This summer, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has publicly announced a more focused initiative to promote digital citizenship (ISTE Blog, July 2018). Digital citizenship is not simply online safety practices.  Online safety includes maintaining good practices such as strong passwords, not becoming victims of phishing, spear fishing, or other social engineering digital attacks, and protecting one’s identity in online spaces. Digital citizenship is not simply about protecting yourself or your institution online. It is about creating a meaningful community, engaging in respectful debate, helping to shape public policy, and engaging in effective digital information literacy (ISTE Blog, July 2018).

Digital citizenship is meant to combat the tsunami of cyberbullying, trolling, toxic comments, online arguments, and fake news that we all see in our online environments.  Similar to being a good citizen in one’s physical community, one needs to be a good citizen within their virtual environments. As we move into this week where most of our undergraduate students will participate in their local community through Into the Streets, we need to remember and remind ourselves that citizenship is not limited to our physical geography.

What is perhaps most important to remember is that people who are not good digital citizens can (though certainly not always) actually be generally respectful people IRL (in real life).  The anonymity and physical distance provided by the online environment can provide temptations for individuals to engage in actions that they otherwise might not if they were able to be identified.  I explored this very issue over 10 years ago when I was in graduate school and today these same psychological principles continue to contribute to the sometimes toxic nature of the Internet world (see Christopherson, 2007).

So what might we do?  What are some of the ways that we in higher education can help ISTE meet their goals to encourage digital citizenships? Many of these strategies are actually easy for us to do as individuals:

• When engaging in disagreements, do so with civility.  If the ‘other side’ continues to use toxic forms of disagreement, disengage so that you remove one of their platforms for incivility. Do not engage ‘trolls.’
• If you notice someone being cyberbullied through comments or posts, post positive comments and encourage others to do so as well.  Doing nothing, does something. See StopBullying.com for other strategies to prevent and address cyberbullying
• Be vigilant about fake news and spreading misinformation.  Stop and think before forwarding or sharing a post. Help others to identify these types of fake stories and images. See FactCheck.org for strategies to identify fake news and images.
• Use digital mechanisms for engaging in social policy.  Engage in meaningful debate, post well researched solutions, share perspectives, use digital means to raise funds or awareness for meaningful causes.
• Use digital materials ethically.  Appropriately give credit for multimedia you might use. Do not use someone else’s materials without permission.  Check for the permissions that are provided by the creator. Familiarize yourself with the copyright of information and materials you use (creative commons as an example).
• Model digital citizenship through all online interactions and communications.

If the concept of fostering digital citizenship is of interest to you, I encourage you to explore ISTE’s site on Digital Citizenship.  Though ISTE is more focused on the K-12 educational environment, these basic principles and ideas can be translated into higher education.  This page provides a number of short articles on ways to incorporate digital citizenship into the classroom and how to create learning activities (such as problem-based learning and authentic learning tasks) that help students engage in digital citizenship.

Christopherson, K.M. (2007). The positive and negative implications of anonymity in Internet social interactions: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Computers in Human  Behavior, 23(6), 3038-3056.

Bear with me in this week’s blog post – I’m about to get a little ‘fan-girl’ crazy here with Moodle.  And for anyone who knew about these bulk grading and upload processes and never told me…Shame! Shame! Shame!

Last week I shared with you a way to help the first start of the grading processes for Moodle assignments go a bit quicker using the Download All Submission option.  At that time I also alluded to the fact that this can be the first step in helping later on with submitting assignments back to Moodle. Today I share with you the thing the literally made me want to jump and shout to the world what I think will be a LIFESAVER for those of us who do a lot of electronic grading.

Image from https://imgflip.com/i/1dqrhu

But before I get into the really exciting part, let me share with you a few of the features in Moodle that you can use to provide different types of feedback to your students.  When you create or edit an assignment you can select the different ways of providing feedback: Feedback Comments, Feedback Files, Offline Grading sheet, and Comment inline.

Feedback Comments, when enabled, will include a textbox for you to write comments back to your students.  Feedback Files, when enabled, will provide you a place to upload a file – most likely a Word file that you have made electronic comments on.  If you have provided a textbox for your students to type their assignments into (you do this in the Submission Types –>Online Text) and enable the Comment Inline feature, you will see your student’s responses from their online text submission in your feedback comments textbox and you can comment within the student’s text (see below for what I mean by this).

