Photos and Video Helps Connect Students and Teachers in Online Courses

A recent post at Extra Credit: The Canvas Blog discusses their findings that the use of video in online courses may help increase student retention—at least in larger courses. This reminded of a phenomenon that I noticed over the first few years I taught fully online courses: photos and video can help connect students and teachers.

After decades of teaching traditional face-to-face courses and web-enhanced courses, I transitioned to fully online courses. The first thing I struggled with was the seeming lack of personal connection with my students, and among my students.

I found that if I used a clear and "happy" photo in my LMS (learning management system) profile, students started recognizing me around town and reported that they felt more "connected" to me than before.  And more connected to me than their other online teachers with no profile photo—or an unclear or "not happy" photo.

Then I started prodding all my students to post profile pictures. Face pictures, not vacation photos taken in front of Niagara Falls and not photos of their dog or favorite child. No avatars, either. And you know what? I felt more personally connected to THEM!  And they found they felt a bit more connected to each other.

Then something wonderful and unexpected happened. It was a course I teach in an online graduate program that trains anatomy and physiology professors. I had been using the iSpring plugin for PowerPoint to create short presentations that introduce each learning module in the course. There was a software upgrade that allowed me to embed a video of me narrating alongside the slides and outline. I thought I'd try it to see how it worked.

I got immediate feedback from nearly every student in the course! They loved, loved, loved it. Not because of my amazing face or resonant voice—they just loved finally seeing and hearing me as I presented the introduction. They reported feeling more connected to me. 

That program has a required summer seminar at the home campus near the end of the program. When I go there now, the students who have taken my course in previous terms tell me that they feel like they already know me well because of those videos. They tell me they can better pick up on my style of conversation, my sense of humor, what I think is important in the course, and my enthusiasm for my subject. And they appreciate that.

So now I'll never go back. I'll always find a way to include video of myself somewhere in each online course I teach. Because part of teaching is being there for students. And video helps me do that.

Want to know more?

Want Lower Dropout Rates? Use Video (Part 1)

• Jared Stein. Extra Credit: The Canvas Blog. 24 Oct 2016
• Blog post that interprets results of a study by Instructure on the use of video in Canvas courses.
• my-ap.us/2g1dlbD

iSpring for PowerPoint

• Kevin Patton. The Electronic Professor. 19 October 2011
• Previous post from this blog describing my use of iSpring to produce online presentations. Includes a video walkthrough.
• theelectronicprofessor.blogspot.com/2011/10/ispring-for-powerpoint.html

10 Ways to Increase Student Engagement Online

• Dr. Al-Malood. Faculty Workshop. 16 Feb 2014
• Podcast and blog post, with point #5 explaining the importance of profile photos.
• my-ap.us/2g1gyYI

When Answering Student Questions, Address ALL the Students

In classroom discussions, any question that gets asked is answered by me addressing the whole class. I don't ignore the questioner, but I make sure that the answer takes everyone into account—not just that individual. In my online courses, I like to have an open discussion forum that I usually call something like, Kevin's Virtual Office. Here, students can ask their questions and, again, I answer the whole class.

There are several reasons I've found this to be a successful strategy in online and on-ground courses:

1. I can leverage many content questions into an effective forum for clarifying common misconceptions about the topic. If one student didn't quite "get it," you can safely assume there are others. And I can bring in related misconceptions that my experience tells me are likely to be out there.


2. By addressing the whole class, you avoid losing student attention. Although student questions can breathe new life into a classroom activity, there's also the risk that students will notice your focus on only the questioner, and drift away—perhaps never to return to the fully engaged mode.


3. Overarching themes and "big picture" concepts can be woven into the answer, thus giving students a better context for the topic at hand. Depending on the question, the answer can expressed in a way that brings many other ideas together to illustrate how the main themes of your discipline are being played out in this particular context.


4. If it regards course policies or procedures, I can take the opportunity to explain my rationale. Many students embrace unfamiliar learning strategies if they understand the reasons you have adopted them.


5. You can teach problem-solving skills. Some answers can be easily found in the syllabus, textbook, handout, or some other handy resource and you remind students of this fact for future questions they might have. By walking through a process to arrive at a not-so-obvious answer, however, you can teach additional skills. Perhaps by asking questions of several students during the process, or going through some logical steps, you can model how a student might answer their own questions that occur during study times. This is a well-known mechanism for teaching critical-thinking skills.


