From Plosives to Personalized Feedback: Tools to Elevate Teaching in Online Degree Programs

Staff at the Global Campus at the University of Arkansas can explain this concept and many others in as much or as little technical detail as instructors want while assisting them with their online teaching. Global Campus staff offer information, guidance and resources on everything from communicating well on video to efficiently using tools on the Blackboard Ultra learning management system to help students learn.

Audio and Video

Jerin Crandell offered advice during the Global Campus’ annual BOLT conference (Better Online Learning Together) on both audio and video in his presentation about how to improve your recording at home. He said audio is most important because people will forgive poor quality video but, if they can’t hear the audio, they won’t continue watching.

Crandell leads the media production team at Global Campus, a group that works with U of A instructors to create engaging media content for their online courses. The media production team works with the instructional design and learning technology support teams at Global Campus to serve instructors teaching online.

As Crandell offered tips and tricks for effective recording at home, he also described several free resources available to U of A instructors at the Global Campus media production studio on the downtown Fayetteville square:

• Built-in microphones are OK if you get close so that not a lot of background noise is picked up, but mics that plug into your device with a USB port provide better sound quality. The Global Campus has microphones that instructors who teach online can check out and use throughout the development cycle of an online course at no charge.

“We want your audio to be as good as it can be with as little cost to you,” Crandell said.

• Do your recording in a room with soft surfaces such as upholstered furniture, curtains or other fabric wall coverings and carpet, not in kitchens or bathrooms. Hard surfaces bounce the sound around, making the audio unclear. Instructors who teach online courses can also book studio space at the Global Campus to record at no charge.
• Record an introduction where you are speaking to your students in front of the camera. This goes a long way to showing them you are a real person, even if the rest of the semester you do a voiceover with PowerPoint, Crandell said. Instructors who teach online can record an introduction at the Global Campus studio.

“Think of this as an opportunity to create a video you can use for all of your classes to introduce yourself,” he said. “It takes 30 minutes to record. We will help you write a script, and we’ll put it on a teleprompter. You just have to remember to smile as you read through it.”

• At home, position your camera at eye level. That may mean placing your laptop or desktop computer on a pile of books so that people aren’t looking up your nose, he said. Try to center yourself in the screen.
• Use natural light as much as possible but place it behind your computer, not you. If you sit with your back to a window, your camera will adjust the light level to the window and you will be in shadow.

Feedback Through Blackboard

Abi Moser lives a double life as Blackboard support coordinator at the U of A as well as an adjunct faculty member in the communication department, so she knows teaching from several angles. Blackboard Ultra is the learning management system used by all instructors at the U of A, whether they teach online or on campus. The Blackboard Help team Moser supervises is available extended hours seven days a week to answer questions from both students and faculty members, and faculty have other avenues to seek help, including Global Campus staff such as members of the instructional design and learning technology support teams, and the TIPS website (Teaching Innovation and Pedagogical Support).

Moser said it’s important to give “substantive, timely, quality feedback to students every chance we get.” But the question is how. And, she has answers.

“We want to make sure they know what’s expected of them and for every assignment before that work is due,” Moser said.

Ways to do this:

• Instructors may think of discussion boards associated with their courses in Blackboard as primarily places for student conversations, but they can also be a good place for the instructor to give feedback. “The amount of feedback you can give your students in a conversation is a lot more in depth and rich than checking boxes in a rubric,” Moser said.
• Consider writing the text in a rubric rather than using the default text so that you can describe in detail exactly what you are looking for in an assignment. Blackboard Ultra also allows the instructor to write more personalized feedback on each point in the rubric.
• Use video and audio recording features in Blackboard to give students feedback on assignments, making for a more personalized response and possibly some extra comments that are helpful.
• Annotate a homework assignment by circling passages, writing notes about specific sections, and adding images or page breaks to show the student how to restructure a paper.
• Put comments you frequently use into a content library. Pulling from the library helps you respond quickly to common errors, giving you more time to elaborate in other areas.
• Add comments to your feedback on tests that tell students where to look up answers they got wrong as well as thanking them for reading a specific chapter where the answer came from that they got right.
• Use the messages feature in Blackboard as an alternative to email, where students may miss the communication.
• Use the automatic notifications feature to alert students when their grade drops below a certain percentage or they miss several due dates or they haven’t logged into Blackboard for a certain time, whatever is appropriate for your class.
• Use a web conferencing tool like Zoom or Class to set up office hours for an entire semester. Instructors can send invitations to students informing them of the set office hours.

Proactive Strategies

Kelly Westeen has taught a number of different courses during her 20 years working at the U of A. She’s the faculty support coordinator for Global Campus, leading multiple training sessions a month, including one lunch in collaboration with the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center, as well as creating content for the TIPS website and supporting faculty with academic technology and pedagogical help through one-on-one consultations.

In one of several sessions she gave at BOLT, Westeen offered instructors strategies and tools inside Blackboard to reach out to students before they dig themselves into holes, academically:

• Personalized assignments to help you get to know students in which you ask them about their majors, hometowns, favorite book or movie, and what they except their biggest challenge will be this semester.
  “A lot of times they will share things with me that I can keep in the back of my mind in working with that student,” she said.
• Journals in which students can write their concerns and answer your questions about how things are going. Instructors can use them as temperature checks throughout the semester and suggest helpful resources for students depending on what they have written.
• The class conversations feature allows students to ask a question within a particular assignment.
• Use analytics such as course activity reports to gauge progress. Let students know you can see whether they open assignments and how long they spend working on them in Blackboard. You can also see how Blackboard rates the difficulty level of individual questions and how students are doing on each question. This can tell you if you should consider rewording a question or focusing longer on a topic.
• Setting automatic zeros if a student doesn’t turn in an assignment causes Blackboard to automatically notify students if they get a zero and possibly nudge them to take action.
• Similarly, performance metrics set by you tell Blackboard to automatically notify students if they fall below those metrics. Again, they may need this wake-up call to get back on track, she said.