The settings:

How it works:

View Video Click Here: https://use.vg/W4gzdm

But probably what I am most excited about is the fact that I just recently started to explore just what this Offline Grading Sheet was all about and WOW have I been missing the boat there.

When you enable the offline grading sheet, you will then be given an option in the drop-down menu where you can also ‘download all submissions’ to download the grading sheet.

Doing this will download an Excel file to your computer that is formatted so that all you need to do is enter in the points grades for students on the single excel sheet.  You can also write in your feedback comments on this grading sheet as well.

Once all of the grades are entered, then you can simply upload this sheet back (don’t change anything about the formatting except for the grades and the feedback you entered) and Moodle magic updates all of the grades for you at once!  You can do similar quick grading on the initial page of an assignment in Moodle, but this allows you to also do this while not connected to the Internet (at least until you have to upload the sheet). Here’s a quick demo of how this works:

View Video Click Here: https://use.vg/4GnnyW

So, once I learned about that I decided to explore the other options in that drop-down menu that I typically ignore (we truly just don’t always have the time to explore this stuff right…plus we don’t want to break the Moodle).  So I explored what the “upload multiple feedback files in a zip” was.

Well, surprisingly it’s exactly what it sounds like.  A way to upload all of those commented worksheets or papers at once (rather than going student by student).  The trick here is that you need to first download all of the files using the “download all submissions” tool.  This names the files in the way that is necessary to batch upload again. After that all you need to do is to save all of these files into a zip folder and then upload it back and BOOM! All the files are there.  What might take you the better part of an hour to do when turning back assignments (especially if you have have 30-40 or more students in a course) is now done in the matter of a few minutes! Now if we can just get the actual grading to go quicker right?! See this magic at work here:

View Video Click Here: https://use.vg/g0pIJm

So are you as excited as I am about this? This will literally save me hours of time as I grade assignments this year.  The one thing to be aware of is that students do not receive an automatic email notifying them of these updated grades and files.  But this is easily done by simply clicking the “save all grading changes” at the bottom of the quick grade view.

**Edit to add information**

Unfortunately if you use ‘Rubrics’ or ‘Marking Guides’ as your grading type in Moodle the Offline Grading Sheet feature is not available.  However, you can still do a bulk upload of all feedback files.

When Susie and I had the faculty respond to a short survey, there was a lot of interest from you on learning more about the different features of two particular Moodle activities: Assignments and Quizzes.  These are probably two of the most commonly used Moodle activities (Forums are also very common) at Morningside and there is probably more to them that you are aware.

Even I have learned a few new strategies for using these tools recently and this year one of my goals is to share these with all of you.  This Fall I focus on Moodle Assignments.

Basics:

The Moodle Assignment is basically the drop-box feature in our learning management system (LMS).  Instructors provide instructions and materials for students to complete and then students submit their work electronically through Moodle.  Instructors then provide feedback and grade the assignments, turning them back electronically through Moodle. Here is a document outlining this basic process.

Assignment Options:

There are many different options available that you’ve likely noticed if you have ever included one of these in your course.  For example, there are different feedback types, different grading mechanisms, you can use something called ‘groups,’ you can enable multiple attempts, you can use a ‘quickgrade’ or you can grade students one screen at a time.  I’ll discuss using some of these different features in future blog posts, however, In this installment I want to give you one tip that might help the grading process go just a tad bit faster – the Download All Submissions feature.

Using Download All Submissions:

After your students have all uploaded their assignments to Moodle there are really two ways to download the files onto your computer so that you can provide feedback on their assignments.  1) you can click on each individual student file and download them individually or 2) you can download all files as a batch. There are a few benefits to using process #2: First, there is WAY fewer clicks and less waiting for downloads and second, using the download all submissions option automatically names the files with the students names.  So you don’t need to depend on students properly naming their files for you to identify them on your computer! Here is a short 30 sec video demonstrating how to do this.

https://use.vg/xYu57R

The one drawback that I can think of is this.  You really need to wait until after the due date to use this bulk download process in the most efficient manner, so if you are someone who likes to grade as assignments come in, this process might not be the best to use.  This bulk download does not recognize if you have downloaded the same file previously. It’s still possible to use it, there is just more file management that needs to occur on the instructor’s end (i.e. moving new files into your assignment files and ignoring student files that you have already saved).

