EUR lecturers share their experiences, insights and opinions on different educational tools they used during their online courses.
To inspire you as a fellow lecturer, and save you the time so you don't need to figure out things for yourself.
Based on a random sample and on feedback received from our teaching assistants we judge that the quality of the papers handed in for grading is of similar quality when compared to previous years.
From this year’s experience we conclude that peer-review guided by careful instruction (rubric and model reference paper) is an effective learning tool in the context of our course.
The benefits of peer-review is twofold:
• students more actively engage with the writing process by donning the writer’s hat as well as the corrector’s hat (educational advantage).
• teaching assistants still have to read and evaluate the individual papers but have to spend less time giving detailed feedback, thus reducing the overall time-investment (financial advantage).
Students uploaded a first draft of their paper to receive built-in automated feedback from FeedbackFruits. This application is customized by the teacher to check for e.g. the needed sections (Title, Abstracts, Introduction, etc), word limit, and language. This may be helpful for students but the program does not allow screening for content-, context- and grammar-related issues.
Next, FeedbackFruits organizes the peer review process by assigning which paper has to be reviewed by whom, and gives information on deadlines.
All in all, the program is easy to use but allows for a fair grade of customization.
During the process we monitor that students submit their papers on time and that the feedback is in accordance with the grading rubric by looking at individual comments.
As described above we also keep an eye on the statistics to keep track of potential issues worth looking into.
FeedbackFruits also provides the possibility for students to rate the feedback they received. From these data, and other reactions we received from students we have the impression that students appreciated the comments of their peers and experienced them as useful. Importantly, several students mentioned that while providing feedback took some time, putting on the critics’ hat helped them with improving their own paper. They also better appreciated the time it takes to provide detailed feedback, which meant that in general they took the received feedback more seriously.
If you want to use peer review, make sure that you provide clear instructions. Given that the students are, if you will, still learning the ropes of the trade, it is important that they have the right tools at their disposal. In our case an analytic rubric and a model reference paper worked quite well. Make sure that the instructions you provide are as clear and unambiguous as possible.
The Miro tool does exactly what you want for a brainstorm- or mind map exercise: it allows a peer group of students to sign in at the same time and meet ‘real time’, they can design and draw a mind map exactly as suits their discussion, they can use ‘post its’ to add content to the mind map, and they can choose various colours to organize the content they discussed. For example, some students organized their mind map in red and green post-its to differentiate between positive and negative perspectives. Others organized the map by differentiating ‘what goes wrong’ from ‘possible solutions’, which they connected by drawing all kinds of lines, arrows and feedback loops.
The tool was experienced as quite intuitive, and the mind maps that came out of it are colourful and very easily readable while still displaying the depth of discussion. This also makes it very easy to evaluate and grade assignments, even in groups as large as the clinical master (200+ students).
The disadvantage is that the program does require the students to make an account, so to use it, they have to share their email addresses. Also, it takes some time to get started, so for a smaller assignment it might be too much of technicalities for its purpose. To tackle this, I asked students to create an account in advance. Also, I advised the students to first get their discussion started, and not focus on the technicalities of Miro right away, because it might take away some flow of the conversation. Still, in my experience it might be even more interference to ask students to write a report or paper about their discussion, whereas this mind map tool seemed to leave plenty of room for flow and depth in the peer discussions. Overall, I am very enthusiastic about the tool and might keep using it even when we return to offline education.
December 2020: Annotation tool in Zoom
First in this series is the annotation tool in Zoom. Floor van Rosse, assistant professor at the pharmacy department of Erasmus Medical Center and CLI Fellow, will show how she used this tool during her course and explain to you why this tool could enrich your courses too.
- An important insight to mention: don't use the beta option ’slides as virtual background’ if you want to use the annotation tool. When you use this option, the Annotate option won't appear in the menu, so students won't be able to use it.
- Some colleagues also mention differences between the app and the browser version of Zoom. Please be aware of that.
- Check TeachEUR for a nice corresponding teaching session to use the Annotation tool with: the online discussion.
