create an experience where online and in-person activities complement each other. Try not to think of hybrid courses as online courses with an in-person element (or vice versa). Design activities that facilitate effective learning in the delivery system being used.
• Plan interactions, activities, and assessments that support desired outcomes. Vary interactions and activities, and provide prompt feedback to ensure students understand and retain concepts. Use technology, such as Crowdmark, to speed up the feedback process.

As with any course design, following the techniques above will take some planning. Though the approach of outlining outcomes and mapping class activities is a good practice for any course design, knowing what activities are uniquely effective online versus in person can be challenging. There are a few things that can be considered when planning for success.

Planning for delivery method: Online or in-class?

With hybrid classes, instructors can benefit from online class advantages and face-to-face class advantages. To do so, you will want to take note of some recommendations that Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation has for ensuring the delivery method enhances the learning experience.

Online Activities

Activities that are inherently digital or that do not require human interaction are often a good choice for online delivery. Watching videos, reading, and completing online quizzes are prime examples.

Individual activities can be enhanced with online forum discussions about topics of interest or key learnings from online materials. Additionally, collaborative learning activities, such as creating a glossary using a wiki, can pull students into online interaction. The option for asynchronous participation via forum or wiki allows students to take time for reflection before responding to prompts.

Online time does not need to stay in the virtual world, though. Take advantage of the interactive and conversational nature of the in-person experience by bringing online discussions into the classroom. Select one or two contentious or popular online topics for in-person discussion.

In-class activities

Hybrid courses allow instructors to spend less face-to-face course time lecturing and more time on active learning. Here are some examples of active learning:

• Writing brief responses to in-class discussion prompts
• Answering questions in teams or pairs
• Discussing concepts or notes with a classmate

In-class time is best devoted to problem-solving, group work, case studies, and presentations because these activities can be more engaging in person. Focus in-person classes on communication and learning through shared ideas and interaction.

Remember to close the loop on online and face-to-face learning. Create forums to continue in-person discussion, and share in-person presentation slides online. The more in-class and online activities complement each other, the better.

In part one of this series on teaching beyond the pandemic, we explore techniques from face-to-face teaching that can be applied to online teaching. In this, part two of our series, we discuss online teaching techniques that can enhance in-person learning.

Understanding as a foundation for in-person learning

In a recent blog post, Jennifer Berdahl discusses some lessons from teaching during the pandemic that speak to a new level of empathy, trust, respect, and admiration for students. Lessons in empathy include:

• Extending patience and flexibility
• Getting to know students and their names better
• Spending more time on listening and giving feedback to students
• Focusing on education and success

Similar to teaching and grading students online, in-person learning starts with understanding. Students have individual needs and concerns that may present barriers to learning. It is through understanding that educators can begin to break down learning barriers.

Student engagement and in-person learning

Though lack of student engagement is a common concern expressed about online courses, the challenge of lackluster student interaction can occur in person as well.

Jennifer suggests more and lower stakes assessment to ameliorate this issue. This type of micro-assessment can increase student engagement while offering an avenue for authentic assessment. Other micro-assessment types include assigning minute papers, application cards, and classroom polls to assess student progress.

As Jennifer also mentions, class discussion is imperative, whether done in small groups or as a class, it is important to encourage participation and engagement. One way to achieve this is to pre-record lectures for watching outside of face-to-face class time. Class time can then be reserved for conversation and application of concepts to real-life situations.

When lectures occur in class, the incorporation of question and answer periods into lecture time can assist with engagement. Instructors can choose when to answer questions and ensure that question and answer time integrates well with the flow of instruction. This is similar to a technique for online teaching wherein educators regularly check for questions in the chat feature of an online system.

Technology-enhanced classroom

Because they can be distracting and time-consuming to resolve, technical difficulties can present barriers to in-person teaching and learning. By prepping the in-class environment and computer and projector connections before class, instructors can limit technology issues during class time. Once basic technical issues have been minimized, instructors can focus on options for technology enhanced teaching and learning.

In the past year, some technology trends have emerged for enhanced teaching and learning. Instructors may want to explore these ideas:

• Intersperse video-assisted learning such as short animations, videos, or other audio-visual content to introduce variety and engaging information into traditional learning formats. Consider showing popular online videos about key concepts or TED Talks about relevant ideas.
• Use technology to help track student performance. With online platforms like Crowdmark, instructors can view analysis of student performance and quickly identify individual areas for improvement.
• Gamify the learning experience. Higher education instructors can take advantage of digital platforms designed to encourage engagement with activities such as quick-response quizzes. Digital platforms can also be effectively utilized to teach concepts like game theory.

One final technological feature discussed on Jennifer Berdahl’s blog is online chat. This function in online environments empowers students who may hesitate to speak or share their thoughts in a class. As educators move back into the classroom, incorporating technology that gives a voice to less outspoken or vocal students may serve to make the classroom more accessible for all students.

As technology becomes a greater focus in the traditional classroom, other trends are emerging. One trend that some experts are predicting will continue, is the option to take hybrid and non-traditional courses. In the next part of this series on transitioning education beyond the pandemic, we will explore considerations for teaching and learning in hybrid education.

Continue exploring education beyond the pandemic: read Successful Hybrid Learning, part three of this four-part Beyond the Pandemic series.

Whether in class or online, successful instructors are likely to apply the lessons from the past year to their future courses. While there are many takeaways from the past 12-14 months, some of the most notable experiences show how face-to-face and online teaching methods can complement each other.

In this blog series, we explore a few crossover techniques for enhanced learning. We share foundational online teaching techniques and look to the future of technology in higher education. We begin in this first post by discussing teaching techniques for remote learning.

Foundations for successful online learning

Technical issues and lack of engagement present challenges in an online educational environment. Strong attention to these two areas is key to developing online teaching skills.

Three major teaching practices for the virtual classroom set the foundation for a successful online learning experience:

• Plan – decide, in advance, how to facilitate discussion and how to handle technical difficulties.
• Facilitate – instruct in an environment you feel comfortable in, be cognizant of time, and engage students in participatory activities.
• Archive – share recorded class materials in a way that is easily accessible.

Remember that remote learning can require extra effort to encourage students to engage in conversation. Technology can help. In-app chats and discussion boards can be utilized to keep the conversation going, even when cameras and microphones are off.

In-person strategies for online learning

Though online courses offer a different experience than traditional face-to-face learning, there are strategies for in-person learning that can be applied to online engagement.

Effective in-person strategies that instructors can use online are outlined below:

• Discuss concepts – begin class with a student-led discussion of concepts previously covered in class.
• Poll students – pose a question via polling software to spur engagement with course material.
• Encourage reflection – conclude class with a brief reflection exercise conducted in small groups.

Make learning the focus of every online experience. Reinforce concepts and involve students in conversation with thought-provoking questions and group conversation.

Methods for efficient online grading

Even after you master the online teaching foundations, online assessments for students can be cumbersome. These strategies for online grading will help you increase your marking speed:

• Segment work – plan to mark only a small portion of assessments in one sitting. Do not expect to grade all assessments at once.
• Focus feedback – give feedback that focuses on the issue underlying a student’s academic challenge, and be succinct.
• Digitize grading – use grading tools, like Crowdmark, to create a bank of comments and annotations that can be reused.

When you develop and follow strategies for efficient marking, you can reduce the time you spend on grading and spend more time on facilitating learning. These methods for efficient grading can also be used in the in-person environment.

As with the use of efficient grading methods, other online teaching techniques can be transitioned into the in-person classroom. In the next part of this series on transitioning education beyond the pandemic, we will explore lessons that online teaching provides for the in-person classroom.

Continue exploring education beyond the pandemic: read Successful In-person Learning, part two of this four-part Beyond the Pandemic series.

A multi-institutional study of new graduate student instructors has found that novice teachers struggled more than most to teach online without prior experience building their instructional repertoire in-person. They also found that these teachers relied heavily on student feedback and resources found in online professional learning networks like Twitter, whereas they were challenged by a lack of support at the institutional level. These findings are supported by an international study of 1500 teachers from 118 countries, which also concluded that the most successful pandemic educators were those with previous experience specifically teaching online.

While the year has been a challenge, the necessity of distance education meant considerable advances were made in the field of education technology. One study estimates over 16 billion USD was invested in edtech in 2020 alone. This same study continues on to stress the importance of equity when relying on technology in the education space, as the gaps in access to technology appropriate for education across cultures, environments and income levels have become more apparent than ever.

One thing which can be universally acknowledged is that Summer 2021 is time for a break As we reflect on a year that’s been nothing short of extraordinary, we here at Crowdmark wish you all a safe, happy and restful Summer!

Trying to get students engaged is difficult enough in person, and when it’s online, it can be highly frustrating. Thankfully, there are a lot of tactics that can be used to re-engage students, even through distance learning.

A connection matters

Both teachers and students have experienced frustrations and life changes related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In-person, a teacher can try to take the time to connect with students directly. When our face to face interactions are removed, feeling students out is harder, but showing student empathy, even in an email or message, can go a long way.

Many students feel that school is an impersonal obligation—something to be suffered, rather than an opportunity. Reaching out even in small ways shows to them that they matter, and their education matters.

Encourage student collaboration and participation in every class

A great way to keep students engaged when they’re physically at school is to encourage collaboration. Many students learn best when sharing and discussing information. Some students can find engagement in their school by taking roles in student councils or other groups. When students are stuck at home, it seems impossible to keep this kind of investment.

However, there are ways that instructors can still encourage social activity and collaboration online. For example, instructors can allow students to lead the dialogue in video discussion groups, such as in Breakout Rooms in Zoom. Alternatively, instructors can ensure each class involves some form of participation-graded assignment, so students understand that missing one class can impact the chance for a quick grade. If students are part of the learning experience and not just “attendees,” they’ll be more likely to feel engaged.

Combat disengagement through self-guided learning

Sometimes disengagement comes because a student is simply not interested in a topic or subject.

Not every student is going to love every course, and school should be a place for them to discover their interests. They’ll tend towards boredom for things that don’t interest them and have little incentive to finish or submit homework as a result.

Try to leave the option open for the student to customize their curriculum and encourage self-guided learning. It’s a rare student that has no intellectual curiosity at all, and by broadening courses and assignments, you can help reach disengaged students.

Use grading tools

Despite how helpful more varied assignments can be in engaging students, many teachers are hesitant to try anything that complicates their day even further. When grading online is difficult and time-consuming, it’s very tempting to fall back on sheets of multiple-choice questions.

With Crowdmark’s digital grading software, teachers have the power to use a variety of projects and assignments for their students without fear that they won’t be able to grade them effectively through remote channels.

Digital grading software like Crowdmark also allows for much more detailed feedback to students, delivered directly to their email once an assignment is graded.

Learn more about our digital grading foftware

Are you a teacher struggling with disengaged students? Or is grading online material proving to be a hassle. Make sure to check out our digital grading software solutions—and feel free to contact us with any questions!

This article will explore the factors that affect students’ access to online learning and highlight some steps educators can take to bridge the gap.

The technology challenges to distance learning

Equal access to education has always been a challenge, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the last global pandemic in 1919, a group of high school students in Long Beach, California, used a small network of telephones to communicate with their teachers, a system that was later known as ‘teach-a-phone.’

More than 100 years later, some North American students’ only access point for distance learning is their smartphone, as they cannot afford another device or are waiting for one to arrive. Many school boards ordered devices like laptops and tablets early on in the pandemic. However, as of October 2020, it was estimated that there was still a shortfall of about 5 million devices in American schools.

