By Greta Underhill

In my last post, I outlined my search for a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) program that would fit our Research Unit’s needs. We needed a program that would enable our team to collaborate across operating systems, easily adding in new team members as needed, while providing a user-friendly experience without a high learning curve. We also needed something that would adhere to our institution’s IRB requirements for data security and preferred a program that didn’t require a subscription. However, the programs I examined were either subscription-based, too cumbersome, or did not meet our institution’s IRB requirements for data security. It seemed that there just wasn’t a program out there to suit our team’s needs.

However, after weeks of continued searching, I found a YouTube video entitled “Coding Text Using Microsoft Word” (Harold Peach, 2014). At first, I assumed this would show me how to use Word comments to highlight certain text in a transcript, which is a handy function, but what about collating those codes into a table or Excel file? What about tracking which member of the team codes certain text? I assumed this would be an explanation of manual coding using Word, which works fine for some projects, but not for our team.

Picture of a dummy transcript using Lorem Ipsum placeholder text. Sentences are highlighted in red or blue depending upon the user. Highlighted passages have an associated “comment” where users have written codes.

Fortunately, my assumption was wrong. Dr. Harold Peach, Associate Professor of Education at Georgetown College, had developed a Word Macro to identify and pull all comments from the word document into a table (Peach, n.d.). A macro is “a series of commands and instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically” (Create or Run a Macro – Microsoft Support, n.d.). Once downloaded, the “Extract Comments to New Document” macro opens a template and produces a table of the coded information as shown in the image below. The macro identifies the following properties:

Page: the page on which the text can be found
Comment scope: the text that was coded
Comment text: the text contained in the comment; for the purpose of our projects, the code title
Author: which member of the team coded the information
Date: the date on which the text was coded

Picture of a table of dummy text that was generated from the “Extract Comments to New Document” Macro. The table features the following columns: Page, Comment Scope, Comment Text, Author, and Date.

You can move the data from the Word table into an Excel sheet where you can sort codes for patterns or frequencies, a function that our team was looking for in a program as shown below:

A picture of the dummy text table in an Excel sheet where codes have been sorted and grouped together by code name to establish frequencies.

This Word Macro was a good fit for our team for many reasons. First, our members could create comments on a Word document, regardless of their operating system. Second, we could continue to house our data on our institution’s servers, ensuring our projects meet strict IRB data security measures. Third, the Word macro allowed for basic coding features (coding multiple passages multiple times, highlighting coded text, etc.) and had a very low learning curve: teaching someone how to use Word Comments. Lastly, our institution provides access to the complete Microsoft Suite so all team members including students that would be working on projects already had access to the Word program. We contacted our IT department to have them verify that the macro was safe and for help downloading the macro.

Testing the Word Macro

Once installed, I tested out the macro with our undergraduate research assistant on a qualitative project and found it to be intuitive and helpful. We coded independently and met multiple times to discuss our work. Eventually we ran the macro, pulled all comments from our data, and moved the macro tables into Excel where we manually merged our work. Through this process, we found some potential drawbacks that could impact certain teams.

First, researchers can view all previous comments made which might impact how teammates code or how second-cycle coding is performed; other programs let you hide previous codes so researcher can come at the text fresh.

Second, coding across paragraphs can create issues with the resulting table; cells merge in ways that make it difficult to sort and filter if moved to Excel, but a quick cleaning of the data took care of this issue.

Lastly, we manually merged our work, negotiating codes and content, as our codes were inductively generated; researchers working on deductive projects may bypass this negotiation and find the process of merging much faster.

Despite these potential drawbacks, we found this macro sufficient for our project as it was free to use, easy to learn, and a helpful way to organize our data. The following table summarizes the pro and cons of this macro.

Pros and Cons of the “Extract Comments to New Document” Word Macro

Pros

Easy to learn and use: simply providing comments in a Word document and running the macro
Program tracks team member codes which can be helpful in discussions of analysis
Team members can code separately by generating separate Word documents, then merge the documents to consensus code
Copying Word table to Excel provides a more nuanced look at the data
Program works across operating systems
Members can house their data in existing structures, not on cloud infrastructures
Macro is free to download

Cons

Previous comments are visible through the coding process which might impact other members’ coding or second round coding
Coding across paragraph breaks creates cell breaks in the resulting table that can make it hard to sort
Team members must manually merge their codes and negotiate code labels, overlapping data, etc.

Scientific work can be enhanced and advanced by the right tools; however, it can be difficult to distinguish which computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software program is right for a team or a project. Any of the programs mentioned in this paper would be good options for individuals who do not need to collaborate or for those who are working with publicly available data that require different data security protocols. However, the Word macro highlighted here is a great option for many research teams. In all, although there are many powerful computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software programs out there, our team found the simplest option was the best option for our projects and our needs.

References

Create or run a macro—Microsoft Support. (n.d.). Retrieved July 17, 2023, from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-or-run-a-macro-c6b99036-905c-49a6-818a-dfb98b7c3c9c

Harold Peach (Director). (2014, June 30). Coding text using Microsoft Word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbjfpEe4j5Y

Peach, H. (n.d.). Extract comments to new document – Word macros and tips – Work smarter and save time in Word. Retrieved July 17, 2023, from https://www.thedoctools.com/word-macros-tips/word-macros/extract-comments-to-new-document/

For the first part of this post, please see Media Literacy in the Age of AI, Part I: “You Will Need to Check It All.”

Just how, exactly, we’re supposed to follow Ethan Mollick’s caution to “check it all” happens to be the subject of a lively, forthcoming collaboration from two education researchers who have been following the intersection of new media and misinformation for decades.

In Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, November 2023), Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg provide a kind of user’s manual to the modern internet. The authors’ central concern is that students—and, by extension, their teachers—have been going about the process of verifying online claims and sources all wrong—usually by applying the same rhetorical skills activated in reading a deep-dive on Elon Musk or Yevgeny Prigozhin, to borrow from last month’s headlines. Academic readers, that is, traditionally keep their attention fixed on the text—applying comprehension strategies such as prior knowledge, persisting through moments of confusion, and analyzing the narrative and its various claims about technological innovation or armed rebellion in discipline-specific ways.

The Problem with Checklists

Now, anyone who has tried to hold a dialogue on more than a few pages of assigned reading at the college level knows that sustained focus and critical thinking can be challenging, even for experienced readers. (A majority of high school seniors are not prepared for reading in college, according to 2019 data.) And so instructors, partnering with librarians, have long championed checklists as one antidote to passive consumption, first among them the CRAAP test, which stands for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. (Flashbacks to English 101, anyone?) The problem with checklists, argue Caulfield and Wineburg, is that in today’s media landscape—awash in questionable sources—they’re a waste of time. Such routines might easily keep a reader focused on critically evaluating “gameable signals of credibility” such as functional hyperlinks, a well-designed homepage, airtight prose, digital badges, and other supposedly telling markers of authority that can be manufactured with minimal effort or purchased at little expense, right down to the blue checkmark made infamous by Musk’s platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

Three Contexts for Lateral Reading

One of the delights in reading Verified is drawing back the curtains on a parade of little-known hoaxes, rumors, actors, and half-truths at work in the shadows of the information age—ranging from a sugar industry front group posing as a scientific think tank to headlines in mid-2022 warning that clouds of “palm-sized flying spiders” were about to descend on the East Coast. In the face of such wild ideas, Caulfield and Wineburg offer a helpful, three-point heuristic for navigating the web—and a sharp rejoinder to the source-specific checklists of the early aughts. (You will have to read the book to fact-check the spider story, or as the authors encourage, you can do it yourself after reading, say, the first chapter!) “The first task when confronted with the unfamiliar is not analysis. It is the gathering of context” (p. 10). More specifically:

The context of the source — What’s the reputation of the source of information that you arrive at, whether through a social feed, a shared link, or a Google search result?

The context of the claim — What have others said about the claim? If it’s a story, what’s the larger story? If a statistic, what’s the larger context?

Finally, the context of you — What is your level of expertise in the area? What is your interest in the claim? What makes such a claim or source compelling to you, and what could change that?

“The Three Contexts” from Verified (2023)

At a regional conference of librarians in May, Wineburg shared video clips from his scenario-based research, juxtaposing student sleuths with professional fact checkers. His conclusion? By simply trying to gather the necessary context, learners with supposedly low media literacy can be quickly transformed into “strong critical thinkers, without any additional training in logic or analysis” (Caulfield and Wineburg, p. 10). What does this look like in practice? Wineburg describes a shift from “vertical” to “lateral reading” or “using the web to read the web” (p. 81). To investigate a source like a pro, readers must first leave the source, often by opening new browser tabs, running nuanced searches about its contents, and pausing to reflect on the results. Again, such findings hold significant implications for how we train students in verification and, more broadly, in media literacy. Successful information gathering, in other words, depends not only on keywords and critical perspective but also on the ability to engage in metacognitive conversations with the web and its architecture. Or, channeling our eight-legged friends again: “If you wanted to understand how spiders catch their prey, you wouldn’t just look at a single strand” (p. 87).

SIFT graphic by Mike Caulfield with icons for stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.

Image 2: Mike Caulfield’s “four moves”

Reconstructing Context

Much of Verified is devoted to unpacking how to gain such perspective while also building self-awareness of our relationships with the information we seek. As a companion to Wineburg’s research on lateral reading, Caulfield has refined a series of higher-order tasks for vetting sources called SIFT, or “The Four Moves” (see Image 2). By (1) Stopping to take a breath and get a look around, (2) Investigating the source and its reputation, (3) Finding better sources of journalism or research, and (4) Tracing surprising claims or other rhetorical artifacts back to their origins, readers can more quickly make decisions about how to manage their time online. You can learn more about the why behind “reconstructing context” at Caulfield’s blog, Hapgood, and as part of the OSU Libraries’ guide to media literacy. (Full disclosure: Mike is a former colleague from Washington State University Vancouver.)

If I have one complaint about Caulfield and Wineburg’s book, it’s that it dwells at length on the particulars of analyzing Google search results, which fill pages of accompanying figures and a whole chapter on the search engine as “the bestie you thought you knew” (p. 49). To be sure, Google still occupies a large share of the time students and faculty spend online. But as in my quest for learning norms protocols, readers are already turning to large language model tools for help in deciding what to believe online. In that respect, I find other chapters in Verified (on scholarly sources, the rise of Wikipedia, deceptive videos, and so-called native advertising) more useful. And if you go there, don’t miss the author’s final take on the power of emotion in finding the truth—a line that sounds counterintuitive, but in context adds another, rather moving dimension to the case against checklists.

Given the acceleration of machine learning, will lateral reading and SIFTing hold up in the age of AI? Caulfield and Wineburg certainly think so. Building out context becomes all the more necessary, they write in a postscript on the future of verification, “when the prose on the other side is crafted by a convincing machine” (p. 221). On that note, I invite you and your students to try out some of these moves on your favorite chatbot.

Another Postscript

The other day, I gave Microsoft’s AI-powered search engine a few versions of the same prompt I had put to ChatGPT. In “balanced” mode, Bing dutifully recommended resources from Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard on introducing norms for learning in online college classes. Over in “creative” mode, Bing’s synthesis was slightly more offbeat—including an early-pandemic blog post on setting norms for middle school faculty meetings in rural Vermont. More importantly, the bot wasn’t hallucinating. Most of the sources it suggested seemed worth investigating. Pausing before each rabbit hole, I took a deep breath.

Related Resource

Oregon State Ecampus recently rolled out its own AI toolkit for faculty, based on an emerging consensus that developing capacities for using this technology will be necessary in many areas of life. Of particular relevance to this post is a section on AI literacy, conceptualized as “a broad set of skills that is not confined to technical disciplines.” As with Verified, I find the toolkit’s frameworks and recommendations on teaching AI literacy particularly helpful. For instance, if students are allowed to use ChatGPT or Bing to brainstorm and evaluate possible topics for a writing assignment, “faculty might provide an effective example of how to ask an AI tool to help, ideally situating explanation in the context of what would be appropriate and ethical in that discipline or profession.”

References

Caulfield, M., & Wineburg, S. (2023). Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online. University of Chicago Press.

Mollick, E. (2023, July 15). How to use AI to do stuff: An opinionated guide. One Useful Thing.

Oregon State Ecampus. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Tools.

Have you found yourself worried or overwhelmed in thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence for your discipline? Whether, for example, your department’s approaches to teaching basic skills such as library research and source evaluation still hold up? You’re not alone. As we enter another school year, many educators continue to think deeply about questions of truth and misinformation, creativity, and how large language model (LLM) tools such as chatbots are reshaping higher education. Along with our students, faculty (oh, and instructional designers) must consider new paradigms for our collective media literacy.

Here’s a quick backstory for this two-part post. In late spring, shortly after the “stable release” of ChatGPT to iOS, I started chatting with bot model GPT-3.5, which innovator Ethan Mollick describes as “very fast and pretty solid at writing and coding tasks,” if a bit lacking in personality. Other, internet-connected models, such as Bing, have made headlines for their resourcefulness and darker, erratic tendencies. But so far, access to GPT-4 remains limited, and I wanted to better understand the more popular engine’s capabilities. At the time, I was preparing a workshop for a creative writing conference. So, I asked ChatGPT to write a short story in the modern style of George Saunders, based in part on historical events. The chatbot’s response, a brief burst of prose it titled “Language Unleashed,” read almost nothing like Saunders. Still, it got my participants talking about questions of authorship, originality, representation, etc. Check, check, check.

The next time I sat down with the GPT-3.5, things went a little more off-script.

One faculty developer working with Ecampus had asked our team about establishing learning norms in a 200-level course dealing with sensitive subject matter. As a writing instructor, I had bookmarked a few resources in this vein, including strategies from the University of Colorado Boulder. So, I asked ChatGPT to create a bibliographic citation of Creating Collaborative Classroom Norms, which it did with the usual lightning speed. Then I got curious about what else this AI model could do, as my colleagues Philip Chambers and Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez have been exploring. Could ChatGPT point me to some good resources for faculty on setting norms for learning in online college classes?

“Certainly!” came the cheery reply, along with a summary of five sources that would provide me with “valuable information and guidance” (see Image 1). Noting OpenAI’s fine-print caveat (“ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”), I began opening each link, expecting to be teleported to university teaching centers across the country. Except none of the tabs would load properly.

“Sorry we can’t find what you’re looking for,” reported Inside Higher Ed. “Try these resources instead,” suggested Stanford’s Teaching Commons. A closer look with Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine confirmed that the five sources in question were, like “Language Unleashed,” entirely fictitious.

An early chat with ChatGPT-3.5, asking whether the chatbot can point the author to some good resources for faculty on setting classroom norms for learning in online college classes. "Certainly," replies ChatGPT, in recommending five sources that "should provide you with valuable information and guidance."

Image 1: An early, hallucinatory chat with ChatGPT-3.5

As Mollick would explain months later: “it is very easy for the AI to ‘hallucinate’ and generate plausible facts. It can generate entirely false content that is utterly convincing. Let me emphasize that: AI lies continuously and well. Every fact or piece of information it tells you may be incorrect. You will need to check it all.”

The fabrications and limitations of chatbots lacking real-time access to the ever-expanding web have by now been well-documented. But as an early adopter, the speed and confidence ChatGPT brought to the task of inventing and describing fake sources felt unnerving. And without better guideposts for verification, I expect students less familiar with the evolution of AI will continue to experience confusion, or worse. As the Post recently reported, chatbots can easily say offensive things and act in culturally-biased ways—”a reminder that they’ve ingested some of the ugliest material the internet has to offer, and they lack the independent judgment to filter that out.”

Just how, exactly, we’re supposed to “check it all” happens to be the subject of a lively, forthcoming collaboration from two education researchers who have been following the intersection of new media and misinformation for decades.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post with the second installment of “Media Literacy in the Age of AI,” a review of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (University of Chicago Press, November 2023).

References

Mollick, E. (2023, July 15). How to use AI to do stuff: An opinionated guide. One Useful Thing.

Wroe, T., & Volckens, J. (2022, January). Creating collaborative classroom norms. Office of Faculty Affairs, University of Colorado Boulder.

Yu Chen, S., Tenjarla, R., Oremus , W., & Harris, T. (2023, August 31). How to talk to an AI chatbot. The Washington Post.

Introduction

We’ve all heard by now of ChatGPT, the large language model-based chat bot that can seemingly answer most any question you present it. What if there were a way to provide this functionality to students on their learning management system, and it could answer questions they had about course content? Sure, this would not completely replace the instructor, nor would it be intended to. Instead, for quick course content questions, a chatbot with access to all course materials could provide students with speedy feedback and clarifications in far less time than the standard turnaround required through the usual channels. Of course, more involved questions about assignments and course content questions outside of the scope of course materials would be more suited to the instructor, and the exact usage of a tool like this would need to be explained, as with anything.

Such a tool could be a useful addition to an online course because not only could it potentially save a lot of time, but it could also keep students on the learning platform instead of using a 3rd-party solution to answer questions as is the suspected case right now with currently available chatbots.

To find out what this would look like, I researched a bit on potential LLM chatbot candidates, and came up with a plan to integrate one into a Canvas page.

Disclaimer!
This is simply a proof of concept, and is not in production due to certain unknowns such as origin of the initial training data, CPU-bound performance, and pedagogical implications. See the Limitations and Considerations section for more details.

How it works

The main powerhouse behind this is an open source, Large Language Model (LLM) called privateGPT. privateGPT is designed to let you “ask questions to your documents” offline, with privacy as the goal. It therefore seemed like the best way to test this concept out. The owner of the privateGPT repository, Iván Martínez, notes that privacy is prioritized over accuracy. To quote the ReadMe file from GitHub:

100% private, no data leaves your execution environment at any point. You can ingest documents and ask questions without an internet connection!
privateGPT, GitHub Site

privateGPT, at the time of writing, was licensed under the Apache-2.0 license, but during this test, no modifications were made to the privateGPT code. Initially, when you run privateGPT, train it on your documents, and ask it questions, you are doing all of this locally through a command line interface in a terminal window. This obviously will not do if we want to integrate it into something like Canvas, so additional tools needed to be built to bridge the gap.

I therefore set about making two additional pieces of software: a web-interface chat box that would later be embedded into a Canvas page, and a small application to connect what the student would type in the chat box to privateGPT, then strip irrelevant data from its response (such as redundant words like “answer” or listing the source documents for the answer) and push that back to the chat box.

*A diagram showing how the front-end of the system (what the user sees) interacts with the back-end of the system (what the user does not see). Self-creation.*

Once created, the web interface portion, running locally, allows us to plug it into a Canvas page, like so:

*A screenshot showing regular Canvas text on the left, and the chat box interface on the right, connected to the LLM.*

Testing how it works

To begin, I let the LLM ‘ingest’ the Ecampus Essentials document provided to course developers on the Ecampus website. Then I asked some questions to test it out, one of which was: “What are the Ecampus Essentials?”

I am not sure what I expected here, as it is quite an open ended question, only that it would scan its trained model data and the ingested files looking for an answer. After a while (edited for time) the bot responded:

A video showing the result of asking the bot “What are the Ecampus Essentials?”

A successful result! It has indeed pulled text from the Ecampus Essentials document, but interestingly has also paraphrased certain parts of it as well. Perhaps this is down to the amount of text it is capable of generating, along with the model that was initially selected.

A longer text example

So what happens if you give it a longer text, such as an OpenStax textbook? Would it be able to answer questions students might have about course content inside the book?

To find out, I gave the chatbot the OpenStax textbook Calculus 1, which you can download for free at the OpenStax website. No modifications were made to this text.

Then I asked the chatbot some calculus questions to see what it came up with:

*Asking two questions about certain topics in the OpenStax Calculus 1 book.*

It would appear that if students had any questions about mathematical theory, they could get a nice (and potentially accurate) summary from a chatbot such as this. Though this brings up some pedagogical considerations such as: would this make students less likely to read textbooks? Would this be able to search for answers to quiz questions and/or assignment problems? It is already common to ask ChatGPT to provide summaries and discussion board replies, would this bot function in much the same way?

Asking the chatbot to calculate things, however, is where one would run into the current limitations of the program, as it is not designed for that. Simple sums such as “1 + 1” return the correct answer, as this is part of the training data or otherwise common knowledge. Asking it to do something like calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle using Pythagorus’ theorem will not be successful (even using a textbook example of 3² + 4² = c²). The bot will attempt to give an answer, but its accuracy will vary wildly based on the data given to it. I could not get it to give me the correct response, but that was expected as this was not in the ingested documentation.

Limitations and Considerations

OK, so it’s not all perfect – far from it, in fact! The version of privateGPT I was using, while impressive, had some interesting quirks in certain responses. Responses were never identical either, but perhaps that is to be expected from a generative LLM. Still, this would require further investigation and testing in a production-ready model.

How regular and substantive interaction (RSI) might be affected is an important point to consider, as a more capable chatbot could impact the student-instructor Q&A discussion board side of things without prior planning on intended usage.

A major technical issue was that I was limited to using the central processing unit (CPU) instead of the much faster graphics processing unit (GPU) used in other LLMs and generative AI tools. This meant that the time between the question being sent and the answer being generated was far higher than desired. As of writing, there appears to be a way to switch privateGPT to GPU instead, which would greatly increase performance on systems with a modern GPU. The processing power required for a chatbot that more than one user would interact with simultaneously would be substantial.

Additionally, the incorporation of a chatbot like this has some other pedagogical implications, such as how the program would respond to questions related to assignment answers, which would need to be researched.

We also need to consider the technical skill required to create and upkeep a chatbot. Despite going through all of this, I am no Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning expert; a dedicated team would be required to maintain the chatbot’s functionality to a high-enough standard.

Conclusion

In the end, the purpose of this little project was to test if this could be a tool students might find useful and could help them with content questions faster than contacting the instructor. From the small number of tests I conducted, it is very promising, and perhaps a properly built version could be used as a private alternative to ChatGPT, which is already being used by students for this very purpose. A major limitation was running the program from a single computer with consumer components made 3 years ago. With modern hardware and software – perhaps a first-party integrated version built directly into a learning management system like Canvas – students could be provided with their own course- or platform-specific chatbot for course documents and texts.

If you can see any additional uses, or potential benefits or downsides to something like this, leave a comment!

Notes

Martínez Toro, I., Gallego Vico, D., & Orgaz, P. (2023). PrivateGPT [Computer software]. https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT.
“Calculus 1” is copyrighted by Rice University and licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).

As educators and instructional designers, one of our tasks is to create online learning environments that students can comfortably use to complete their course activities effectively. These platforms need to be designed in such a way as to minimize extraneous cognitive load and maximize generative processing: that is, making sure that the learners’ efforts are spent on understanding and applying the instructional material and not on figuring out how to use the website or app. Research and practice in User Experience (UX) design – more specifically, usability – can give us insights that we can apply to improve our course page design and organization.

Getting Started: General Recommendations

Steve Krug, in his classic book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, explains that, in order for a website or app to be easy to use, the essential principle can be stated as “don’t make me think” (Krug, 2014). That may sound like a strange principle in an educational context, but what Krug referred to is precisely the need to avoid wasting the users’ cognitive resources on how a particular platform works (thus reducing extraneous cognitive load), and to make them feel comfortable using that product (enhancing generative processing). When looking at a web page or app, it should be, as much as possible, obvious what information is on there, how it is organized, what can be clicked on, or where to start; this way, the user can focus on the task at hand.

Krug (2014) provided a few guidelines for ensuring that the users effortlessly see and understand what we want them to:

Use conventions: Using standardized patterns makes it easier to see them quickly and to know what to do. Thus, in online courses, it helps to have consistency in how the pages are designed and organized: consider using a template and having standard conventions within a program or institution.
Create effective visual hierarchies: The visual cues should represent the actual relationships between the things on the page. For instance, the more important elements are larger, and the connected parts are grouped together on the page or designed in the same style. This saves the user effort in the selection and organization processes in the working memory.
Separate the content into clearly defined areas: If the content is divided into areas, each with a specific purpose, the page is easier to parse, and the user can quickly select the parts that are the most relevant to them.
Make it obvious what is clickable: Figuring out the next thing to click is one of the main things that users do in a digital environment; hence, the designer must make this a painless process. This can be done through shape, location or formatting—for example, buttons can help emphasize important linked content.
Eliminate distractions: Too much complexity on a page can be frustrating and impinges on the users’ ability to perform their tasks effectively. Thus, we need to avoid having too many things that are “clamoring for your attention” (Krug, 2014, Chapter 3). This is consistent with the coherence principle of multimedia learning, which states that elements that do not support the learning goal should be kept to a minimum and that clutter should be avoided. Related to this, usability experts recommend avoiding repeating a link on the same page because of potential cognitive overload. This article from the Nielsen Norman Group explains why duplicate links are a bad idea, and when they might be appropriate.
Format text to support scanning: Users often need to scan pages to find what they want. We can do a few things towards this goal: include well-written headings, with clear formatting differences between the different levels and appropriate positioning close to the text they head; make the paragraphs short; use bulleted lists; and highlight key terms.

Putting It to the Test: A UX Study in Higher Education

The online learning field has yet to give much attention to UX testing. However, a team from Penn State has recently published a book chapter describing a think-aloud study with online learners at their institution (Gregg et al., 2020). Here is a brief description of their findings and implications for design:

Avoid naming ambiguities – keep wording clear and consistent, and use identical terms for an item throughout the course (e.g., “L07”, “Lesson07)
Minimize multiple interfaces – avoid adding another tool/platform if it does not bring significant benefits.
Design within the conventions of the LMS – for example, avoid using both “units” and “lessons” in a course; stick to the LMS structure and naming conventions as much as possible.
Group related information together – for example, instead of having pieces of project information in different places, put them all on one page and link to that when needed.
Consider consistent design standards throughout the University – different departments may have their own way of doing things, but it is best to have some standards across all classes.

Are you interested in conducting UX testing with your students? Good news: Gregg et al. (2020) also reflected on their process and generated advice for conducting such testing, which is included in their chapter and related papers. You can always start small! As Krug (2014, Chapter 9) noted, “Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none. Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site”.

References

Gregg, A., Reid, R., Aldemir, T., Gray, J., Frederick, M., & Garbrick, A. (2020). Think-Aloud Observations to Improve Online Course Design: A Case Example and “How-to” Guide. In M. Schmidt, A. A. Tawfik, I. Jahnke, & Y. Earnshaw (Eds.), Learner and User Experience Research: An Introduction for the Field of Learning Design & Technology. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/ux/15_think_aloud_obser

Krug, S. (2014). Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to Web usability. New Riders, Peachpit, Pearson Education.

Loranger, H. (2016). The same link twice on the same page: Do duplicates help or hurt? Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/duplicate-links/

My family and I were preparing for a move. We packed up some of our things, removing extraneous items from our walls and surfaces and preparing our house to list and show. Not willing to part with these things, we rented a small storage unit to temporarily warehouse all this extra “stuff.” Well, as it turned out, we ended up not moving at all, and after a few months went to clear out the storage unit and retrieve our extra things. The funny thing was, we could hardly remember what had gone in there, and as it turns out, we did not miss most of the items we had packed away. We ended up selling most of what was in that storage unit, and shortly thereafter, we did even more “spring cleaning.” One of the bedrooms, which also doubles an office, needed particular attention. The space was dysfunctional, in that multiple doors and drawers were blocked from fully opening. After a little purging and reorganization this room now functions beautifully, with enough space to open every door and drawer. I have been calling this process “moving back into our own house,” and it’s been a joy to rethink, reorganize, and reclaim our living spaces.

