Online

In order to encourage my online students to read the comments I leave for them in Canvas, I developed the "Doube-Secret Extra Credit Opportunity" that rewards them for seeing instructions that I leave in a comment in Canvas. (Sadly, none of my students seemed to get the 'double-secret' reference; they mostly called it Super Secret or Secret -- sigh! I guess I'm officaly old if no one remembers Animal House anymore!) The results were amazing; it really got my students talking to me about what they liked and what they were interested in as it relates to the courses

This semester I am provided a sample of a successful paper submitted by a 1st year student last semester to test the idea that identifying a peer who succeeded with similar challenges will provoke greater effort and ultimately greater success. For the full background on this CATS please see "Will Providing a Peer Sample Motivate Growth?"

In the Fall of 2016, I decided to convert some of the many writing assignments in my online and hybrid CRE101 course to video submissions rather than written submissions.  Unfortunately, at the time, the recording tool in Canvas was unpredictable and made it very difficult for many students to successfully submit their video submissions.  Submitting by attaching video files was also problematic due to the increased time it took for the students to upload the files and the time for me to download them to grade.  It was so problematic that many students either contacted me about not being abl

The Counseling Division wanted to determine the effectiveness of the CPD150 Career Unit which includes a Career Interest Assessment, Career Research, and Career Planning. In effort to measure the Career Units effectiveness on student learning we created a 5 item Pre/Post Assessment that is modeled after the Critical Inquiry Rubric. The Pre Assessment was administered in the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester with 741 responses and the Post Assessment was administered in November of 2017.

One of the biggest challenges for nursing students is to acclimate to the world of the nursing school exam.  Gone are the days of one right answer, the nursing student must learn how to prioritize several correct answers to determine which is the "most" correct. During the Spring 2017, utilization of the Adaptive Quizzing/Learning Resources was highly encouraged but not attached to course points.  In Fall of 2017, the Adaptive Learning activities were attached to 39 of the 600 total course points, leading to a 206% increase in student utilization.

In the 3rd week of PSY 101 students have to complete an assignment critical to college success (locating a research article in an academic journal on a specific topic and providing a summary, APA style reference, & informed opinion).  Recognizing that this task is usually just beyond the students' current abilities, I use extensive scaffolding to support their acquisition of these important skills. Nonetheless, grades on this assignment remain low and approximately 60 % of students are unable to successfully complete the full task.

Sociology courses have topics that are taboo, disturbing, offensive and controversial. SOC 212 (Gender and Society) students read "If Men Could Menstruate" by Gloria Steinem. Students tend to get defensive and miss the important point on power in society. On average 50% of the students would be defensive in the discussion responses and miss the importance of the article. I decided to rewrite the directions for the assignment so that students would focus on critically thinking as sociologists.

The EMCC Gen. Ed. abilities assessment cycle is a three years cycle. Prior to assessment there is never a guarantee that students have had formal instruction aligned to the abilities being assessed. Seeing an opportunity to test out an intervention tool in the form of an online tutorial, a pilot was conducted with two classes, ENG102 and ECN211. The tutorial was designed to align with the Information Literacy EMCC Gen. Ed. Abilities. The driving research question was: Can an intervention be created to support the teaching of EMCC Gen. Ed. IL Abilities for Information Literacy?

Participants registered and attended the face-to-face workshop that was presented using Canvas. Individuals registered for the course using a provided link. Participants completed a pre-assessment to measure their understanding of utilizing Canvas outside of the classroom according to the learning objectives. After the pre-assessment the workshop included topics on the purposes of using a LMS (according to eLearning Industry), connecting benefits of a LMS to out-of-class activities, and discussing how EMCC can move forward with these ideas in mind.

Is there really a need to kill another tree if CANVAS provides a medium for quizzes? In a quasi-experimental design, introductory stats students across two semesters (SP and FA ‘16) with two different instructors self-reported the number of hours spent studying for a common cumulative quiz. One group used e-quizzes, the second used paper quizzes. Results are as follows: