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By Phoebe S.K. Young
Associate Professor
Department of History
phoebe.young@colorado.edu

This is a description of a tool I developed for my large introductory course in U.S. History.  I called it “Weekly Previews” and it entailed students watching a 7-12 minute video podcast through D2L, where I introduced the themes for the upcoming week and related them to the week we were finishing; then they would answer several questions online, some designed to gauge their comprehension of the points made on the video and others that elicited both their previous knowledge of the era and the questions they had going in.  They received lecture participation credit for completing the Weekly Previews.  Here, I will explain how I developed this tool, employing validated Just-in-Time teaching techniques, including some examples of what it looks like, feedback from students, my initial evaluation and plans for future modification.

Background and Development

I am always running out of time in lecture.  When I teach the U.S. History since 1865 survey course (HIST1025, enrollment ca. 300), there are so many interesting issues and moments to discuss and the more I incorporate active engagement techniques like clickers into the classroom, the more condensed each hour becomes.  After teaching an on-line course through Continuing Education and learning how easy it was to integrate video podcasts (using the Camtasia software) into Desire2Learn (via the aptly named “insert stuff” function),  I wondered I might apply these resources to my regular courses.   I began to generate some ideas about how to both expand my teaching time outside of the classroom and improve student learning experiences within it.  The increasing availability of this technology have led to studies of and experiments with a concept sometimes called the “flipped” classroom – where lecture material is delivered online freeing up the meeting time to maximize student discussion and engagement.   I was a bit hesitant to try such a complete reversal.  To build a one-way information delivery system and then sever it from in-class formative discussions would run counter to the pedagogical framework I use for this course.  My emphasis centers on building knowledge through skills of analysis, where the content (“the facts”) are learned not before, but together with and by practicingtechniques for understanding how to interpret them.[i]  Was there a way I could use the on-line tools to advance my course goals?

As I clarified for myself, I hoped to use this new approach in order to help students focus their reading and studying for the upcoming week around larger conceptual questions, to help me hit the ground running in lecture, and to provide week-to-week transitions and continuity for a 300-person classroom with multiple TAs.  My initial idea was to post the video and give students credit for watching it.  I then consulted education research to assist me in integrating this element as effectively as possible and was largely guided by principles of the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) model.  JiTT is a research-based suite of learning and teaching techniques that helped me to tailor this idea to keep students most engaged and enhance the opportunity for formative feedback.  According to two of its original developers, Physics Education researchers Gregor Novak and Evelyn Patterson, “the key idea of JiTT pedagogy is to develop an intentional direct linkage between in-class and out-of-class activities via preparatory web-based assignments.”  The motivation originated not in “off-loading” content, but creating meaningful ways for students to connect their learning activities “that generally require students to read, view, or do something, and answer related questions.”[ii]  This encouraged me to add an element to the exercise – not just watching the video, but I added a three-question quiz (graded for participation only), that both allowed students a chance for self-assessment and to provide feedback.  JiTT has spread across disciplines, with adaptability and proven effectiveness throughout the sciences and into the humanities.[iii]

Example and Tutorial

Before I go any further into the details, how I implemented specific JiTT principles and the overall outcome, you might want to look at an example of a Weekly Previews I used in this course.  First, here is a video from early in the semester, setting up the transition from the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction we had just finished and looking towards the labor unrest and economic issues of the Gilded Age.  You’ll see at the end a list of “concept questions” I offered to help students guide their studying for the week ahead; these are not the quiz questions they would answer immediately after watching the video, but rather ones they should be able to answer by the end of the week, integrating lecture, recitation discussions, and reading in the textbook and primary sources.

[video:https://youtu.be/wCPl1Mc60A8]

Students would then visit the Quiz area of D2L to answer the questions, and I built in a function whereby students could only get to the quiz after having accessed the video.  They did this between Friday morning and Monday before lecture, allowing me to review their answers Monday mornings and integrate some of their insights and questions into the lecture.

Here’s a tour of how this looked in my D2L site.

[video:https://youtu.be/aCZZQ7Iv56s]

Student Feedback

Over the course of several surveys, most students in the course reported that they found the Weekly Previews useful for their learning: 55% chose either helpful or very helpful, with an additional 35% deciding they were a little helpful.  The remainder either though they were not helpful, or were not completing them (even though they did receive credit for doing so).  Of the students who found them helpful, here were some typical comments.

