Workplace vets in the classroom Post #1
Workplace emigrants are dynamite in the classroom,
Once they do the hard, boring thing first:
Master that learning management system
As American newsrooms shrink, smart colleges and universities are hiring former full-time journalists like me to put our decades of newsroom experience to work teaching writing, public health, courses on civic literacy and even journalism.
I am no education expert, but I’m a lap or two ahead of newcomers. I moved from running newsrooms to running classrooms in 2009. For six years, I ran one of the bigger courses at Stony Brook University and led teacher workshops every summer.
This series of posts aims to focus the next crop of working-professionals-turned-teachers over the most common stumbling block: classroom technologies.
My course, News Literacy, enrolled more than 1,000 students some semesters, so we had to use all the tools of modern mass education. Part of the job was to assemble teaching teams that included dozens of working and retired journalists, from Carl Bernstein to stalwarts of New York-area newsrooms.
Students made it clear on RateMyProfessors.com and in Stony Brook’s internal surveys: they benefit greatly when these toilers from the vineyards of democracy distill their experience for the classroom. Peers at the more than 60 other campuses that picked up our course reported similar enthusiasm for teachers from outside academia.
In particular, students give us high marks for real-world experience, for our accessible (mile-wide/inch-deep) perspective and for our demonstrated commitment to the public interest.
The most preventable complaint was that these mature professors failed to master the digital tools of the classroom. In every case, I was convinced it was a matter of mindset, not aptitude that got in our way. Anyone can master these tools, if they decide to.
Fighting digital tools is like your grandparents demonizing rock ‘n roll instead of hearing the poetry and feeling the beat. Seriously…Even square Ed Sullivan knew enough to book Elvis, and that was 1956. First-time teachers need to accept and adopt the digital tools that define the lives of their students.
Tool #1 The Learning Management System
If you read or follow nothing else in this series, heed this well: Before the semester begins, you must know the basic moves of your campus’s Learning Management System.
Students pay good money to the university and correctly expect they can access course material any time they need it. If you cannot deliver the syllabus, handouts and individual grades with some degree of the personalization that is now customary on the web, you are a problem for them. Plus, you are missing a chance for connection, the secret to making students’ lives better. (More on this in a future post.)
As soon as you’re hired, find out which LMS or classroom management software your campus uses.
Most run on Moodle™, Blackboard™ or Edmodo™. Comprised of a series of pre-built web pages with pre-coded functions, an LMS is the means by which students pick up and submit homework, receive grades, prepare for tests, check syllabi, take quizzes, and discuss class material with one another and with you.
Yes, there is an ongoing debate about online education. Yes, face-to-face conversation is important, but now is not the time to fight the rising tide. Class starts in a couple of weeks and your site must be ready.
You’ll learn, unless you are teaching at a school for rich kids, that many of your students are working at least one job to get by. All of them live much of their lives online. Go where they are or you will reduce your impact on almost everyone in your class.
To be fair to the resistors, these are not easy systems.
My bluest language is reserved for Blackboard™, which in my opinion is Exhibit A in the need for the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Only a product with a monopolistic mindset could be so hated by its customers, so poorly programmed…oh, don’t get me started.
Yet, my relationships with my students grew warmer and more impactful once I attained Blackboard™ skills that allowed me to build self-grading online quizzes, provide lecture outlines in advance and post lecture feedback videos immediately after class. A good course engenders a continuous and inclusive conversation and for Millennials, a crucial venue is mobile web technologies.
Fortunately, there is lots of help available.
Most campuses have an office of Teaching & Learning stocked with coaches, seminars and handouts to help you get started. Better yet, many campuses (and public libraries) offer access to Lynda.com, which provides online video tutorials by expert users of your LMS. Use those before you lean on your new fellow instructors. They will appreciate the effort and won’t grab for the phone every time they see you coming.
Here’s a proposed syllabus for your crash course in using your school’s LMS. It seems like a huge amount of work, but everything you build this semester can be copied forward as the starting point for the next course you teach.
Beginner moves:
· Get your user account set up;
· Post your name, picture and bio on the course site;
· Check class-time and room against official listings. (I once had to lead half a lecture hall across campus to join the other half in the correct room.);
· Post your syllabus;
· Announce your office hours;
· Pre-load any reading materials, plus links to required videos.
Intermediate moves:
· Revise all of the above, inserting hot links to online versions of your professional work;
· Insert photos or other items to enliven the user experience. Many LMS systems allow you to put custom backgrounds and images on your course site. It seems frivolous, but a distinct look improves the user experience;
· Build homework assignment pages;
· Build the pages of supplemental readings, videos, etc;
· Review all the campus-specific optional additions your LMS to your site: library pages; health and safety, etc.
· Learn all you can about any plagiarism-checking system built into the LMS;
Power moves:
· Use the online quizzing tool to build a self-grading syllabus quiz that students have to take until they get 90%;
· Set up the linkage between homework prompts, submission and grading. Ideally, the page where a student gets the assignment includes the link where the assignment is uploaded and that upload is linked to the gradebook;
· Experiment with the course calendar, setting up automatic reminders;
· Build your online discussion page, especially if it will permit you to grade participation as you read student comments, saving you several steps;
· Set up special discussion pages to help students prepare for tests or presentations;
· Set up automatic warnings to tell you and your students when they are lagging;
Pro Moves
· Find and use the video tools available at your campus. Because so many of my comments on homework were the same, I started recording short webcam videos explaining what went wrong and right with assignments. Blackboard™ allows you to post those directly on the classroom site.
· Set up a second-week survey in which students can quickly and anonymously tell you what’s working and what’s not; (repeat at mid-semester);
· Use the survey tool to collect material for use in classroom discussions;
· Use collaboration tools to encourage students to collect favorite readings and videos related to the course.
· Many campuses allow you to create a fictional student so that you can check how the site looks to student users.
Start small, but before the semester starts, get on that classroom site every day and make adjustments and additions. Revise your bio, adding hotlinks to online versions of your work.
Most of us non-digital-natives found it hard to remember the moves if we didn’t refresh our memories regularly, hence my suggestions you get on the site daily at first. It’s far easier to make changes now than it is once the semester is underway and cheer yourself up by remembering this course site will be easily replicated next semester.
Whatever you do, resist the temptation to start on paper with the plan to transfer to the site at mid-semester. Until you get there, students have no idea how they are doing from day to day. Plus, when grades are due, those instructors have a laborious and inherently inaccurate challenge: typing grades into the system. I had an average of 25 students per section. With 10 quizzes, two major tests and about 15 written assigments, that would mean typing in 675 items in an intensive cram session.
Plus…There is something uniquely comical about journalistic advocates for government transparency scribbling consequential student information in a private ledger book.
For tips on using video in the classroom, go to Post #2 in this series.
