2.1 Why do I need these tools?

It is anticipated that, even if we are back on campus and lockdown has eased at some point in Semester 1, social distancing will still be in place until the end of 2020 and perhaps beyond. With this specific issue in mind, the University has instructed that all lectures in Semester 1 2020/2021 must be delivered online, and that we must also prepare for all seminars, if necessary, to be online too.

Both Faculty and SALC guidance outlines that blended and online teaching should be based on a principle of active learning. Professor Becki Bennett, Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students (Distance Learning), says:

"We know that students learn more effectively when they are active learners, that is, when they have to do something."

To engage students in active learning there are a range of interactive but asynchronous tools that you can deploy. You may use these to break up an asynchronous "lecture" style session, or you might wish to mix them up with, or deliver in advance of, a synchronous seminar.

2.2 VoiceThread

VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that can include text, images, documents, audio and video, and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in several ways - using voice, text, audio or video. VoiceThreads can be created by staff or students, and be graded or un-graded.

A VoiceThread can be used like a lecture, slide by slide, but with the added bonus that students can then comment on this or annotate the slides. Alternatively a VoiceThread can be a single slide where you might pose a question and the students can answer it. You can control whether students can hear and see each other's responses.

VoiceThread is a cloud application, so there is no software to install. The only system requirement is an up-to-date version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. VoiceThread will run in your web browser and on almost any internet connection.

The Faculty has lots of fantastic VoiceThread resources, including how to guides for staff and students, FAQs and examples, and training.

Click on these links to examine and contribute to examples of single and multiple slide VoiceThreads. The multiple slide VoiceThread also provides an overview of the various ways you might want to use VoiceThread.

2.3 Discussion Boards

Blackboard have some helpful resources on discussion boards. They outline that:

Discussions are a good way to encourage students to think critically about your coursework and interact with each others' ideas. You can create discussions around individual course lessons or for your course in general. As the instructor, you own the discussions. After you start a discussion, you can post comments of your own to guide students. The most common form of interaction in an online course is through discussions started by an instructor. Participation and interaction in discussions don't occur naturally. You must intentionally design it into your courses. To encourage engaging, quality discussion, craft discussion questions carefully and create inquiry.

Blackboard outline 4 steps to make effective discussions:

1. Define participation requirements: Share your expectations. Create a discussion where students can read about etiquette and access grading information.Model proper online interaction and reinforce appropriate behaviour with public recognition.
2. Craft an effective question: Incorporate multimedia resources into your questions to reduce the monotony of purely text-based interactions. With the popularity of services like YouTube™, you can ask students to view a clip and ask for responses.
3. Encourage new ideas: If discussion posts contain too much agreement and not enough questioning of ideas, assign students with the last names A-M to support one side and N-Z to support the other.
4. Moderate: Establish your presence. Ask for clarification, resources, or input from silent participants.

To get a sense of how people in SALC already use discussion boards you can watch this short clip, from the Distance Learning team in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI). In this clip Dr Darren Walter also covers the way he organises his Blackboard space every week to ensure consistency.

There are other tools beyond Blackboard that also allow you to develop less formal discussion boards, such as Padlet. Padlet is not supported by the Humanities eLearning team, but you can sign up for a free account and it is easy to use. In the video below, Dr Scott Midson discusses how he has used Padlet, and provides a short guide about how it is used.

The above clip is from Scott's talk to the SALC Teaching Innovation Collective, and the full talk covers many of the online learning tools discussed on this page. The short clip used here is part of a longer section in which Scott discusses his experience of using both Blackboard discussion boards in contrast to Padlet. If you want to hear more you can see his whole talk here. If you visit the SALC Remote Teaching Website you can find links not only to Scott's talk, but also the full talk by Dr Darren Walter that the clip above is taken from, and a presentation from the Egyptology Distance Learning Team too. All three present the use of discussion boards, along with other online and blended learning techniques.

2.4 Quizzes

Including regular quick, formative quizzes and tests provides a useful way for students to check their understanding and consolidate their learning, and for them to feel engaged with the course. As a lecturer, you can also use these to check how the cohort is developing their knowledge. You can also deploy quizzes in Blackboard as summative assessments if you wish, in line with School and Faculty guidance on assessment.