This process can help speed up grading by basically reducing the time it takes to download each individual student’s file to your computer.  Additionally, using this process also makes it possible to do a type of bulk upload (to be discussed in a future blog post! – This is a feature I just learned about myself).

The term Universal Design initially originated in the field of architechture design as a way to describe creating building designs that incorporated features that helped accommodate those with disabiities and also were useful to those without disabilities.  Consider how helpful having automatic doors are when your hands are full or how nice it is to have slopped sidewalks at corners if you are pushing a stroller.  These are all benefits of UD.  The same idea can be applied to the classroom when we begin to make accommodations that are often availble to student with disabilities to all students in the classroom.  Creating videos with closed captioning, having electronic textbooks that have an e-reader feature can be very helpful if one needs to view a video where having the sound on might not be appropriate or if they need to read a chapter while driving to and from school.

Technology has allowed for more incorporation of UD into the classroom.  Below I present a table of just a few common classroom issues that might benefit from a UD approach.  I present a low-tech, medium-tech, and high-tech approach.

One manner that we can utilize technology as instructors is through our lesson planning process.  There are several processes for designing lessons, but perhaps the most powerful is the Backward Planning approach that is recommended by most instructional designers.  This approach asks the teacher to first consider what you want your students to DO before you consider what you will teach.  With Backward design we start with the student learning outcomes first (written with verbs that indicate some action on the part of the student that is measurable), then decide on the manner in which we can measure learning (assessment instrument), and then we decide on the materials and activities that need to be done to practice and develop these skills.

Here is an example of how technology can play a role:

Perhaps you are a history teacher and want students to understand the relationships between current economic conditions and political policies that were developed.  First you will want to decide how your students could demonstrate this understanding.  Perhaps you will have them engage in a debate between two rival political parties one the historical policy. Your assessment might be a scoring rubric with a number of necessary elements (facts, relationships between economics and policy, explanation of party differences, etc).

Now that you know what your students will do and how they will be evaluated, now you can decide on the information they need to know and the activities they can do leading up to this.  So then you might ask, how does technology play a role?

Perhaps you do not have class time to have a live debate? What are some alternatives?

• Students record in small groups their debates
• Have a social media debate
• Have students create a documentary portraying the debate

How does technology play a role in assessment?

• recorded evaluation allows instructors to rewind and view elements again.
• Recorded products can be shared internally or globally
• Rubrics can be created electronically

How does technology play a role in materials and activities?

• textbooks and original historical documents available on the internet
• Other research from historians.
• Online or electronic activities, quizzes, etc.

Technology is not necessarily a requirement for this project, it could be done without it.  But you can see that integrating technology provides opportunities for your students that are otherwise difficult to do without it.  The important part here is really process.  If we know where are students need to be at the end, we can better tailor our lessons so that students can meet those expectations.

About a month ago I attended the 8th Annual Quality Matters Conference in Portland, OR. This conference offers a number of opportunities for faculty, staff, and administration people involved in online and blended learning to learn more about the Quality Matters rubrics and how to use them to help improve course design.

I attended a couple of half-day pre-conference workshops and a number of conference sessions on topic ranging from methods for implementing the QM rubrics on campus to strategies for making specific types of course improvements.  I learned quite a bit but I came away from the conference with three major take-aways:

1. Morningside’s online programs are in good position to begin utilizing the Quality Matters rubrics in both course design and in creating quality assurance processes.
2. Morningside faculty are perhaps unusually willing to explore the potential uses of the Quality Matters rubrics. Many people I spoke to expressed difficulty in having engaged faculty in the process.  Morningside’s faculty seem very willing to engage in this process.
3. A clear plan needs to be envisioned to assess the impact of implementing the QM rubrics here. Notably, meaningful metrics need to be identified and measured.

So what is on the horizon with Quality Matters and Morningside College? I am currently in conversations with the leadership in the three online programs at Morningside (Grad Ed, Grad Nursing, and Organizational Management) to create implementation plans that makes sense for each of those online programs.  A primary focus of these plans will be on faculty development and use of the rubrics for course development/design and peer-review of courses.

If faculty are interested in how they might use the Quality Matter’s rubrics in their own courses (online or FtF) please feel free to contact me and have a conversation about how this might be a useful resource for you.  Or you can listen to a recent Ed Tech development session where a few of the undergraduate faculty who piloted using the rubrics in their summer online courses found using these rubrics.