The internet conundrum

In addition to devices, many students in North America, especially in rural areas, have struggled to access education through unreliable or unavailable Wi-Fi.

In response, many cities and schools have partnered with telecom companies and internet providers to set up mobile hotspots or make existing coverage inexpensive or free for students and their families. Students in Baltimore successfully lobbied Comcast to improve the network speed for low-income communities as they were struggling to complete their school work. However, consistent adequate internet access is only one facet of the technology gap students face.

Bridging the remote education technology gap

While schools and governments are working diligently to bridge the technology gap by purchasing new devices and making the internet more widely available, the reality is that there are still students working with minimal resources. As we’re trying to reach every student, what can we as educators do to make the wait less of a challenge?

In addition to these outreach measures, individual teachers and educators can take steps to ensure that their lessons are still accessible, even to students with limited access to technology. Here are some examples:

1. Record classes: If you use Zoom or another video conferencing platform for classes, it’s easy to make a recording. Press the ‘record’ button before your class starts, then post the recording online to ensure it’s accessible to students who may have to use a phone for a class or share their device with a sibling.
2. Encourage students to call in: Another benefit of many online conferencing platforms is that they give phone numbers so that attendees can call in if they don’t have internet or cell service.
   This makes it easier for students to use their smartphones or even a home phone, allowing them to scroll through reading material even as they listen to the class’s audio in session.
3. Keep resources available online: Many teachers use slides, images, videos, and other resources in their online classes and share their screens to ensure that students can watch it together.
   To help accommodate students using a phone for their distance learning, post all of these resources in one central place after the lesson is over. That way, if students had a hard time seeing the shared screen, they can pull up the resource on their own time.
4. Use electronic grading software for class assignments: Instead of requiring students to submit homework differently for each teacher, schools can help facilitate easier online learning by investing in electronic grading software. These tools give students one centralized place for homework submission that students can access on any device.

Support students with electronic grading software like Crowdmark

Electronic grading software like Crowdmark makes it easy for educators to support students who may have trouble accessing technology. The simple platform is mobile-friendly and designed to make it easy for students to complete and submit homework and other class assignments.

Want to try it in your classroom? Get in touch with us today to start your free trial.

We explore the benefits further and how an instructor can successfully use cooperative learning within the physical and remote classroom.

What is cooperative learning?

Cooperative learning refers to groups of students learning and working together on an assignment or project. During cooperative learning tasks, teachers structure collaborative interaction between students, which involves five essential elements.

1. Positive interdependence: This is achieved when students recognize that success or failure will be as a group.
2. Individual accountability: Students realize that they also need to perform their unique role while they are learning together.
3. Face-to-face interaction: Discuss how to solve problems, debate concepts, connect present learning and past knowledge, and promote each other’s understanding.
4. Small group social skills: Builds teamwork, leadership, decision-making, trust, communication and conflict management.
5. Group processing: Allows each group to assess their work and improve together over time.

As thousands of students continue to move their education to an online setting, some educators are left scrambling to figure out new ways to keep students engaged and adapt their in-person lessons into remote lessons.

In many cases, teachers have turned to more passive teaching methods, which runs the risk of lessons being dull. To get students to get more excited about learning, we’ll need to implement more engaging ways of learning online. Small group learning can be an easily adaptable technique that can be introduced to your digital classroom quickly.

Benefits of smaller group learning

Sometimes, working in large groups can hinder students’ ability to learn and participate. In a smaller group environment, students can feel more relaxed and focused on the tasks at hand.

Below are a few benefits of incorporating smaller group learning in the classroom, both online and in-person:

1. Allows teachers to work more closely with individual students, offering flexible learning

Teaching in smaller groups allows teachers to become more individualized with each student, provides the teacher with insight into each student’s strengths and weaknesses, and helps locate any learning gaps between students.

It also helps teachers reinforce skills and reteach essential concepts and learning objectives while at the same time checking for understanding. This can help set the pace for each lesson plan, such as passing quickly over concepts that students already clearly understand.

2. More opportunities to provide students with feedback

Because smaller group settings allow teachers to monitor students more closely, there is more opportunity to provide frequent and more specific feedback. Usually, feedback is only limited to graded assignments or report cards, but small group learning can give instant feedback on ideas and concepts.

3. Helps to build confidence through collaboration

Some individual students might not be comfortable participating in a large class due to shyness or a lack of self-esteem. On the other hand, in a smaller, more informal atmosphere, many of these same students start to feel comfortable enough to join in on the conversation. This helps them build confidence and increase their social skills.

How can instructors incorporate cooperative learning?

Whether it be on Zoom or in-person, there are many different ways teachers can start to incorporate cooperative learning and small group learning into their classrooms:

Collaborate online by screen sharing

Online meeting tools have a handy feature called “share screen,” which allows both you and your students to share your screen’s content so you can use visuals while you learn. Using this tool can facilitate small group learning sessions and help collaboration on group projects like presentations.

Use polling features

Polling is another way to help check students’ opinions that can help you get feedback in real-time, and is found built into many web meeting platforms. You can post questions and gather responses using multiple choice, true or false, or have them comment on their level of agreement. This can help you check your students’ background knowledge, assess their opinions, choose the next topic and much more. It also helps to gather participation information.

Crowdmark helps guarantee smooth assignment submission and remote grading

There are many ways you can help foster cooperative learning using different online tools, including Crowdmark’s digital grading software and distance learning systems. Teachers rely on technology to work for them. This is why we offer educators a trial to see how easy it is to integrate and use our simple digital grading platform.

There is evidence which speaks to the variety of ways to make distance learning work, and supports the theory that remote education has been working. Thus, uncertainty alone may not be enough of a reason for a deferral. In this article we’ll examine what a rise in deferrals means for international students and universities. We’ll also show how distance learning with the right tools can still lead to a positive college experience.