6. You can trigger more questions. By addressing the whole class, you demonstrate that you want everyone to understand fully. This may provide an inviting atmosphere in which other misconceptions or confusions can be brought up and addressed—a sort of "just in time" teaching opportunity.

One thing that can throw us off is when a student asks a question in a public forum that really should be asked privately. This can be tricky. Depending on the exact nature of the question and/or answer, I may still use it as learning opportunity for all members of the class. But if sensitive, personal information is revealed, I assume that the student did not realize that the whole class can read it. So I usually take the student down from the forum (if I'm able) and respond privately (by email) to directly to the student.

One other issue that is important is making it clear that I expect students to regularly watch Kevin's Virtual Office and read all the threads posted there. I explain at the beginning of the course, that most questions help everyone and that I'll be responding to everyone when questions are asked. 

Photo: Benito LeGrande

Grading as teaching

In previous posts, I've shared several ideas for making grading of and feedback on assignments more helpful to students. This time, I want to share what may be a new way for you to think about the whole process of grading and providing feedback— It's part of the teaching and learning process!

I think we all know that correcting errors in student assignments is a form of teaching. As a published author, I encourage my reviewers and editors to be thorough so that I can learn where my weaknesses as an author are — and how to become better. I tell them that I view them as my teachers…my mentors in my lifelong quest to be a better writer.  So—yes—correcting a student’s mistakes is a form of teaching.

When providing feedback on a particular assignment to my students through electronic media, I usually start with a template. I paste that template into the LMS feedback window of each individual's assignment.

The template begins with a rubric, as I explained previously in my article Precision feedback.

I then follow with a paragraph or two or three that briefly outline some general advice or concept of which I’d like my student to take heed.  For example:

• How to plan this type of project more efficiently.
• Common pitfalls to avoid.
• How to proofread their work before submitting.
• Why certain formats help the reader avoid confusion.
• Shortcuts and tips for future work.

I keep my list of templates all in one document file.  This way, I can easily plan out which “big idea” I want to share in the form of “personal mentoring” during grading in each module.  I often refer to “my previous comments” on a topic, upon which I build themes as students progress through course modules.

These little gems are things I’ve learned along the way and want my students to learn, too.  Some of these will go unheard or ignored if I present them in a list or in the syllabus or in the course outline.  But when included in one-on-one feedback—a personal message—I find that such advice is more welcome and more thoughtfully processed by students.

I tweak the wording of the template if needed, then add personalized feedback that relates to the particulars of the submitted work.  This process can be sped up using the tips outlined in my previous post Speed up your feedback.

When I encounter specific errors and issues, I can paste in one of my prepared list of snippets that fully explain the error and how to avoid it in the future—a process outlined in my previous article Precision feedback.

I find that my students begin to look forward to the comments and advice that I include in their grading feedback.  In fact, many of them email or message me to begin a brief dialog about some idea or suggestion that was included in the feedback template.  Dialog that would not have otherwise happened.
With very little extra effort, I can give students more

• General advice
• Mentoring
• Specific corrections
• Personal advice
• Opportunities for student-teacher dialog

Thus, I have come to see grading online projects and assignments as more formative in nature than I had previously.  I now recognize grading as a personal teaching/learning experience.

Want to know more?

My article on using voice recognition software to speed up your feedback to students:

Speed up your feedback
my-ap.us/UYQtDK

A previous article on using rubrics to make your feedback faster and more precise:

Precision feedback 
my-ap.us/S2G8b2

An introduction to formative assessment and how to embed it into your teaching:

Embedded formative assessment
amzn.to/S2JBGI

Photo credit: lsiryan

Precision feedback

In a recent post, I shared my experience in using voice-recognition software to enhance the quantity and quality of feedback to students on their assignments.  Here's a method for further improving the value of our feedback to students by adding a bit of precision to our grading.

It's nothing new, really.  It's using grading rubrics.  However, I’ve found a way to use rubrics as kind of grading shortcut that also ends up maximizing the learning process.

For a while, some of my online course assignments were worth a certain number of points.  If you did “A” work, you received 90% or more of the available points.  “B” work earned you 80%-89% of the available points. And so on.

But then I started getting inquiries from students. 

• What can I do to improve my grade? 
• How did I miss three points?
• What went wrong?
• I thought I did well.  Why did I receive a low grade.

Yikes.  I realized that a number alone wasn’t helping these students very much.  The whole point of my assignments is to improve competence in my students—but I wasn’t really doing anything but dinging them on points when their work did not meet my standards.