Course Design Connection

As I have been working with more instructors who are redeveloping existing courses, I have been trying to bring this mindset into my instructional design work. How can we reclaim our online learning spaces and make them more inviting and functional? How can we help learners open all the proverbial doors and operate fully within the learning environment? You guessed it: While our first instinct might be to add more to the course, the answer might lie in the other direction. With a little editing and a keen eye on alignment, we can very intentionally remove things from our courses that might be needless or even distracting. We can also rearrange our pages and modules to maximize our learner’s attention.

Memory and Course Design

Our working memories, according to Cowan (2010), can only store 3-5 meaningful items at a time. Thus, it becomes essential to consider what is genuinely necessary on any given LMS page. If we focus on helping learners to achieve the learning outcomes when choosing the content to keep in each module, we can intentionally remove distractors. There can be a place for tangential or supplemental information, but those items should not live in the limelight. To help get us started on this “cleaning process,” we can ask ourselves a few simple questions. Are there big-ticket items (assignments, discussions, readings) that are not directly helping learners reach the outcomes? Are we formatting pages and arranging content in beneficial and progressive ways? Might we express longer bodies of text in ways that are more concisely or clearly? Can we break text up with related visuals? Below are some tips to help guide your process as you “clean” up your course and direct your learners where to focus.

Cut out the Bigger Extraneous Content

It is simple to assume that for your learners to meet the course outcomes, they must read and comprehend many things and complete a wide variety of assignments. When planning your learning activities, it’s crucial to keep in mind the limits of the brain and also that giving learners opportunities to practice applying content will be more successful than asking them to memorize and restate it. For courses with dense content, lean into your course outcomes to guide your editing process. Focusing on the objectives can help you remove extraneous readings and activities. This will allow your learners to concentrate on the key points. (Cowden & Sze, 2012)

Review Instructions

For the items you choose to keep in your course, reviewing assignment instructions, and discussion prompts is helpful. Consider inviting a non-expert to read these items. An outside eye might help you to simplify what you are asking your learners to accomplish by calling to your attention any points of confusion. You may be tempted to add more detail, but try to figure out where you can remove text when possible. Why use a paragraph to explain something that only needs a few sentences? Simplifying your language can enable learners to get to the point faster. (For more on this, see the post by intern Aimee L. Lomeli Garcia about Improving Readability). When reviewing your instructions and prompts, think about what learners want to know:

· What should they pay attention to?

· Where do they start?

· What do they do next?

· What is expected?

· How are they being assessed/graded?

(Grennan, 2018)

Utilize Best Practices for Formatting

Use native formatting tools like styles, headers, and lists to help visually break up content and make it more approachable. Here are some examples:

If I were to list my favorite animals here without a list, it would look like this: dogs, turtles, hummingbirds, frogs, elephants, and cheetahs.

Suppose I give you that same list using a header and number list format. In that case, it becomes much easier to digest mentally, and it looks nicer on the page:

Julie’s Favorite Animals

Dogs
Turtles
Hummingbirds
Frogs
Elephants
Cheetahs

Provide High-Level Overviews

If an assignment does need a more thorough explanation, and your instructions are running long, you can always create a high-level overview, calling out the main points of the page. You could place this in a call-out box or its own section (preferably at the top). This is where learners can quickly look for reminders about what to do next and how to do it. Providing a high-level overview alongside detailed instructions will cater to a variety of learning preferences and help set up your learners for success.

Module Organization

Scaling up beyond single pages and assignments to module organization, consider the order you want learners to encounter ideas and accomplish tasks. Don’t be afraid to move pages around within your modules to help learners find the most efficient and helpful pathway through your material (Shift Elearning, n.d.).

Wrapping It Up

The culture of “more is better” is pervasive, and it’s almost always easier to add rather than to remove information. In online learning, when we buy into the “culture of more” we can impede the success of our learners. But more isn’t always better; sometimes more is just more. Instead, don’t be afraid to dust off that delete button and start reclaiming and reorganizing your course for ultimate learner success. Sometimes less is best. For more on the art of subtraction, see Elisabeth McBrien’s blog post from February of 2022.

References

Cowan, N. (2010). The magical mystery four. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 51–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721409359277

Cowden, P., & Sze, S. (2012). ONLINE LEARNING: THE CONCEPT OF LESS IS MORE. Allied Academies International Conference.Academy of Information and Management Sciences.Proceedings, 16(2), 1-6. https://oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/online-learning-concept-less-is-more/docview/1272095325/se-2

Grennan, H. (2018, April 30). Why less is more in Elearning. Belvista Studios – eLearning Blog. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from http://blog.belvistastudios.com/2018/04/why-less-is-more-in-elearning.html

Lomeli Garcia, A. L. (2023, January 17). Five Tips on Improving Readability in Your Courses. Ecampus Course Development and training. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/inspire/inspire/2023/01/17/five-tips-on-improving-readability-in-your-courses/

McBrien, E. (2022, February 24). Course design challenge: Try subtraction. Ecampus Course Development and training. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/inspire/inspire/2022/02/24/course-design-challenge-try-subtraction/

Parker, R. (2022, June 30). Why less is more for e-learning course materials. Synergy Learning. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from https://synergy-learning.com/blog/why-less-is-sometimes-more-when-it-comes-to-your-e-learning-course-materials/

Shift Elearning. (n.d.). The art of simplification in Elearning Design. The Art of Simplification in eLearning Design. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/the-art-of-simplification-in-elearning-design

University of Waterloo, Queen’s University, & University of Toronto; and Conestoga Colleg (n.d.). Module 3: Quality course structure and content. In High Quality Online Courses . essay, Pressbooks Open Library, from https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/hqoc/chapter/3-1-module-overview/

Announcements are among the most basic yet effective ways to communicate with students, whether in person or online. In our Ecampus asynchronous online courses, announcements are often the primary way instructors pass on important information to students and can be a formidable tool for fostering instructor presence. They can be used to welcome and orient students, summarize and reiterate key concepts, and remind students about upcoming assignments, projects, and exams. Some instructors send out weekly announcements that reflect on the prior week and provide general feedback on student performance, while others only use announcements for course related logistics such as schedule changes or instructor unavailability. No matter how you use announcements, the following suggestions can help ensure you are leveraging the power of the announcements feature in Canvas.

Best Practices

Keep announcements concise. Students have a limited amount of cognitive capacity and lengthy announcements may not be read in full.
- Consider your purpose before composing and resist the urge to rehash what you have written elsewhere.
- If you need to remind students of an assignment, consider linking to the instructions rather than rehashing them in the body of the announcement.
Send announcements on a regular schedule. If you plan to send weekly announcements, do so on the same day of the week and general time if possible.
- Sending out a recap of the prior week and preview of what to expect in the upcoming week is most valuable if sent at the beginning of the week. If you start your course week on Monday, send your announcements on Monday mornings.