Increasing deferrals and universities

The rise in deferrals makes sense given the extraordinary situation in which so many students now find themselves. The social aspects that students find so important about the college experience are currently restricted. For many students, focusing becomes increasingly tricky when lessons and tasks are communicated only through a computer screen, especially when it’s a new college experience.

For international students, with borders currently closed, the ability to study or learn in another country with a top-rated university is also fraught with challenges.

Deferments by domestic students have a negative impact on schools, but universities charge more tuition to international students, making them a crucial part of maintaining high educational standards.

Take for example Australia, which accepts more international students into its universities than any other country globally. Australian universities have had to cut more than 17,000 jobs and have lost roughly 5% of their total revenue. Universities in Canada and the US, where 14% and 5% of students are international, will also see losses if they can’t make remote education attractive to global students.

Why deferrals aren’t always the answer

While universities might fret about the growing number of deferrals, the option remains appealing for many students worldwide. After all, the current pandemic situation is nothing short of extraordinary. However, there are many reasons for students to take a chance on an extraordinary first year.

Often, the appeal of taking a deferral or a gap year is to travel and gain experiences. However, with the pandemic, such a benefit has all but evaporated. Taking a deferral can also lead to a severe loss of educational momentum.

How to make remote education work

At Crowdmark, we’re well aware the right tools can make a difference. There are two leading solutions for educators looking to entice students to stick with education through the pandemic.

Firstly, students should be able to submit assessments without difficulty. Secondly, there should be no confusion for students when they are navigating their grades through digital grading software. Crowdmark has dedicated itself to providing solutions which eliminate both of these issues.

Digital assignment submission

Crowdmark’s assignment submission system is so easy to use that students can submit homework on their mobile phones. For many students, navigating online submission systems can become a source of significant anxiety. By making handing in assignments more straightforward and intuitive, students are more likely to focus on learning.

Digital grading software

After assignment submission, students anxiously await their grades. However, grading can be a lengthy task, even before everything went remote. By the time students receive their grades, they’ve forgotten how to apply the lessons they could have learned from their mistakes.

With digital grading software like Crowdmark, instructors can return assignments to students with meaningful feedback quickly. This reinforces the idea that professors are really engaging with students and helps fight the remote learning disconnect.

Defer that Deferment

While taking a pass might be tempting for students, their first year of university can be their most important. There’s no reason why remote learning can’t be just as fulfilling as in-person education—it only takes the right digital grading software. At Crowdmark, we’re very proud of the education solutions we offer. Feel free to read up on the ways we help improve higher education.

Opinions from both educators and students are mixed as to the effectiveness of online education; not all teachers are well-suited to the format, and not all students are able to do their best work using it. Because of this, some myths have cropped up about distance learning.

In this article, we’ll debunk the top three myths associated with the digital classroom.

Myth #1: Not being in the classroom means teachers have more time

Many believe that, by not physically being in a classroom, teaching classes will take less time. This is not necessarily true. Educators actually spend more time adapting their in-person lessons to an online format that limits student interaction and resources.

Online classes still involve learning materials, engagement from students, assignment submission, and digital grading, but the significant change in the way teachers and students interact means that online classes are more complex than in-person classes.

Therefore, the teacher will spend just as much time and energy teaching and creating meaningful experiences in their digital classroom as they would their physical ones.

Myth #2: Teachers and students don’t want to go back to school

This is a common belief among frustrated parents who want their kids back in school, especially when their kids aren’t doing so well in their virtual classrooms.

The truth, however, is that most teachers are fearful of returning because governments at all levels are failing to provide adequate safety measures to prevent COVID-19. Many teachers want to go back to school, but they want to do so safely. The government has failed to make safety measures clear, and in some provinces and states, have denied teachers priority for vaccination as frontline workers.

Additionally, schools that were struggling with maintenance issues previous to the pandemic will only struggle further when faced with health and safety concerns caused by outdated heating and ventilation systems. The classroom is simply not a safe environment for teachers or students in this condition.

Myth #3: Distance learning works for no one

Distance learning has presented our education system with new challenges every single day. It would be amiss to say that these challenges have not led to widening learning gaps, but there are also undeniable wins.

For example, the University of Delaware is a prime example of how successful remote learning can be when implemented well. Teaching staff and faculty moved over 6000 courses online in just two weeks, thus squashing any barriers to learning for their students as seamlessly as possible.

There has also been success at the University of Waterloo by using technology and software to their advantage. Using digital grading and online assignment submissions can expedite the process of grading papers and allow teachers to focus on what they do best: teaching!

Don’t let these common myths of remote learning fool you

It might seem like both teachers and students alike are struggling with the transition of distance learning, but in many instances, it is the safest way for everyone to continue learning. Remote learning and distance education are nothing new—they have both existed in the United States and the world for nearly two centuries.

When given the right tools and technology to submit homework and grade assignments, distance learning can be a very effective way to conduct classes.

Crowdmark’s digital grading software can help give educators and institutions the ability to transfer to online teaching without any hiccups seamlessly. Our platform helps with accepting assignment submissions, digital grading and giving formative feedback so that your students can continue to learn most safely and effectively possible.

Providing formative, digestible guidance when grading papers is one of the most critical skills an educator can learn. When students receive personalized feedback promptly, it helps them genuinely know and understand the taught concepts.

Despite these clear benefits, it can be a challenge for educators to offer helpful feedback to every student when they have a pile of essays on their desk that all deserve the same care and attention.

In this article, a guide to take educators through improving their formative feedback so that they can spend more time engaged with their students and less time grading papers.

The benefits of formative feedback for students

Many studies detail the benefits of formative feedback for students, with one study noting that teachers are “frequently exposed to contradictory information about the best ways to implement these written feedback types.”

