Every month, we aim to post an IDEAS digest to share some of the resources, tips, tricks, and tools that our team has come across over the past month. I.D.E.A.S. is an acronym for Instructional Design Educational Activities Summary. Below are some reflections/resources from our team of instructional designers that might be helpful in your course design.

Instructional Designer 1

Articulate 360 is used within many different projects for clients for learner engagement and interactivity; thus, take some time to learn about the accessibility-related concerns you may have when using Articulate 360 products.

Instructional Designer 2

Sometimes getting your ideas down is all that is needed, so two amazing mind mapping tools are:

1.     Mindmeister – wonderful for independent planning but you can share your maps

2.     Coggle – outstanding for collaborative brainstorming

Instructional Designer 3

Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0 is a great source to read over at least once to understand are standards for accessibility for a website while stating excellent practices that should be included when designing/auditing content online. The five steps for the evaluation procedure point out everything that needs to be addressed from the start and final testing of the website. It’s a great starting point to learn about accessibility and points to consider when making recommendations.

Instructional Designer 4

One of the recent highlights is the launch of the [Archived Content] Escape room available in the Brightspace Learning Center for free, for all our clients! It's a great example of how gamification can be done within Brightspace, while also teaching the learner about release conditions available within Brightspace.

Instructional Designer 5

With my recent projects, I have been exploring online platforms and tools to create gamification elements. One of the resources I found helpful and useful is Genial.ly, since the website is designed to provide ideas for interactive and engaging content.

Instructional Designer 6

Recently I learned that within Brightspace when creating new course awards within set-up there is a section called “create your own award image” which leads to classical badge designer allowing you to create simple badges that can be added to any of your courses!

Instructional Designer 7

We have used H5P as a third-party tool within different courses over the years, some new features that are worth sharing:  The Chase, AR-Scavenger, Cornell Notes and Structure Strip released!

Lately, I’ve taken the time to learn more about immersive learning. According to Aubrey Barto, “immersive learning utilizes augmented, simulated, or purely artificial environments for learners to experience scenarios and simulations.” Simulations are created through technological means, including:

• Virtual Reality (VR) (i.e., learners are fully immersed in an artificial environment through the use of a headset)
• Augmented Reality (AR) (i.e., technology that augments real-world environments, adding digital elements to enhance reality)
• Mixed Reality (MR) (i.e., rather than simply overlaying virtual objects into the real-world environment like in AR, MR is a blend of VR and AR that allows digital and physical objects to co-exist and be interacted with in real-time)
• 3D Immersive Learning (3D) (i.e., uses 3D visualizations and simulations that learners can explore and perform different tasks within) 

As Jitender Kumar writes, immersive learning offers several benefits, including: 

1. Removes distractions. Immersive learning minimizes distractions, allowing learners to be fully present in the simulation.
2. Promotes focused immersion. With distractions minimized and engagement increased, learners are more likely to see a learning experience through to completion.
3. Encourages an emotional connection. Realistic and engaging simulations often elicit an emotional response from learners. As a result, learners become more involved in the learning experience.
4. Increases motivation. Simulations often allow learners to be immersed in an artificial environment that is connected to their real-life, which prompts learners to see the learning experience through.
5. Supports personalized learning. Immersive learning is personalized and learner-centric, as it allows learners to explore and learn at their own pace.
6. Enhances knowledge retention. Immersive learning minimizes distraction, facilitates immersion, and allows learners to learn at their own pace. This combination supports learners' ability to retain information.

What I find particularly fascinating about immersive learning is its ability to be used for different learners in different settings and the possibility of integrating storytelling and gamification elements.

I'd like to learn more about your thoughts and experiences with immersive learning: Have you used immersive learning before? What was that experience like? If you haven't used immersive learning, would you consider it? How might you use it in an online or blended learning environment?

Sources:

•  Everything You Need To Know About Immersive Learning
•  The Difference Between Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality And Mixed Reality
• The Truth About Immersive Learning And Its Sharp Benefits
•  Immersive Learning: What It Is and How To Use It

Image Credit:

Photo by fauxels on Pexels

Within instructional designing, the acronym ADDIE is one of the favourites for many! I would say it’s a fancy way to say use your critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Before driving into how is that relevant for any educator, let’s learn about what the acronym means:

Analyze – understanding the needs, constraints and current situation for content. To answer the question: What is in it for the learner? I would think of this stage to answer the 6 Ws (Who, What, Where, When, How and Why).