There are a wide range of online sources for developing quick and easy formative quizzes. Quizlet and Kahoot are two free providers (please note that these are not supported by Humanities eLearning - this does not preclude you from using them, but it means that the eLearning team can not provide training or guidance in their use). For both you simply sign up for a free account from their websites and proceed from there. In Quizlet you can create "flashcards" with definitions, which students can review, revise and then be tested on. In Kahoot you can create more straightforward multiple choice quizzes, which students can then take individually or "play" against each other as a challenge - see the video below for more information.

Because this video is not owned by us, we can not provide a transcript of the text, but you can click on the "closed captions" button on the bottom right of the screen when the video is playing in full screen mode.

You can also create quizzes in Blackboard too. Blackboard use the term "tests", but despite this more formal terminology these can be employed as formative quizzes in the same way as Quizlet or Kahoot. You can also use Blackboard tests in a more formal way as summative assessments. Whether they are formative or summative, the results of Blackboard tests will be published in the grade centre. You can find out more by clicking the link below, and the below video provides a simple step by step guide to creating tests in Blackboard.

Because this video is not owned by us, we can not provide a transcript of the text, but you can click on the "closed captions" button on the bottom right of the screen when the video is playing in full screen mode.

2.5 Wikis

Most of us are familiar with Wikis through the medium of Wikipedia, and you could of course collaborate with students students to write entries for Wikipedia itself. However, Blackboard also provide the facility of creating wikis specific to your course. They explain:

Wikis allow course members to contribute and modify one or more pages of course-related materials and provide a means of sharing and collaboration. Course members can create and edit pages quickly, and track changes and additions, which allows for effective collaboration between multiple writers. You can create one or more wikis for all course members to contribute to and wikis for specific groups to use to collaborate.

Blackboard provide detailed guidance about how to use wikis, including suggestions about the ways in which these can be deployed. You can click the link below for more detail and also watch the video below for an overview.

Because the video is not owned by us, we can not provide a transcript of the text, but you can click on the "closed captions" button on the bottom right of the screen when the video is playing in full screen mode.

2.6 Polling

Polling technology can be employed both asynchronously or during a synchronous session too. It allows the lecturer to pose a question (usually embedded in a presentation or VoiceThread) which students then answer via their devices (phone, computer or tablet). The most common way of doing this is through a set of multiple choice or yes/no answers, but some polling technology also allows respondents to add in their own answers, contribute to clickable maps, provide short written answers or create word clouds too.

Three of the most popular brands are TurningPoint (for which the University of Manchester has a site licence that you will need to sign up to access, and which is supported by Humanities eLearning), Mentimeter, and Poll Everywhere (which require signing up for free at their website).

2.7 Word Clouds

Word clouds are a method of visually presenting textual data, ordering the size of words by their frequency. There are lots of free word cloud generators on the web and most of these work by allowing an individual person to upload text to them. For example, I made the word cloud above at WordClouds.com by pasting in the SALC Remote Teaching Key Principles document. However, for both asynchronous and synchronous teaching there are some word cloud generators available which allow word clouds to be created as a collaborative effort. In fact some of the most popular sources for this are in the polling tools you have already encountered above, Poll Everywhere and TurningPoint. AnswerGarden also generates word clouds which can be embedded easily in Blackboard.

This is a great tool for student engagement and it works well integrated with other tools discussed above. You could, for example, ask students to read an article or consider a topic then contribute three key words to a word cloud generator by a certain date. You can then generate and share the word cloud and then ask your students to contribute to a discussion board or VoiceThread to discuss why certain words were more popular.

On this page we have aimed to provide a brief introduction to some of the key tools available to you for interactive asynchronous teaching, and which can help students to engage in active learning. The tools covered here are:

1. VoiceThread
2. Discussion Boards
3. Quizzes
4. Wikis
5. Polling
6. Word Clouds

For each we have outlined what they do, how they might be used, and provided videos so you can find out more about them and videos and links to step-by-step guides. Feel free to return to this page as a "launch pad" for investigating these in more detail as you progress in developing your online and blended learning materials.

There are, of course, plenty of other tools that you might want to use. We recommend exploring the Faculty's eLearning resources web page using the link below. In the left hand column you will see links to a wide range of additional resources, including multi-media resources and open educational resources, which may be valuable for your online and blended teaching.

In the next part of this course we move on to cover tools for recording asynchronous lectures.