The same study notes that there is “a lack of accord between researchers … with some advocating for [feedback’s] usefulness for student writing development and others claiming that it inhibits student learning.”

Despite these debates, written feedback is the most frequently used form of feedback in elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities. When delivered effectively (and remember, each student has a different way of receiving and processing feedback), it helps students improve their work by deepening their understanding of the material.

Critical elements of useful feedback for online paper graders

Another way to help students deepen their understanding of the subject material is to get them more engaged in the learning process. If a student’s essay lacks a coherent thesis, or if their argument is weak, it’s not the educator’s job to solve this problem for them. Instead, they should take this teaching opportunity to move the student forward in their understanding.

Here are some of the most critical elements of effective feedback for students.

Timely

One of the most critical elements of good feedback is that an instructor provides it promptly. That doesn’t necessarily mean immediately, but generally, students shouldn’t have to wait weeks to receive a teacher’s input on their work.

The material should still be fresh in their minds, and the feedback should come quickly enough so that a student can remedy any gaps in their understanding before they move on to more advanced topics that may build from this knowledge.

Personalized

Great feedback must feel personalized to each student. Every instructor and educator has specific phrases that they repeatedly use to save time, but these should never make up the bulk of your feedback to students.

In studies, simple compliments like “Good job” or “Well done” are not “associated with learning gains, as [they] provide no information that a student could use to improve his or her work.”

Instead, your formative comments should reflect the student’s learning style and offer observations and challenges to clarify their thought process.

Collaborative

Instead of just ‘fixing’ students’ work, teachers should strive to use meaningful feedback to engage students more deeply in the learning process. They can do this by focusing on collaborative rather than corrective feedback.

Instead of marking up their paper with statements, educators should ask students questions to expand their understanding of the essay topic.

4 tips for improving your feedback when grading papers

There are many ways for educators to improve their feedback to make it more timely, personalized, and collaborative. Here are some of our top suggestions from educators.

1. Use open-ended questions to help them reach the next level of understandingFeedback shouldn’t just be offered to students struggling or have issues with the grammar, tone, or structure of their essays. Students who understand the material still deserve the same level of attention and should be encouraged to dig even deeper into their understanding of the topic.To help students reach that next level of understanding, use open-ended questions like “What are the implications of —?” or “How could you bring in another side of this argument?” to help inspire them to reach more nuanced, thoughtful conclusions.
2. Build frequent feedback checkpointsEducators should try to offer feedback as frequently as they can, without having it completely take over their life. Students benefit when they’re able to have regular check-ins with teachers to ensure they’re building a complete understanding before moving on to the next lesson or topic.Instructors don’t always need to write their feedback. In the early stages of essay development, ask your students to have a sit-down conversation, in person or over Zoom, to discuss their thesis and approach so that you can provide verbal feedback at this critical stage of development.
3. Try grading papers online with CrowdmarkStudents who want you to grade their paper quickly have no idea how long it can take when you’re dealing with the same demand from 30 or 300 students.Instead of doing it all by hand, try grading papers online with a platform like Crowdmark.Students upload their work onto the platform. The online paper graders (educators, professors, or teaching assistants) can evaluate it from any device, making it easy to provide meaningful feedback quickly since it can be typed as a comment or handwritten using a stylus. Crowdmark also retains your comments as a library, so you can save the ones you use frequently and reuse them across assessments.
4. Provide multimedia feedbackSome students absorb information faster and with a greater depth of understanding if you provide feedback using multimedia. With Crowdmark, this is easy. Educators can embed links to extra resources like videos or images that explain the concept in greater detail or draw freeform images, charts, and other visual aids.

How online tools like Crowdmark support better feedback

Essays are a challenging assignment for any student and can be even more frustrating when their instructor cannot provide meaningful feedback that they understand. To make feedback easier and faster to deliver and more accessible to students, invest in online grading software like Crowdmark.

With a library of robust grading tools, Crowdmark makes it fast and easy for educators to write or type in detailed feedback.

If you find yourself using the same phrases repeatedly, they can be saved into your library and re-inserted into new assignments with a simple keyboard shortcut.

To learn more about how Crowdmark can support your students’ work on written assignments like essays, get in touch to explore a free trial today.

However, many studies have been conducted on new approaches to grading for both secondary and post-secondary students over the last several years. These studies have brought much more nuance into the conversation about grading. Templates and rubrics that lay out a baseline of knowledge have traditionally been the standard, but many of these studies suggest a new approach based on participation and engagement. This is known as holistic evaluation or contract grading.

This article will examine traditional grading vs contract grading and compare and contrast their efficacy in a classroom setting. We’ll also learn which can serve our distance learning systems best.

The basics of traditional grading

Most parents and teachers today grew up when traditional grading was the only assessment option available. There are a few hallmarks of a traditional grading system that can readily identify it as traditional. They are:

• Simple letter grades.
• Assessments based on teacher-defined criteria, or a grade sheet template or rubric provided to students.
• A single overall grade per student is based on a combination of related and unrelated assessments of skills, knowledge, performance, and conduct over time.

Many teachers favored traditional grading in the past because it’s simple to explain, easy and fast to use. However, it has many drawbacks.

The focus on a student’s final grade can demotivate them from improving essential skills like writing, critical thinking, or literacy since it does not recognize their effort or engagement in the subject matter. Even students who excel in a particular subject are more likely to rest on their laurels when they’re traditionally graded. After all, if they know they can get a B+ or A without much effort, it takes away their motivation to go above and beyond the rubric’s requirements. On the flip side, the focus on achievement that comes with a letter grade is a motivator for students to cheat because the grade itself is seen as more valuable than the material they’re learning.

This grading style also penalizes students with learning challenges, who often find traditional assessments like multiple choice or written exams difficult. This narrow approach to grading also puts racialized and minority students at an inherent disadvantage.