Design – creating objectives and developing strategies to achieve the objectives, leading to a prototype for presenting your ideas.

Development – content is produced based on the design phase decisions followed by reviewing the quality of the deliverable.

Implement – content/course is presented to the learner, and its impact is monitored.

Evaluate – assess the changes and whether the content achieved the goals. Thus, deciding if future iterations should be created or not.

As an educator, you are constantly using ADDIE when designing your lessons for any class—starting with reviewing the curriculum expectations to see what goals need to be achieved by the particular lesson and then planning it out, finding resources or creating resources for the lesson. As an educator, the Implementation and evaluation components are often not formally done; instead, it’s based on your judgements and observation within the classroom setting. Such as were the learners engaged? Did everyone understand the lesson, or was there a lot of confusion while teaching? After addressing all these questions, you decide whether to use the lesson again for future classes or not.  

Similarly, as ID, we use the same process to piece together the learning experience for the learners!

Have you heard of the ADDIE before? If not, do you see yourself using it any time soon?

I posted this week's article to the general Community group. Follow the link if you'd like to read "What Else Can You Teach?"

5 Quick Tips to Improve your Marking Workflow

1. For video assignments (using the Assignments tool), encourage students to submit a link to their video on YouTube, Microsoft Stream, Zoom, or Teams so that you don't need to download their file to your computer, taking up space on your computer. Brightspace added a new feature recently where you can restrict the assignment submission file type to be whichever custom file type you would like (.docx, .doc, .pdf, etc). Don't forget to consider all possible file types (for example, written assignments might be .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt, .pages) when adding this restriction to avoid students emailing you to ask questions.
2. For quizzes, ensure that you have "Automatically update evaluation in grade book when published" to ensure that when you have graded the quizzes, the grades automatically get added to the grade book.
3. If you haven't already done so, switch to a custom points rubric (instead of a points rubric) to give you more flexibility to award partial marks to students.
4. If you don't have it setup already, consider using a percentage based grading scheme instead of a points-based grading scheme. The percentage-based grading scheme is easier for learners to understand (in most cases) and also helps to catch any calculation errors when you add grade items at the outset (for example, if you missed 5% of the gradebook).
5. Use the end date feature to prevent students from submitting late. For example, if you have a late policy that allows students to submit 5 days late (-10% per day), set the end date to be 5 days after the due date to prevent submissions altogether.

Do you have any other suggestions for ways that you optimize your grading workflow in Brightspace?

Hello everyone,

I would like to invite you to our free webinar: ‘Engagement That Lasts: Best Strategies for Inclusive Course Design' on Thursday, February 17th.

We're happy to welcome Linda Lee, Director Director of Instructional Design at Wharton School as guest speaker. Together we will showcase a pandemic-proof student journey that educators and instructional designers can implement in any modality and classroom size to keep each and every student connected throughout the course and support their success.

The registrants will also get early access to our upcoming ebook 'Quality Online Learning' on how to implement flexible online course designs that accommodate students' diverse needs.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.

We hope to have you with us.

Monika Dybalska

FeedbackFruits

The Teaching and Learning Team (TLT), at College of Charleston, invites you to submit a proposal for the 6th Annual Teaching, Learning, and Technology Conference (TLTCon) - May 17-18, 2022. This FREE regional conference, with global reach, offers presenters an opportunity to share and discuss best practices and lessons learned in all aspects of teaching and learning. All sessions will be hosted live via Zoom.  

Who should consider presenting?

• Teaching faculty and staff
• Academic administrators
• Instructional technologists and designers
• Librarians
• Student support staff and advisors
• Graduate students (with teaching experience) 

Topics of interest (not limited to those listed below - all relevant topics welcome!)

• Assessments and grading
• Brightspace / LMS best practices
• Class discussions
• Community building
• Diversity and inclusion
• Educational technologies
• Innovative teaching
• Gamification
• Lecture design and delivery
• Online education (synchronous, asynchronous, and flipped classroom)
• Student engagement
• Resilient teaching  
• Student success and retention
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
• Wellness and well-being 

Session formats

• Classic presentation
  • An interactive session where one or more presenters share content and engage participants in discussion.
• Panel discussion
  • A roundtable-style discussion where three or more presenters share their experiences and lessons learned. 
• Workshop
  • An interactive session where one or more presenters share content and engage participants in group work, activities, or exercises that produce a deliverable(s). 