• “I really enjoy the weekly previews. They get me prepared and excited for lecture. Thanks.”
• “A good set up on what we are going to be learning this week.”
• “I REALLY like the Weekly Preview videos - it's a great introduction to the reading & to the next week's lecture!”
• “Very unique and they get me ready for the week.”
• “I liked having a brief grasp of the weekly topic before going into lecture. It gave me a good understanding of what was to come.”
• “A good summary for myself to refresh history I had already learned. It also made me highlight key things I did not know. Therefore, I would pay extra attention during lecture during those parts.”
• “It allowed me to focus on what was brought up often, to look for what’s important.”
• “The most useful element for me was our ability to state our questions, comments and concerns. “
• “Helped me build momentum for the rest of the week's lectures and recitation.  Introducing the material the night before lectures helps quite a bit in retaining the information.”

That it allowed students to plan their own studying, be clear on the areas of focus, identify areas of confusion, and retain lecture material better all fed into many of the goals of JiTT (see below for more detail).

Of the students who found them less helpful most asked for all the videos to be on the shorter side, say 5-7 minutes rather than 7-12, and expressed concern about technical challenges.  Others found some of them a bit repetitive, particularly those students who seemed to have no trouble taking notes or focusing their studies.  My sense from examining the feedback and talking with students, that the Previews most helped those students who typically found themselves overwhelmed.

Assessment and Modification Possibilities

I reviewed my first semester using this tool based upon the seven principles for effective implementation of JiTT[iv]:

1. Structure – This principle suggests that these tools need to be clearly integrated into the structure of the course, rather than ad hoc, and their significance explained to the students in advance.
2. Flexibility – Here one should adapt various types of JiTT towards ways that are most compatible with in-class teaching practices.

In following these principles, I did find that the Weekly Previews accomplished what I had hoped in terms of greater week-to-week continuity and an effective way to open up the broader questions for each topic and engage student participation.  It was also a useful platform to integrate other course tools, such as the weekly concept questions which I have used without the Previews for sometime.  This tool allowed me to combine those elements.

1. Feedback and formative assessment – Here the suggestion is to make use of the pre-class learning activities in class and give direct feedback about apparent learning gaps and a chance to address them before higher-stakes assignments and exams.
2. Student centeredness – This reminds that the follow-up use in the classroom can influence content to focus more on students needs.
3. Employs research on learning – This is a recommendation to employ best practices of research on student learning, in part through students articulating their own questions and reasoning, and so the JiTT exercises align with (rather than counter) such knowledge and tools in the course.

Weekly Previews seemed to encourage students to generate their own questions and allowed me to make good use of them in classroom, whether adding sections based on areas of student confusion or requests based upon interest.  Students responded that they felt included in the process of generating course content.  I do think the quiz questions could do a better job of giving students more immediate formative assessment about the state of their comprehension and knowledge going in, as it was clearly helpful when it did provide that.

1. Building meta-cognitive skills – JiTT exercises can be useful when designed as reflective learning practices to help students understand what they know and what they don’t know, the gap between them and how to connect the dots.

As above, Weekly Previews allowed students to better target what they needed to know and pay greater attention to in the upcoming week.  I also tried, and can do more with, emphasizing why this self-assessment practice (metacognition) is an important skill for students to cultivate.

1. Making student thinking visible – This principle suggests that JiTT can help teachers to uncover hidden misconceptions and capitalize on student questions in ways that expand what is possible in the classroom itself.

As I mentioned before, making student thinking visible through this kind of feedback was the unexpected gold mine in the Previews for me.  Whatever students’ payoff in a more student-centered environment, my ability to know what my students were thinking, wondering, or worrying about going into the classroom was an extremely valuable perspective to have – and new to me.  Instead of assuming what I thought they knew and wanted to learn, I had a much more concrete sense of where I could help them and where I could take them.  Very simply as well, students often communicated an eagerness to learn about certain topics that made me excited to get to the classroom.  In a large survey, with an anonymous mass of students, it can be easy to assume the students were likely to arrive skeptical and disengaged.  For them to articulate, and me to see their words: “I want to learn…” before I began the week’s classes, was energizing and rewarding.

For all of these reasons, I plan to continue my use of Weekly Previews for my survey class in the future, although with aims to modify and improve this tool in future semesters.  Initial changes will be to streamline some of the scoring and technical issues as well as to regularize the length of the videos, towards the shorter end of the spectrum, or at least to have all come in under 10 minutes.   And without losing the open-ended feedback, on a more complex level, I hope to vary the types of questions and activities to create more opportunities for both meta-cognitive work and practice with developing their habits of historical thinking.  The ideal for JiTT activities is that they yield rich set of student responses for classroom discussion, encourage students to examine prior knowledge and experience, require answers that cannot be easily looked up, contain ambiguity, and allow students to formulate responses in their own words. [v]  My hope is to work to integrate these general ideals with discipline-specific goals, in my case, a skills-based approach to history.[vi]