Holistic evaluations: what is contract grading?

Instead of basing a student’s entire grade on their performance in a limited number of assignments, contract grading evaluates every activity a student does. Whether it’s completing homework, finishing an essay draft, doing peer review, or attending class, every action the student takes impacts their final grade.

At the end of the course, the student is given one of three grades: below proficient, proficient, or above proficient.

Researchers examined this task-based approach in a study of 4,000 post-secondary students. Researchers found that students performed better when they set goals based on tasks rather than grades.

For example, a student whose goal was to get a B+ had a lower statistical chance of getting that grade versus a student who gave themselves a goal of completing a set number of tasks during the same period.

By focusing on their progress rather than their final grade, educators can encourage students to engage more deeply in the learning process and challenge themselves when they know they can do better.

Grading using traditional models or holistic evaluations on Crowdmark

One of the advantages of distance learning is how much it’s shaken up our stale classroom routines and habits. Many educators have chosen to take this time to explore contract grading to encourage their students to engage more deeply in their remote education.

Luckily, it’s easy to change your grading approach when you use an electronic grading platform like Crowdmark. Grading assignments is easy, regardless of whether you’re using a rubric of your design or the student created as part of the contract grading process.

You can even create a shared comments library, so it’s easy for all classroom evaluators to drag and drop comments on a students’ work. This keeps things consistent between graders and allows educators to spend less time on this time-consuming task.

Want to explore the possibilities of Crowdmark? Get in touch today to learn more about the platform with a free trial.

After putting in hours of work, students submit the assignment and wait to see what grade they receive. When instructors hand back the students’ papers, they often skip right over the paper’s comments to see their grade.

This focus on a letter or percentage grade is a hallmark of traditional grading or standardized assessment. The majority of North American schools have been using traditional grading for decades since it’s easier for teachers and more straightforward for students to understand.

However, with distance learning, many teachers and educators are starting to explore different grading and assessment types and how these approaches can benefit students.

One new type of assessment is authentic assessment, also called comprehensive or performance assessment. This progressive assessment allows teachers to offer feedback and direction every step of the way, based on tasks like submitting drafts, participating in class, and even attending classes.

Grading students using traditional assessment

Most of us are familiar with traditional assessment, which uses letter and percentage grades to evaluate students’ understanding of the learning material. Typical forms of traditional assessment include multiple-choice tests or any graded assignment based on a standardized rubric.

We based traditional assessment on the idea that students must obtain a baseline of knowledge before graduation. Since this knowledge is mandatory, it has become the norm to test students on their ability to successfully repeat and recall this knowledge during a test, essay, or other projects.

Critics of traditional assessment note that this type of evaluation only tests knowledge rather than evaluating proficiency in skills, such as literary analysis, writing, and critical thinking. As we take this time to consider how and why we assess students’ learning, it makes sense to evolve beyond letter grades and competition. How can we do better for our students?

The benefits of authentic assessment during distance learning

In contrast with the traditional model, authentic assessment offers teachers the opportunity to grade students based on their progress and how much they’ve learned. Instead of using a roster of standardized assessments like multiple-choice tests or quizzes, well-designed authentic assessments match the instruction’s content. They also give students valuable feedback on how well they understand the information, identifying areas that require further study.

A common authentic assessment is a working assignment, which usually takes the form of an essay or presentation. It offers students the opportunity to receive feedback at every stage to see where they went wrong and course-correct before they hand in the final assignment. A working assignment helps them achieve their full potential, rather than measuring their ability to succeed without any interventions whatsoever.

This grading method also helps reduce pressure on the student’s final grade since their overall grade is based on every task they do during the semester, rather than a limited selection of assignments. When students experience anxiety and depression at record levels, this is a rare opportunity for meaningful COVID stress relief.

Explore a new way of grading students with authentic assessment

Many educators who have used traditional assessment throughout their career may feel intimidated by the prospect of switching to an entirely new method of grading. Remote teaching has already been a challenge, without adding more new skills to be learned.

Fortunately, there are ways to balance new forms of authentic assessment with traditional grading in your classroom. Here are some suggestions.

1. Introduce new types of authentic assessmentThe majority of educators have already had to adapt and change assignments to ensure they’re compatible with distance learning.Instead of adapting traditional forms of assignments like quizzes and tests, try introducing new authentic assessment types into your classroom. These assignments can be anything from one-on-one discussions to tasks that demonstrate their proficiency, like presentations or demonstrations.
2. Encourage student-structured assignmentsA key component of authentic assessment is the transition from educator-structured assignments to student-structured assignments. Instead of giving students a narrow set of parameters to structure their assignment, encourage them to think creatively and develop a unique way to demonstrate their understanding.This deepens their engagement in the assignment, and forces them to think of new and creative ways to present their knowledge.
3. Ask for your students’ input on the rubricA rubric created by an instructor is a valuable tool for students to track requirements on an assessment and demonstrate applicable levels of comprehension on multiple learning outcomes.Instructors can deepen student engagement by involving them in creating the evaluation rubric for key assignments throughout the semester. This gives students an in-depth understanding of what is required for them to achieve the highest grade. Students participating in establishing the grading criteria ahead of time also help create a more democratic classroom environment and ensure they’re more engaged in the process.

Explore new types of grading with Crowdmark

Ultimately, grading should encourage a student’s engagement with the subject material by showing them where there’s room for improvement. This can be hard to achieve with traditional grading, especially if you only have a limited number of assignments that count towards your students’ final grades.

Instead of relying on traditional grading, take the opportunity created by remote education to explore new types of assessment. It’s easy when you have a flexible grading tool like Crowdmark.

Our electronic grading platform makes it easy to create new rubrics and evaluate your students based on completed assignments and intermediary tasks like submitting drafts.

Try it out today with a free trial to see how well it works in your classroom.

With so many educators suffering from Zoom fatigue and struggling to keep their energy levels up when faced with muted empty screens, it’s hard to imagine that students may feel enthused with presentations as a class assignment.

However, there are ways to do it well. By encouraging creativity and giving students the flexibility to choose their format, teachers can add a bit more excitement to their students’ daily routine.

This guide will showcase the benefits of presentations as an assignment and offer suggestions for a few formats that work best for remote learning.

Why presentations?

There are few types of assignments that are engaging for students as a presentation, and asking students to prepare information can be a more challenging and effective way to assess learning than a traditional test or exam.

One of the key benefits of a presentation is that it requires students to know the material well enough to reiterate and explain it to their peers. Presentations give students a nuanced understanding that goes beyond memorization.

Additionally, it offers students the chance to practice important communication and organization skills they’ll need in their adult lives. The act of planning and delivering a presentation can seem nerve-wracking to young students, but as they get more comfortable, it will deepen their self-confidence.

How students can use technology to complete assignments like presentations

It may seem challenging to set presentations as an assignment during remote learning, but there are ways to make it easier and more approachable.

Here are some of our suggestions for using technology to make the delivery and grading of presentation assignments much more effortless.

Keep the traditional format

If you’d like for students to give their presentations in real-time, you can use whatever technology you’re using for your classes and simply turn over the group’s leadership to the presenting student.

Encourage students to use props from home to make their presentation more engaging and think about doing a test run beforehand to ensure that they know their space’s sound and lighting requirements.

Screen share using Google Meet, Webex, or Zoom

If students are shy or want to encourage them to make and utilize slides, give them the option of doing their presentation through a screen share. Students can then put their materials on the screen and present verbally.

Upload a video to your digital grading software

If you don’t want to spend all of your class hours listening to presentations, you can allow students to film their presentations, allowing them to be as creative as they wish. Video presentations may alleviate some of the burdens on students who struggle with public speaking.

After their video is complete, they can do assignment submission in two ways: they can send you the entire file or upload it to a secure video platform like YouTube or Vimeo and send you a link. It’s much easier to use digital grading software instead of email in these cases, so the links and large files don’t clog your inbox.

Crowdmark makes assignment submission easier for teachers and students

Presentations are a great way to encourage your students’ creativity, but submitting and grading them can be challenging. To help make it easier, try Crowdmark.

We created our digital grading software to make the grading workflow easier for educators. Assignment submission is easy and quick and offers educators the opportunity to grade from anywhere. With Crowdmark’s new Text entry question format, students can attach or embed links, images and files directly into their question response. Once educators are engaged in marking, the grading tool allows them to save frequently used comments and mark up each assignment with rich text, including images and videos.

This year has been a challenge for many educators, staff, and students working in our schools. In the United States alone, almost 51 million students have been affected by school closures. In the first frantic weeks of remote education, school staff quickly changed their routines, trying their best to recreate in-school education’s realities using only the software platforms and technology they had available.

In specific ways, remote education widened the already-growing technology gap between affluent students who had no issues logging in versus their peers who struggled to find the technology required to access their education. Educators and counsellors try to help, but the sheer scope of the issues they faced and the lack of resources available make it difficult.

We’ll explore the significant challenges that have faced counsellors in the last year and share some strategies and resources to help.

What our counsellors have seen during distance learning

A recent study conducted by researchers from Harvard and Boston College was one of the first to examine the challenges facing guidance counsellors trying to work during a pandemic. They surveyed 948 guidance counsellors across the United States and Puerto Rico and asked them a series of questions on their needs, their students’ needs, and how they changed their working conditions to adapt to COVID-19.

The most important takeaway was that overall, “school counselors were not able to spend as much time as usual counselling students about social-emotional issues, career development, or post-secondary plans.” Instead, logistical challenges overtake counsellors’ time at the expense of their regular counselling work.

Undoubtedly this work—which often included checking up on students with repeated absences, delivering technology, and supporting teachers—was necessary. However, it left counsellors with very little time to engage students in any type of social, emotional, or career-focused conversations, where their expertise and training were most necessary.

Only 15% of counsellors surveyed said that they had been given more support from their district than before the pandemic.

How this affects students

Guidance counsellors are often the first line of defense for students who are suffering emotionally, academically, or socially. With guidance counsellors stretched thin and unable to do their jobs, students’ mental health has suffered.

In a UK study published in The Lancet, 26% of students surveyed reported that they could not access mental health support. Students worldwide report high levels of depression and anxiety, and many are worried about their prospects for life after high school and university. Despite their best efforts, guidance counsellors are struggling to allay these fears and provide meaningful relief.

Offering COVID stress relief to students

Despite these shocking statistics and reports, the state of our students’ mental health should come as no surprise. Here are some ways that we can support guidance counsellors in their fight to help students:

Involve guidance counsellors in COVID-19 school planning

Despite being asked to contribute to additional duties, many guidance counsellors report a lack of inclusion in the decision-making process. Instead, they were given directives from administrators that were restrictive rather than supportive.

To keep our students healthy and engaged with their distance learning classes as much as possible, we must include guidance counsellors in all school planning sessions. They can give valuable insight into supporting students and advocating for their needs in different ways than teachers.

Improve psychological safety for students

Understanding trauma and how it affects students is a critical component in providing a safe, educational environment. Even though students are not physically in the same building anymore, teachers must still use a trauma-informed approach to care for their pupils.

Typical examples include:

• Using conversation, rather than punishment, as a method to deal with a student acting out in class.
• Acknowledging loss instead of avoiding difficult conversations.

Implement early warning systems

An early warning system is critical to ensure that students don’t get lost in the shuffle and receive personalized attention when they need it most. While guidance counsellors should help design this system, making it their sole responsibility will keep them from their other essential duties and quickly leads to burnout.