The call for proposals will close on Thursday, February 3, 2022. The conference committee will review all proposals and send out acceptance/rejection emails by March 1, 2022. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Chris Meshanko (meshankocm@cofc.edu), 2022 Conference Committee Chair. 

Please submit your proposal(s) here: https://bit.ly/tltconp22.

Many instructional designers (IDs) and instructors know the value of learning through storytelling. Stories engage us on both an intellectual and emotional level, and that combination leads to better retention of information.

So perhaps you’ve decided to incorporate storytelling elements in a course, but you’re not sure where to start. You should consider story structure and format. Format options include a personal anecdote, case studies or segmented stories sprinkled throughout a course leading to a whole story by the end.

Stories need both a character and a plot, which can be broken down into motivation + complication. The following table, which I like to call “The Table of Possibilities” (exclamation point optional), provides a basis for potential stories to enhance your content.

Let’s try some combinations.

1) The stressed supervisor wants to thwart a hostile takeover because the supervisor knows this takeover is bad news even if no one else does (only the main character knows there’s a problem). The supervisor knows someone who can help, but it’s the difficult client, and the supervisor wants to avoid interactions with this client. However, the company is worth it, so the supervisor digs deep and practices good communication skills and emotional intelligence to connect with the client and prevent the takeover. This story base works well for business, leadership, psychology or communication courses.

2) The experienced mentor is ready to retire but needs someone to carry on their work (leave a legacy and share knowledge with the world). The only person available (lack of resources) is the worrywart. The experienced mentor presents vignettes from their past and coaches the worrywart through those former decisions, avoiding the temptation to do the wrong thing and growing in knowledge and confidence (attitude adjustment needed). This story base works well for a variety of courses and can include the fun element of time travel for history/politics courses.

3) The naïve newbie wants to prove their skills in the lab outside of class hours and brings along the funny sidekick, who perhaps cracks content-related jokes or riddles. Chemicals get mixed up, and suddenly the funny sidekick is sick, and doctors need to know what combination of chemicals were used to accidentally poison the sidekick (a tight deadline). The newbie (or your learner) must now identify various chemicals to inform the doctors in order to save the funny sidekick. This story base works well for safety/WHMIS, chemistry or medical courses.

As an ID or instructor, you know your content and you know your learners, so hopefully some elements of the Table of Possibilities! jump out at you already. If they haven’t, take time to reflect or collaborate with colleagues and remind yourself that breakthroughs in your area of expertise took time and patience. Developing stories to help your learners connect with their content may take time and patience as well, but like the breakthroughs in your area of expertise, they will be well worth your effort.

Some content in this post is excerpted from a D2L Brightspace Community course “Learning through Story”.

How do you leverage Brightspace to make your end-of-year evaluations a little bit easier to manage?

One way I like to provide feedback that’s quick to create and personal is to provide my learners with a video note. In that feedback, I frequently keep the following structure in mind:

• Say something positive about what the learner is excelling at.
• Say something that is something they need to improve on.
• Give a suggestion of what the learner can do.

Set Expectations

• Highlight the “why” and make connections between what learners are doing in the course and the benefits of completing these activities to get learner buy-in.
• Provide information about netiquette so that learners know how they’re expected to interact with one another.
• Include grading criteria, rubrics, and any exemplars you can share to support learner success.

Make the Most of the Tools Available to You

There are many great options within and outside of Brightspace to get learners engaged in collaborative activities and peer review. When choosing what tool to use, keep in mind what you’d like learners to accomplish. For instance, Discussions, Activity Feed, Padlet, or Flipgrid would be good choices when you want to encourage sharing content, ideas, and opinions. In contrast, you may wish to use Bongo Video Assignments, Google Workspace, or collaborative whiteboard tools when learners are working on a project or presentation in a group.

Learn From Your Colleagues

Another way to create more impactful collaboration and peer review opportunities is to learn from your colleagues’ successes! With that in mind, how have you incorporated collaborative learning opportunities in your courses?

