Lowering Barriers to Success
This last segment will return, in many ways, to the morning discussions/practices and move into critical conversations around barriers and challenges for bringing digital creative practices into our work with students.
- Activity 3 - TPS - Faculty Perspectives
- Activity 4 - Group Discussion - Positives & Impact
- Activity 5 - TPS - Student Perspectives
- 2 Unfortunate Myths
- A few Strategies & Orientations
Activity 3 - Think-Pair-Share | Identifying barriers (& other considerations)
- Step 1 - Think - 1-2min - Write down a few barriers or concerns you think faculty face in bringing these practices into the classroom.
- Step 2 - Pair (in pairs or groups of 3) - 2-3min - Discuss what your wrote down and rank order them in terms of significance (1 being most significant barrier).
- Step 3 - Share 5-7min - Write down on a Post-It note your prominent barriers/concerns raised and be prepared to share insights and explanations with the group.
Activity 4 - Group Discussion
- Step 1 - In groups, take 3-5 minutes to talk about the positives or advantages of bringing digital creative practices into the curriculum.
- Step 2 - As a group, write down on Post-Its a few key positives you identified.
- Step 3 - (S)elect a Champion to report out your conversation
Activity 5 - Think-Pair-Share | Identifying barriers (& other considerations) - FOR STUDENTS
- Step 1 - Think - 1-2min - Write down a few barriers or concerns you think faculty face in bringing these practices into the classroom.
- Step 2 - Pair (in pairs or groups of 3) - 2-3min - Discuss what your wrote down.
- Step 3 - Share 5-7min - Write down on a Post-It note a few key words/phrases that correspond to prominent barriers/concerns raised and be prepared to share insights and explanations with the group.
Myth of Expertise
Many faculty are cautious to do too much with new technologies and platforms because they don't feel they are experts in this area. But you need not be an expert to be digitally innovative in the classroom.
ONE: Rapid Change | Technologies change so rapidly that being or remaining an expert is a challenge. Just look at AI/GenAI -- it is the first moment in the history of higher education where everyone needs some form of faculty development, because most digital literacy / digital creativity tools and platforms will always outpace teachers. {Industry just has a bigger budget}
TWO: Inviting Different Models | The Expert-to-Student model of teaching works, but but alternative models, including student directed learning, can be equally effective. Things like student-direct learning (and peer-to-peer learning) can
- help students form habits of practice for working in/with/through creative technologies, and
- help students learn how to learn a new technology (perhaps the most important underlying value).
THREE: Disciplinary Expertise | For most instructors, the "expertise" resides necessarily elsewhere (i.e, in disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and making). This discipline-specific knowledge helps instructors
- provide guidance on methods and practices for discovering, developing, and validating knowledge, and to be able to
- signal to students the acceptable modes and means of representing knowledge in a given discipline.
You don't have to know how to make a TikTok video to know when a TikTok video on [Insert Discipline Topic] is wrong or presented poorly or not appropriately situated for an academic audience
Myth of the Digital Native
The concept of the "digital native" suggests that students have some natural or innate ability to work with technologies, and while there is some validity in that statement -- particularly in relation to consuming digital content via digital devices -- the reality is that the "digital native," while a helpful concept, is a myth.
- For one, the so-called "digital natives" Mark Prensky was writing about in the early 2000s are now faculty who still, after the pandemic, have trouble making Zoom work.
- Two, today's so-called "digital natives" by and large have no idea where files live on their computer.
Strategies & Orientations
Start Simple & Scaffold Skills
One way to enhance Student Success (and mitigate anxiety) is to scaffold the skills and their integration. You can do this through in-class activities and low-stakes assignments that develop abilities as well as engage content.
- Think-Pair-Make-Share to teach Image Creation in Express
- Concept explanation as micro-video: Create 2-3 images in Express (i.e., visual slides) and add them + voice over in Express Video
- Vlog-like reading response/explainer video: Zoom recording + Express image creations + Express Video
- Video-based Project (combining all skills)
Embrace Failure (as) Pedagogy
Failing is often the first step to success, but so much of higher education has stigmatized failure. To flip this, I embrace a tripartite of failure as key to learning: fast failure, fun failure, and formative failure.
- Fast failure is designed to get the bad (or less than ideal) ideas out of the way and to do so quickly. What matters here is not whether a student comes up with the right idea for a project or best explanation or approach, but rather a quick (low-risk) engagement to eliminate the ideas likely to bear less fruit so as to better focus one's energy/time.
- Fun failure focuses on celebrating, quite openly, each others' mishaps and miscues (technological, conceptual, or other). I invite students to use the last or first 5 minutes of class to share their failures, and I share my own (especially those of a technological variety). These stories, artifacts, and shared experiences not only become part of the course culture, they sometimes evolve into course memes.
- Formative failure is another name for drafting, iterability, or review (peer review as well as pre-grade instructor review). The reality is that creative activities (writing, design, production, etc.) go through 'final' versions before being done, publishable, etc. So rather than focus on failure as a shortcoming, treat this more serious orientation to failure as a formative value (or as a series of formative failures) that shape the work and ideas toward a better end.
New Course Feature | Tokens
What are Tokens?
Tokens are a course design feature that can help lower student anxiety about course work and foster a climate committed to taking intellectual risks. They function as a form of currency (given and earned) that can be exchanged for a number of uses.
What can Tokens be used for?
While you can establish any number of uses for tokens (and any number of challenges ["in-class" or "out-of-class"] for students earn additional tokens), the primary ways I use tokens are below:
- 72-hour Extension: This is a "no questions asked" guaranteed extension (excludes Final Course Projects)
- Revise & Resubmit: Allows students to revise and resubmit for an improved letter grade any assignment from class
- Excused Absence: Students can use a token to offset an absence that might otherwise be penalized
- 1% Grade Bump: At the end of the semester, students can use a token to earn a 1% bonus on their final grade
- Collaborator's Pass: Students can use a token to transform any assignment into a collaborative assignment. (Note: all collaborators must use a token.)
How many tokens do students start with? How many can they earn?
I give students 2 tokens at the start of class and they have the opportunity to earn more throughout the semester. The baseline or the number of potential tokens is usually 2 + the number of major assignments in course.
- e.g., if I have 3 major assignments in a course, there would be the 2 at the start plus at least 3-4 Token Challenges during the semester in which students can earn additional tokens.
Discussion
In small groups, discuss some additional ways we might Lower Barriers to Student (and Faculty) Success
- What are some additional ways we might help with student anxiety? faculty anxiety? (both in terms of practices and material constraints)
- What do you think will be your go-to strategy or approach to be successful?
- Or, just as importantly, what are some effective strategies you've used in the past (or seen used) to integrate digital tools/platforms into the curriculum?
Be prepared to report out to the whole group.