So I took a good look at how I expressed my expectations and found that it was pretty murky.  So I constructed a rubric for each type of assignment.

Each rubric is simply a short table that lists each expected element of the assignment and it’s point value.

I am careful to list EVERYTHING—including the “obvious” basic elements of the assignment as well as specific “enhanced features” that I’m hoping for.

I make my rubrics using the “table” format in a MS Word document.  You can use a small spreadsheet just as easily.  I simply copy and paste each type of rubric into my course documents (syllabus , webpage, etc.).  That way , my students can use them as handy guidelines as they design and execute their assignments.

For grading purposes, I keep a second version of each rubric in which I change the “Maximum points” for each element to “Points earned.” 

Then at grading time, I simply copy and paste the appropriate rubric into the feedback window for each student’s assignment.  As I evaluate the assignment, I change the maximum points listed to the actual points they earned for each element of the assignment.  I quickly total it up and change the maximum total to their actual total.

For added precision, I also keep a list of feedback responses for common mistakes.  For example, I have a short paragraph identifying a common formatting error.  This paragraph explains what went wrong, why it’s wrong, and how to do it right next time. When I encounter the error in an assignment I’m grading, I paste the paragraph into the feedback window. Then I insert, “For example, in your paragraph 5 . . . “ into the paragraph so that the student knows precisely where things went wrong in their assignment.

Whenever I encounter a particular type of mistake, I find the appropriate response in my list of “canned responses” and paste it into the feedback window.

This gives specific, precise feedback with minimal grading effort—but maximum benefit to student learning.

It takes longer to explain it than to actually do it!

Now, I can quickly and easily provide my students with more precise feedback than simply a grade.

In an upcoming post, I’ll extend this technique a bit to show how to leverage it into a bona fide teaching-learning moment!

Want to know more?

My previous article about speeding up your feedback process:

Speed up your feedback
my-ap.us/e55NuD

For more about using rubrics, I recommend this book by my friend Dannelle Stevens:

Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning
amzn.to/V2zC8K 

Speed up your feedback

One of the great things about using online tools in your web-enhanced, hybrid, or online course is that you can provide much more individual and group feedback to students.

Frequent feedback helps students correct misconceptions, learn new skills, get coaching on critical thinking, and become more connected to you, the course, and the subject.  Such feedback speeds up learning, allowing more progress in the time frame of a typical course than would otherwise be possible.  It is customized to some degree and thus more effective than not providing frequent feedback.

However, one of the worst things about giving individual and group feedback frequently is that it takes time.  And, as we know, time is something we are finding less and less of these days in the academy.  Increased expectations in record keeping and reporting, a rapidly expanding knowledge base in our disciplines to keep up with, and more time mentoring and managing the growing adjunct faculty pool, all make it harder to devote more time to interacting with students.

How can we improve the balance so that frequent, constructive feedback to students can grow rather than diminish?

One method that I've found to give me more time to give more helpful online feedback to my students is by using speech recognition software.

In the olden days, I tried this and the results were hilarious but ineffective.  Everything I said came out in a knee-slapping stream of nonsense.  In fact, I often laughed out loud, which produced even more "speech recognized" narrative.  So I gave up on it.

But the technology as progressed rapidly.  Now it is very accurate and efficient. With just a little practice— And training of the software — you can speak your feedback into any program quickly and easily.

There is satisfactory speech-recognition software built into many operating systems or other software without any extra expense. However, I have found that using a dedicated speech-recognition program provides improved accuracy and a whole toolbox of nifty features that make the whole experience more flexible, enjoyable, and fast.

I use speech recognition software when I am answering my daily emails. I find that I can get through my emails from students much more quickly using the speech-recognition approach. Not only that, I find that my answers to students are longer and more detailed — and thus hopefully more helpful to them.

I use speech recognition software when I am grading online assignments. When giving feedback on a project, for example, I can very quickly include a number of detailed comments. When keyboarding manually, the number and length of my comments is greatly reduced by both fatigue and the limits of time available.

I find that students really appreciate both the personal attention that such comments represent and the specific help and advice contained within these comments. They feel like they are making rapid progress… because they are.

Many colleges now provide individual installations of speech recognition software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking . This is the software that I use and find it to work very well for me.

I know that it is always daunting to face learning how to use a new technology, but this one is amazingly easy. And even if you have to pay for it yourself, it's not very expensive. And you will find it to be worth every penny — and then some.