Resources

Explore the following Brightspace Community resources to learn more 😊

• Collaborative Tools in Online Learning Environments
• [Archived Content] Planning for Effective Peer Review in Online Environments
• A Guide to Coaching Students for Effective Peer Review

Starting Monday August 30th 2021, finding your new favourite Brightspace Course, or Teaching Tool will be a whole lot easier with the release of a brand new Homepage! Get all the details on the new page and be sure to check in out next week!

Select the text based link, or school bus image link in the following article to take a ride to the Brightspace Learning Center and connect with our latest, free, Brightspace Learning Center course Supporting Students with Low Vision

You'll learn more about:

•   what low vision is

•   how assistive tools help those with low vision see better

•   which Brightspace features support users with low vision, and

•   how course content can be designed to be accessible to users with low vision

 Review all the course materials to unlock a Brightspace Learning Center Award that can be shared with your professional network on LinkedIn

I'm sharing a post that I made last week highlighting a couple of our IDs and their perspectives on the ID role. Read on to learn how they got started with instructional design, what they love about their work, and some things to keep in mind for people who are just getting started!

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How about all of you? What do you find the most exciting about being an ID and what tips do you have for people who are just getting started?

Article Highlight: Students Want Online Learning Options Post-Pandemic 

Author: Lindsay Mackenzie

What is the Future of Online Learning Post-Pandemic in Higher Education?

A question that many educators and learners have asked themselves is what will education look like post-pandemic. Though online learning had always been an emergent topic in education, the global lockdown of March 2020 cemented the importance and necessity that online learning has on learners of various demographics and disciplines. 

That being said, post-secondary institutions have started to ask students, faculty, and administrators about their expectations of online learning, and its place in their future education. According to the article, Students Want Online Learning Options Post-Pandemic (Mackenzie, 2021), students are in favour of more online learning options in the future. Despite the difficulties and challenges online learning has presented to students, 73% of students who responded want the option to take online courses and 68 % were interested in taking  hybrid courses once the world reopens. Many of the respondents (both faculty and students) had a more positive view of online learning than prior to the pandemic. 

The article highlights survey results from students, faculty, and administrators and is accompanied by a webinar recording.  I highly recommend this read as it addresses the types of concerns of learners and educators as institutions slowly move back to face-to-face instruction, and it highlights their hopes for the future of education

Article Title: Students Want Online Learning Options Post-Pandemic

Author: Lindsay Mackenzie

Date Published: April 27, 2021

Publication: Inside Higher Ed

URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/27/survey-reveals-positive-outlook-online-instruction-post-pandemic

I've had some questions in recent days about how to conduct peer review in Brightspace. A while back, I wrote an article on the Community about teaching your learners how do effective peer review, but that doesn't offers suggestions of different ways to facilitate peer review, specifically in Brightspace. This got me thinking about the options.

I have my go-to ways, as I outline below, but I know this is not exhaustive. I'd love to hear how you've done it, to learn other ways - what have you tried (successfully or not!)?

WAYS TO FACILITATE PEER REVIEW IN BRIGHTSPACE:

My preferred way is with the Individual Assignment in Bongo because it is the most automated manner. While this is designed to be a video tool, it works effectively with word documents as well. Students can provide comments and rating that are visible to the student they are reviewing and the instructor. If you're a Bongo Premium user, you can also allow students to assess each other using rubrics.

Beyond Bongo, peer review can be done using the Groups tool with Discussions. Learners can be put into groups of 2 or more, where they post their work and peers provide feedback in comments. Learners can also use the 5-star rating scale on their peer's post.

While I've never tried it, I just learned about an API that Steve Bentley at University of Huddersfield created to Build Peer Assessment within Brightspace. It facilitates peer review through the use of Content, Groups, Assignments and Grades, removing requirements for integrations and the data protection governance associated with third party products. You can watch the Fusion presentation explaining this tool: Peer Assessment of Group Grades Through Brightspace.

We are looking for participants teaching in a range of grades and with a range of experience using educational technology.  

You can learn more about this study in the K-12 First Use Recruitment article.

Teachers can apply to the study here. 

In case you were looking for the answers to the Instructional Design Best Practices Scavenger Hunt clues, you can find them in the following article: [Archived Content] 2020 Instructional Design Best Practices Community Scavenger Hunt Answer Key.👀

We'll be contacting those who won the virtual prize from in the next few weeks. Thank you all for participating in what we hope was an informative and fun event!