Moving to online teaching: lessons learned trying to build engagement in an online programming course
Fran Hooley (Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning) and Pete Causey-Freeman (Lecturer in Healthcare Sciences) launched a 15 credit course Introduction to Programming in November 2019 as part of a new online PG Cert in Clinical Bioinformatics. The following reflections on the course focus on building engagement within online teaching and how the course tried to ensure students were supported.
Whilst reviewing our content from the Introduction to Programming distance learning course we delivered last year, Pete and I started to see some key themes on engagement emerging. As this is one of the key things that many in H.E. are focusing on for the new academic year we thought we’d share some of our lessons learned. We’ve also linked to resources and tools at the end of this article that might help others to build engagement in their online courses too.
About the course
When beginning to plan the Introduction to Programming course, our first step was to understand who our learners would be and what they’d want. On reflection this was the most important step of all. By putting ourselves in the learners’ shoes really helped pin point how to engage with them and keep them motivated.
Lesson One — Know your learners
The short video below is of us both discussing the background to the course and the various requirements our learners could potentially have.
As you can see we needed to provide a supportive and encouraging environment to ensure all students could feel comfortable asking questions. We needed to build a community so it could emulate the community of practice in Clinical Bioinformatics to help the students support each other — not only during the course but also after it had finished. We also needed to bring to life the clinical bioinformatician’s world and what it means in terms of programming.
There was lots to include in terms of coding tools, methods and platforms in order to create the authentic environment and it was tempting to jump in and list the technology the students would need to start designing the course. However, we resisted this temptation and focused on the teaching methods which on reflection led to our next lesson.
Lesson Two — Follow a Pedagogy-first approach
From the video you’ll see this gave us three distinct teaching themes to embed in the course but how would we do this?
We went back to the design board!
Lesson Three — Plan the learning journey.
This was so important to ensure we were creating an experience that was motivating for all our students and reinforce the community ethos we were aiming for. To do this we ran an ABC Learning Design session — https://abc-ld.org
This helped us map out a storyboard document as a team in 90 minutes! As a process, this really focused our attention on the needs of our students. It also helped underpin the activities with a well-known pedagogic framework — Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework. The storyboard listed the activities against Laurillard’s six learning types (https://youtu.be/TSP2YlgTldc) of acquisition, investigation, collaboration, discussion, practice and production. This meant we could see the mix of activities at a glance and fine tune them to ensure were were building an engaging learning journey. It also involved asking lots of questions, prioritising the learning journey as well as an extensive use of whiteboards!
Rule Four — Use tools from practice
So now we had our road map, delivery schedule and project management set up — now it was time for the technology!
There are a number of different learning technologies that can support engagement and motivation some of which are included in the resources section at the end. However, for our course we chose three key tools that helped encourage problem-based learning, build peer network and emulated practice.
Juptyer Notebooks
We created 12 notebooks which formed the majority of of the learning materials on the course. These are interactive web-based workbooks that provide editable coding exercises next to the teaching materials.
We built our notebooks to include step by step instructions, embedded media such as videoed interviews of clinical bioinformaticians alongside interactive coding content. The notebooks helped learners practice coding in a safe, self-contained interactive environment by themselves. Also we ensured these were downloadable so the students could take them away after the course to refer to.
We found that self-paced problem-based learning was essential to increase confidence and thereby contributing to motivation and engagement with the course.
Slack was another key tool used by the clinical bioinformatician community. It is a collaboration platform and we used for the general discussions, group work and educational support, such as solving initial configuration issues, pastoral support and providing personal feedback on the group activities.
This informal setting meant learners were comfortable to ask questions which helped keep them up to speed with the course whilst juggling other commitments.
We found that this tool was popular with the students and really helped create a cohort-feel to the course. Feeling part of a group really encouraged engagement.
Finally GitHub was our version controlling platform which we used for the coding activities. It is a tool they will also use in practice when developing their code with other clinical bioinformaticians.
We encouraged the use of a wiki on the main repository on Git Hub to collate any tools or resources. We also built Git Issues in the workflow of the tasks which helped keep track of any issues in the coding projects. Again all of these things helped keep the team working together and keep momentum towards the goals each group had set in the tasks — this is all great for maintaining engagement!
All these tools also helped us to build the authentic environment we needed but another motivational factor was the iterative sprint-based activities — the actual problems to be solved which leads to our last lesson:
Lesson Five— Building and maintaining Social and Situated Learning
When looking at the delivery timetable and trying to maintain engagement throughout the ten weeks of the course we referred to another well-known model — Gilly Salmon eModerating Framework.
This video demonstrates how we built the agile elements of the course and how it impacted in practice. Not only was this an engaging way to keep the students on track it also gave them a sense of how they could use the learning from the course to really impact their practice. This was reflected in the student feedback
Student Feedback
The following feedback from students on this first run demonstrates how the course kept them engaged and motivated to learn.
We hope from seeing our lessons learned that it helps inspire others to try some of the different approaches we took — be it planning from a learner-centric perspective, replicating real world challenges, encouraging peer learning and building engagement into their online teaching. The following resources are only a few of the many that are out there but are ones that have been tried and tested by colleagues so a good place to start.
Resources
Models and Frameworks
- Gilly Salmon eModeration framework — https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html and her e-tivities framework for designing active learning online — https://www.gillysalmon.com/e-tivities.html
- UCL ABC Toolkit — http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/abc-ld/home/abc-ld-toolkit/
Take a look at this video by Diana Laurillard’s on her six learning types:
Polling
- Mentimeter polling tool that has some good engagement features to build interactive presentations and knowledge checks & there is a free account — https://www.mentimeter.com/
Whiteboards & Ice breakers
- Padlet is another free tool which is really straightforward tool to use. It is great way to share ideas, plan out ideas and can be used as an ice breaker — take a look at this map here https://padlet.com/fran_hooley/distanceLearning
- Tweet from @brocansky — https://mobile.twitter.com/brocansky/status/1176637420789358593?s=19 which includes different educators responding with ice breakers
- The Board of Sparks is a padlet wall full of ideas on active learning, collaboration and formative — https://padlet.com/k_lindsay/sparks
- Don’t forget your library!! The Unviersity of Manchester has a Library Distance Learners Guide — https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/using-the-library/students/distance-online-blended/ and MLE https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/using-the-library/students/training-and-skills-support/my-learning-essentials/
What is already out there?
Check out what other colleagues have done. In the University of Manchester we have various collections of videos:
- Sixty Second Skills (Staff learning and Development site) — https://sixtysecondskills.wordpress.com/category/teaching/1 minute CPD (CARD) — https://sixtysecondskills.wordpress.com/category/teaching/
- Effective Practice Hubs — https://effectivepractice.manchester.ac.uk/ — take a look at a collection hubs in the University that includes examples of best practice in assessment, digital capability and research methods.
- Manchester online learning interest group (MOLIG) has brought together a mix of examples in the “Engagement for Assessment” video below.
Assessment and Feedback
We didn’t cover assessment in this article but there are ways to encourage engagement via your assessment strategy. Try to think assessment FOR learning instead of assessment OF learning. The following guide from JISC is a great resource to start thinking about assessment and engagement:
- JISC Designing learning and assessment ina digital age — https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/designing-learning-and-assessment-in-a-digital-age
Over to you!
Do you have any examples of your own? Please comment on this article and share your own lessons learned