Give announcements meaningful titles to reflect the content of the announcement. Labeling announcements as “week X update”, “Important date change for assignment X”, or another such descriptive title will help students find the correct announcement if they need to revisit it.

Canvas Tips

Delete old announcements from imported course content. Old announcements from previous courses or instructors copy over when a Canvas course is copied and are visible to students in the announcements tab unless deleted, including your own prior term announcements or those from a previous instructor. This could be very confusing for students as some instructors provide the class with quiz or test answers or information about exams in announcements that may be disadvantageous for current term students to read.

Schedule out your announcements in advance using ‘delay posting’ (see image below). If you do want to reuse announcements imported from a previous term, be sure to open each message, edit the content for the current term, and choose when you would like to post each one. New announcements can also be scheduled to post on whatever day and time you choose.

You can set up your homepage to show recent announcements at the top of the page, ensuring students see them when logging into the course (see below). Go to the main Settings menu item at the bottom left course menu. From there, scroll down and click the “more options” link at the bottom. You’ll then see further course options- click the box next to “Show recent announcements…” and then choose how many to display. Don’t forget to save your choices by clicking “Update Course Details”.

We begin with a ghost story.

This story may sound familiar. It begins in a space of learning. You enter as a student. You know you will be in this place for the next two or three months with other students and an instructor. But although you know you are all there in the same space, you can’t see or hear any other students. You wander alone until you discover a pre-recorded message telling you what to do. This should be reassuring, but the person in the video doesn’t look like the instructor listed on your course schedule.

“Welcome,” says the man in the video. “In this course you will learn how to apply theoretical concepts in the real world.”

You wander around the space. An announcement appears, welcoming you to the course. It includes a picture of the instructor listed on your schedule.

“So they do exist,” you think to yourself. And yet, as you look around, all the recordings you see are of someone else. This isn’t really their class, you realize. Someone else built this place. It’s unsettling to be in this space and feel like your instructor doesn’t belong here. Maybe you don’t belong here either.

Eventually, you find the one place where you can talk to other students, but even this space feels strange and isolating. There’s writing on the wall.

Please introduce yourself.

You can see writing by other students in the class, but the instructor never makes a comment. You come back to this room several times during the term to write more, as directed. You write replies to what other students have written, but it doesn’t really feel like talking. It feels like a performance, judged by the unseen, unheard instructor who exists only in writing.

The weeks go by. You listen to a disembodied voice talking over a slideshow lecture. Your instructor makes their ghostly presence known through weekly announcements and in the grades that appear on your homework. On one assignment, you see a comment in addition to the grade:

If you would like to talk to me about your grade, please make an appointment to meet during my office hours.

But you don’t. The idea of meeting your mysterious instructor is more terrifying than a bad grade.

The term ends, and the doors open for the students to leave. Even though you did well, you feel unsatisfied with the experience. You can’t wait to leave and put this strange, unsettling experience behind you. You learned what you were supposed to learn, but the instructor was a ghost; their presence an afterimage of a creator from long ago. Months later, you realize you’ve forgotten your instructor’s name, but you never forget the man in the videos.

My ghost story was partly inspired by the story I read last year about automated courses that are still using the videos created by someone who has since passed away. Sometimes it takes a true story like this to remind us that students know when an online instructor is present, and when they are absent. They know what it’s like to be taught by a ghost–even if that instructor is still living. This story was also a stark reminder to me as an instructional designer that it doesn’t matter how well-designed a course is if the students do not feel like the instructor is actually there and present with these students, while the course is running.

What it means for an instructor to be present in an online course was challenged by the forced shift to online teaching in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. Many teachers used Zoom or other web conferencing software to meet with students during their scheduled class times, to varying degrees of success, and varying degrees of exhaustion. Suddenly, we were not in a classroom or office and neither were our students. We saw bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, cars, parks, and parking lots. We saw parents and kids and intrusive cats. We saw a lot of camera malfunctions, heard a lot of microphone feedback, and experienced many technical difficulties.

But because this was a global crisis, there was a collective understanding that it is more important to be present than to be perfect. While online students may have already experienced the ghost in the course shell, for the first time, instructors were experiencing the other side of that ghost story. Previously embodied in a physical classroom, they were now reduced to digital images, speaking into the void of black boxes; ghosts of their former selves. They found the experience just as eerie as their students. And just like a ghost who struggles to get a message to their loved ones from beyond the grave, a lot of instructors struggled to find a way to reach their students from beyond the classroom.

In the early days of lockdown, a colleague of mine asked for help with one of his online course videos. He always recorded his video announcements the same way he recorded his lectures: inside his office, wearing a suit, looking very formal and professional. This time he wanted to do something different. He wanted to show his students that he was also feeling the strain of lockdown, and that they were all in this lockdown together. An avid walker himself, he decided that he wanted to encourage his students to go for a walk outside, and then show himself walking outside.

“How can I do that?” he asked.

He had no idea how to make a video that did that, because he’d never seen anyone make a video like that–and no one to teach him.

“Go for a walk,” I told him. “Record a video on your phone while you’re walking and send it to me–I’ll do the rest.”

That experience led me to think about how students engage with video content that is formal and compare that to how they interact with content that is informal. Instructors can tap into what makes some of the best internet content these days–authenticity and informality–if they know how. Video is the easiest and most successful way to create authentic presence and build a sense of community with the students taking the course, and it only requires using one technology that most people use every day: a smart phone.

As an instructional designer, I want to enable and empower the faculty I work with, and that includes providing resources and support to prepare them to deliver their course as well assist with the design. I can find many articles written for educators about how to create home recording studios for professional-looking lecture videos, but I have yet to find an article that explicitly focuses on advising faculty how to make informal videos for course delivery purposes that goes beyond the theoretical to the practical, so I decided to write one.

I’m going to focus on TikTok as the model for these videos not because I think faculty should be on TikTok, but because TikTok changed the game for authentic video engagement. Like many of my generation, I’m not on TikTok, and I needed my younger Gen Z friends to explain it to me. (PBS just premiered a documentary on TikTok as explained by Gen Z, so I am clearly not alone in this). But what I do understand, and what I think faculty can bring to their course videos, is the importance of the creator-viewer dynamic popularized by TikTok.

What goes viral on TikTok tends to encapsulate a mood, and not require any particular technical expertise to create–like the video by the guy who recorded himself on his skateboard, sipping cranberry juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac. That kind of realness is increasingly important in a digital age where there’s a growing disconnect between “brand” and “authenticity.” It’s why corporations like Wal-Mart have moved from brand partnerships with well-known influencers on Instagram to creating their own “influencer” platform where they will pay for “real” testimonials of their products, and NBCUniversal just announced a initiative with TikTok stars to create television shows.

So how can instructional designers, media producers, and instructors tap into this zeitgeist? How do you prove to your students that you’re not a ghost lurking in the course shell? Good design for videos is often invisible–just like good design in an online course–because we experience them as a whole and they have a cumulative effect. But by looking at examples, we can identify specific elements that are associated with TikTok videos that are visually distinct from traditional videos. They also serve a different purpose, and that purpose can be supplemental to a traditional video. I’ve separated out eight individual elements in the two video examples where the design decision has a different effect on the audience.

Design Element	YouTube	TikTok
Purpose	Educational/entertainment	Announcement/call to action
Orientation	Horizontal (optimal for viewing on a television or desktop browser)	Vertical (optimal for recording and viewing on a phone)
Setting	In a studio	On location
Lighting Source	Stage/studio overhead	Hand-held ring light
Camera Angles	Medium, multiple shots from multiple camera angles	Medium, close up, extreme close up, one continuous shot
Wardrobe	“Formal”	“Casual”
Audience	Speaking to a group	Speaking to an individual
Length	15 minutes	1 minute

There’s one additional element that is important to understanding why TikTok creates an immediacy with the viewer even beyond the timeliness of the video. TikTok videos are both ephemeral (in the sense that social media platforms are themselves ephemeral and therefore so is the content) and time-specific (in the sense that the content is only relevant until the event takes place). This time-specific framing and call to community is what makes the video feel so immediate and inclusive. Instructors often try to connect with students in this way through announcements or discussion boards, but it is far more difficult to try to accomplish with those tools. Video, because it is visual, and because it is such a large part of students’ daily lives, is able to make that connection far more easily.

–

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: here are some strategies for how to create a video with TikTok vibes using existing pre-scripted announcements.

Record your video on your phone. You do not need to have the latest iPhone or Pixel with a 4k camera. Remember that amateur videos are better than professional-looking videos in creating the “person to person” connection. Your students don’t all have the latest phone, and so they don’t expect you to either. There are a couple of different ways to get video from your phone to your online course. At Oregon State, we use Kaltura to host videos, and you can either upload a video from your phone directly to Kaltura, or record your video using the Zoom app on your phone, which will automatically upload to Kaltura.
Keep it current. Students want to feel like their instructors are existing at the same moment in time as they are and are in a specific location–even if it’s not in the same location as they are. You can comment on the weather or changing of the seasons. And don’t hesitate to go outside! Nothing signifies real time than the weather, and think of the impact of a term-long video sequence in front of a tree as it goes from green summer, to red fall, and finally bare winter. If there are events happening on OSU’s campus, or holidays, those are also good opportunities to connect with students at a specific time.
Keep it short. Most of the video content students consume on social media platforms is under 5 minutes. Any longer than that and you risk losing their attention. Keeping the videos short reinforces their purpose as timely, especially if they see a new video every week.
Make students feel “seen.” You might comment on work that has been received, or point to meaningful discussion board posts they might have missed. You might address a question that a student brought up during office hours or by email. Students value this kind of acknowledgement, even if they are not one of the students being acknowledged. Even the tone you use in recording to the video can create that relationship between speaker and audience. Talk to the camera as if it is a person, and not just a recording device. Students want to feel like you are talking to them, not at them.
Change the way they see you–visually. If all of your videos in your class are studio productions or voiceover slideshows, your students have only one idea of what you are like. Move locations. If your students only see you behind a desk or in the studio, find another location. If you can find a location that relates to the week’s topic, fantastic, but even going to your living room or kitchen will be a welcome change. Change your wardrobe. Go casual. If your formal lecture videos have you in a suit and tie in a library, dress down in a fleece or t-shirt and go outside the office–or even outdoors! (climate YMMV). Even being in a kitchen, living room, or patio will create an informality that feels authentic.

One of the major advantages of digital learning is that we can ensure our materials are accessible to all students. As such, at Ecampus, we are striving – and encouraging others to strive – for universal design, that is, design that anyone can use comfortably regardless of any impairments. In past posts, we have covered various ways of improving accessibility in a course, including how to fix PowerPoint or Word files. Today I’d like to focus on making Canvas pages accessible and making use of the on-page Accessibility Checker available in the Canvas Rich Content Editor.

Common Issues

Here are the main things you can do to ensure your Canvas pages (including assignments, discussions etc.) are accessible:

Use proper hierarchy of headings and do not skip heading levels. You want to start with Heading 2 (Heading 1 is the title), then subordinate to that will be Heading 3 and so on. This is especially useful for screen reader users because it helps with logical page navigation. Some people choose their headings by the font size – not a good idea! If you want to adjust the size of your text, use the “Font sizes” option in the editor, after designating the correct heading level.
Add an alt text description to any image or mark it as decorative. This is helpful for screen reader users and people for whom the images are not loading.
Make the link names descriptive, rather than just pasting the url. For example, you would write Student Resources instead of https://experience.oregonstate.edu/resources. Also, avoid linking “click here” type of text. This helps screen reader users (which would read a url letter by letter), and it also makes it easier for everyone to scan the page and find the needed information.
Ensure good color contrast. I often see instructors making their text colorful – in particular, red seems to be very popular. Indeed, a touch of color can make the page more visually pleasing and help bring out headings or important information! The danger lies in using colors that don’t have enough contrast with the background. This is especially problematic for people with less-than-optimal eyesight, but good contrast really just makes it easier for all of us to read. Also, a word of caution: Canvas has recently rolled out dark mode for mobile platforms and many people like to use it. Some colored or highlighted text may not look clear in dark mode.
Add caption and header row to tables. These are extremely helpful for screen reader users, and the caption helps everyone to quickly see what the table is about. To add these things, you actually have to rely on the on-page accessibility checker – it will flag the issues and walk you through fixing them. While we’re on the subject of tables, you also want to avoid complex tables with merged cells because they are hard to navigate for a screen reader.
Avoid underlining text. Underlining is normally reserved for links. Try using other means of highlighting information, such as bold, italics or caps.

Find and Fix

Canvas has a very useful tool that can help you find some accessibility issues as you edit your page. At the bottom of the editor, the icon representing a human in a circle will show notification when something is amiss.

Screenshot of bottom of editor showing the accessibility checker icon

When you click on that icon, the checker will open on the right-hand side, explaining each issue and allowing you to fix it right there.

Screenshot of the accessibility checker dialog window

This tool can find:

Skipped heading levels/starting with the wrong heading
Missing alt text
Insufficient color contrast – you can find a suitable color right here
Missing table caption and header row

It will NOT flag poorly formatted links or underlined text. So, for these issues, you’ll have to watch out yourself!

For a full list of problems verified by this checker, see this article from Canvas Community.

When you’ve finished building your course, you can also use UDOIT, the global accessibility checker, or Ally, if your institution has installed it. These tools can help you find additional problems, including embedded materials with accessibility issues.

To conclude, following these simple rules can greatly enhance the usability of your Canvas course. The built-in accessibility checker will help you spot and fix some common issues. Once you start paying attention, building instructional content with accessibility in mind will become second nature!

Ashlee M. C. Foster, MSEd | Instructional Design Specialist | Oregon State University Ecampus

This is the final installment of a three-part series on project-based learning. The first two articles, Architecture for Authenticity and Mindful Design, explore the foundational elements of project-based learning. This article shifts our attention to generating practical application ideas for your unique course. This series will conclude with a showcase of an exemplary Ecampus course project.