Ensure that educators and support staff can work together on this by creating the system collectively and hiring additional support staff if the workload becomes too great.

Invest in helpful technology

A great way to free up more staff time and make life easier for students is by investing in technology like Crowdmark. This digital grading tool allows teachers to start marking their papers online, freeing up more time to contribute to their students’ wellbeing. It also gives students an easy, centralized portfolio for their school work, making it less complicated and time-consuming to submit homework and other assignments.

Support student mental health with Crowdmark

There are many different ways to support your students’ mental health, but ultimately it begins by helping those on the first line of defense: teachers, guidance counsellors, and other educators.

At Crowdmark, we believe our platform can help. It simplifies both the assignment submission and grading process, allowing students to submit homework from anywhere—even a smartphone, especially if that’s the only technology they can access. Then, teachers benefit from a simplified grading process, using rich text to give students access to more valuable feedback. Get in touch to try it today with a no-risk free trial.

Over their careers, educators will see a wide variety of behaviours in response to constructive feedback. Some students will double down and work harder on their next assignment, but others will immediately return to the instructor to request a regrade.

As the instructor, it’s your job to hear your students out and process the request in a way that feels fair. Some schools and institutions have set policies that educators must follow, while others give broad discretion to the individual instructor to set their grades and deal with their students’ requests on their terms.

While educators must have the freedom to determine their grades, maintaining mutually respectful relationships with students often means hearing out their concerns and at least discussing the possibility of a regrade.

In this article, we’ll discuss how educators can handle a request for a regrade and explore the tools they can use to ensure the process is both transparent and simple enough to do without disrupting their workflow.

Examine regrade policies for your school or institution

The first thing that educators must do when confronted with a request to regrade is examining their institution’s policy on regrading. Every school has its process for dealing with regrade requests. Some leave it entirely to the discretion of the individual instructor, while others insist that it must escalate to the department head or even the director of undergraduate studies.

It may help to make these policies clear to your students from the very first day of classes. That way, if they ever want to submit a request for regrade, they’ll have an idea of the potential consequences of their actions. Some schools even provide educators with an email template to respond to students with online grading issues.

Evaluating your feedback objectively when online grading

Suppose your school policies allow educators to deal with requests for regrades themselves. The next step in the process is determining whether your feedback was accurate or whether you’ve made an error.

Even when you use a grading tool, humans are not infallible and can still make mistakes. Before you respond to the student, it may make sense to dig into their grades online and see whether there was a simple error that led to them receiving an inaccurate grade.

Once you’ve determined that you’ve made no error, take a look at your feedback and the student’s response. Is their frustration a result of them not understanding where they went wrong? Perhaps your feedback could have been more formative or specific. If it’s clear that the student lacks understanding, a follow-up email with more detailed feedback may be helpful.

Is a regrade possible?

If the student appears to have understood the assignment and still does not accept their percentage or grade, you’ll have to decide whether a regrade is possible. If you’re using an online grading tool, you’ll need to figure out how to re-open the assignment for feedback.

With Crowdmark, this is easy: assignments can be locked and unlocked at any time by the instructor, using the assessment Dashboard. Locking or unlocking the assignment will not affect the student—only the educator can see that anything has changed. This way, it’s easy to change the grade and send the individual student a message once you’ve taken a second look at their assignment.

Setting boundaries with grades online

Although online grading tools make it easier, going back and regrading assignments can be time-consuming. That’s why many institutions insist that students appeal grades to the department head or an educator at the Dean or Director level, freeing individual educators from continually justifying their grading to their students.

Setting boundaries will always be an essential component of dealing with regrade requests. An instructor who is consistently regrading assessments may get overwhelmed with regrade requests from students who simply didn’t understand the assignment or didn’t work hard enough to complete it to the best of their abilities.

Part of any functional student-teacher relationship is mutual respect. If students do not respect their instructor’s judgment, it can sabotage the whole relationship.

Instead of automatically reassessing any regrade request, take the time to educate the student on where they went wrong. If you’re continually getting regrade requests, it could be a sign that your feedback needs work since it’s not specific enough to be helpful to your students.

Improving feedback with grading tools like Crowdmark

One of the best ways educators can improve the quality and depth without increasing the amount of time they spend grading is to use a smart grading tool like Crowdmark.

Crowdmark allows educators to grade assignments on any device, write or type out personalized feedback, and include added diagrams, images, or even embedded videos. If a student has clearly missed the assignment’s goal or doesn’t understand a concept, simply drop a relevant diagram or video link onto the page, allowing them to absorb the information differently. Save time grading, and put the emphasis back on student performance.

The biggest win in text responses may be limitless versatility. Students can now attach almost any file type to their answers including spreadsheets, Word documents and slide presentations; as well as links to externally-hosted files such as video or code notebooks. Click here to learn how to add a text response question to your assessment.

Below are examples of how text responses can be useful in some of the more common subjects amongst Crowdmark users, as well as some subjects that may surprise you!

Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering and Economics

Have students type responses in Crowdmark directly, using LaTeX comment formatting to include equations and images, as well as links to data spreadsheets.

Business

Students can submit case studies complete with attachments for slide decks, excel spreadsheets, graphs and diagrams or links to video presentations.

Arts and Humanities

Research papers or essay-format exams can be copy-and-pasted or typed directly into the text interface. Students can attach research materials and other resources as files or links.

Chemistry and Biology

Lab experiments can be completed in Crowdmark, with students attaching results, embedding images and diagrams, and using LaTeX for chemical notation and equations.

Graphic Design

Ask your students to complete a design abstract, with inspiration images embedded.

Theatre

Students can self-record scene studies, and submit a brief or summary with their linked performance and script attached.

Computer Science

Have students use Markdown and LaTeX formatting to complete a creative entry directly in the text interface.