Over the last couple of years, as an instructional designer, I have observed my faculty developers shifting how they assess student learning. Frequent and varied low-stakes assessments are replacing high-stakes exams, in their courses. Therefore, students increasingly have more opportunities to actively engage in meaningful ways. What an exciting time!

Activity Ideas

Instructors commonly express that adopting a new, emerging, or unfamiliar pedagogical approach can be challenging for two reasons: 1) identifying an appropriate activity and 2) thoughtfully designing the activity into a course. Sometimes a brainstorming session is just the ticket. Here are a few activity ideas to get you started.

Title	Description	Resource
Oral History	Students pose a problem steeped with historical significance (e.g., racism). Students conduct research using primary sources which corroborate and contextualize the issue. Experts and/or those with direct/indirect experience are interviewed. Interviews are documented with multimedia.	Oregon State University SCARC Oral History Program
Renewable Course Materials	Students write, design, and edit a course website that takes the place of a course textbook.	Open Pedagogy Notebook
App Lab	Students collaboratively design an application that will serve a relevant societal need, resolve barriers, or fix a problem.	CODE
Problem solved!	Students select a problem that affects the local, regional, state, national, or global community and conduct research. Students collaboratively create scenarios that authentically contextualize the problem. Students develop solutions that utilize the main course concepts while engaging with the problem within a real-world context.	Oregon State University Bioenergy Summer Bridge Program
GenderMag Project	GenderMagis a process that guides individuals/groups through any form of technology (e.g., websites, software, systems) to find gender inclusivity “bugs.” After going through the GenderMag process, the investigators can then provide recommendations and fix the bugs.	The GenderMag Project

Take a moment to explore a few of the following resources for additional project ideas:

While exploring project-based activities and/or assessments, it may also be helpful to consider the following questions:

Does this activity align with the course learning outcomes?
What type of prerequisite knowledge and skills do students need?
What types of knowledge and skills will students need after completing the project?
Can the activity be modified/customized to fit the needs of the course?
What strategies will be employed to foster authentic learning?
What strategies can be used to guide and/or coach teams through the activity?
How will the activity foster equitable engagement and active participation?
What strategies can be utilized to nurture and build a strong learning community?

Project Spotlight

Becky Crandall

Becky is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Adult and Higher Education (AHE) program at Oregon State University. We had the pleasure of collaborating on the Ecampus course development for AHE 623, Contemporary Issues in Higher Education. With two decades of experience in postsecondary settings, Becky came to the table with a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and strong perspectives grounded in social justice, all of which situated her to create a high-quality, engaging, and inclusive Ecampus course. When interviewing her for this article, she shared her pedagogical approach to teaching online and hybrid courses, which provides a meaningful context for the project design

“At the start of every term, I take time to explain the idea that shapes the approach I take as an educator and the expectations that I have of the class: ‘we are a community.’ Inspired by educational heroes like Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Marcia Baxter Magolda, as well as the excellent teachers who shaped me as a student, I take a constructivist approach to teaching. I also center the ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ of the material we cover through active learning exercises that create space for students to reflect on their learning and its applicability to the real world. Admittedly, such active learning exercises are engaging. Research also highlights their effectiveness as a pedagogical strategy. More importantly, however, they provide a means of disrupting power structures within the classroom (i.e., the students are positioned as experts too), and they serve as mechanisms through which the students and I can bring our full selves to the course.” ~Becky Crandall

The Project

In AHE 623, students complete a term-long project entitled the “Mini-Conference.” The project situates students as the experts, “by disrupting traditional classroom power structures” and provides an opportunity to “simulate the kind of proposal writing and presenting they would do at a professional conference.” The project’s intended goal is to foster deep learning through the exploration of contemporary real-world higher education issues.

Design

The project is a staged design with incremental milestones throughout the 11-week academic term. The project design mimics the process of a professional conference, from proposal to presentation. The project consists of “two elements: (1) a conference proposal that included an abstract, learning outcomes, a literature review, policy and/or practice implications, and a presentation outline and (2) a 20-minute presentation.” As the term concludes, students deliver the presentation (i.e., conference workshop) that actively engages the audience with the self-selected topic. Students have varied opportunities to receive peer and instructor feedback. The information gleaned from the feedback helps to refine student proposals for submission to a professional organization.

Becky shared how she conceptualized and designed the project using backward design principles. “Specifically, I began by considering the goals of the course and the project. I then researched professional associations’ conference proposal calls to determine what elements to include in the project. When developing learning exercises, I often ask, ‘How might the students use this in the real world?’” By using an intentional design process, the result is a project which is strongly aligned, structures learning, and has authentic application.

Project Overview Page

Delivery

The first delivery of AHE 623 was successfully launched in the Spring of 2022 with minimal challenges other than the limited time. “The students engaged fully in the mini-conference. As reflected in the outcomes, they not only learned but were left hungry for more.” Requests flew in for additional opportunities to apply what they had learned! “The students raved about this project such that they even asked if they could host a virtual conference using their presentations.” The project proved to be a transformational experience for students. “Multiple students noted that this opportunity helped them refine their dissertation ideas and related skills.” As Becky looks forward, she hopes to consider restructuring the design into a rotating roundtable format. Doing so will ensure that students are exposed to their peers’ perspectives in the course.

Remember that course design and development is an iterative process. Please know you do not have to get it right the first time or even the tenth. Your students do value your enthusiasm for the subject and appreciate the effort you have put into crafting valuable learning experiences for them. You have got this!

Inspire!

Visit the Ecampus Course Development and Training team blog for application tips, course development and design resources, online learning best practices and standards, and emerging trends in Higher Education. We look forward to seeing you there.

Acknowledgments

Dr. Becky Crandall, thank you for candidly sharing your core pedagogical approaches, philosophy of teaching, and the course project with the Oregon State community. Your commitment to social justice continues to shine in your course designs and instructional delivery.

Testing the Word Macro

Pros and Cons of the “Extract Comments to New Document” Word Macro

Pros

Cons

References

The Problem with Checklists

Three Contexts for Lateral Reading

Reconstructing Context

Another Postscript

Related Resource

References

References

Introduction

How it works

Testing how it works

A longer text example

Limitations and Considerations

Conclusion

Notes

Getting Started: General Recommendations

Putting It to the Test: A UX Study in Higher Education

References

Course Design Connection

Memory and Course Design

Cut out the Bigger Extraneous Content

Review Instructions

Utilize Best Practices for Formatting

Julie’s Favorite Animals

Provide High-Level Overviews

Module Organization

Wrapping It Up

References

Best Practices

Canvas Tips

Design Element

YouTube

TikTok

Purpose

Orientation

Setting

Lighting Source

Camera Angles

Wardrobe

Audience

Length

–

Common Issues

Find and Fix

Activity Ideas

Project Spotlight

The Project

Design

Delivery

Inspire!

Acknowledgments

Contact Info