As one of the 2011 Impact Grant recipients, the general education course Stat 145 has undergone a dramatic face-lift in the past ten months. Most of the imposed changes revolve around increasing the use of technology and moving toward a HyFlex model. The new curriculum experienced good success in the fall term (see previous blog post (“Too Many Students’ and ‘Instructional Technology’: End-of-Term Reflections”), but course coordinator Jackie Miller and I have nonetheless identified areas of weakness in which improvements need to be made.
One of the biggest issues we’re trying to address this winter revolves around building a sense of community within the class. Jackie has always felt strongly about establishing camaraderie among her students, and we believe that this becomes important as class size increases (Jackie’s section has about 170 students enrolled this quarter) and especially important as we move towards the HyFlex, online model. In a recent end-of-term survey given to our fall students, one question asked students to rate their agreement with the statement: “Instructional technology helped create a sense of community in the course.” (Instructional technology was defined to be any combination of tablet-based slides in Powerpoint, statistical applets, Poll Everywhere, Carmen, MyStatLab, and Adobe Connect). Approximately 40% of respondents said they either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the posed question, a number we’d like to decrease greatly.
Piazza Homepage
Near the end of fall quarter, Jackie discovered a new tool called Piazza. According to its website, Piazza is “a place where students can come together to ask, answer, and explore under the guidance of their instructor.” Essentially, it’s a Facebook for classes—but highly customizable and well organized. Most importantly, the site is also highly controllable, giving course coordinators and TAs administrative privileges to manage content.
Optional tags on the Piazza page.
Tying in with its promise to build student community, Piazza enables online collaboration among members of the class. Students can submit questions about lecture content or a homework exercise, and questions can be tagged appropriately (“#problem_set1” or “#instructor_note”) so that students can quickly navigate to the content they’re looking for. Questions can be made private or public, and both students and instructors are able to respond to the questions (student responses are clearly labeled as such, and instructors have the option to “endorse” a student solution). Instructors can host online office hours, multiple instructors can all edit the same response (Wikipedia-style), and the site even allows LaTeX input (especially helpful for us math people).
Piazza usage trends for Statistics 145.
It doesn’t seem to me that Piazza is designed for awarding grades for participation, but individual students’ use of the site can be tracked to measure who is using the site and which content is most helpful to students. This feedback might be useful in ways similar to the dashboard tool in Khan Academy.
We’re not sure exactly how much our students will use Piazza, but the site certainly gives us some exciting capabilities to increase interaction between students. Furthermore, the atmosphere generated by Piazza falls directly in line with the backchannel we hope to eventually implement during lecture (the backchannel would implement a collaborative interface for students to ask questions and submit responses in real time—a “live” version of Piazza). Hopefully, as the quarter progresses, we can find creative ways to direct students to our Piazza page and start building the community we desire.
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Statistics Impact Grant: End-of-Term Reflections Part 2
One of the biggest issues we’re trying to address this winter revolves around building a sense of community within the class. Jackie has always felt strongly about establishing camaraderie among her students, and we believe that this becomes important as class size increases (Jackie’s section has about 170 students enrolled this quarter) and especially important as we move towards the HyFlex, online model. In a recent end-of-term survey given to our fall students, one question asked students to rate their agreement with the statement: “Instructional technology helped create a sense of community in the course.” (Instructional technology was defined to be any combination of tablet-based slides in Powerpoint, statistical applets, Poll Everywhere, Carmen, MyStatLab, and Adobe Connect). Approximately 40% of respondents said they either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the posed question, a number we’d like to decrease greatly.
Piazza Homepage
Near the end of fall quarter, Jackie discovered a new tool called Piazza. According to its website, Piazza is “a place where students can come together to ask, answer, and explore under the guidance of their instructor.” Essentially, it’s a Facebook for classes—but highly customizable and well organized. Most importantly, the site is also highly controllable, giving course coordinators and TAs administrative privileges to manage content.
Optional tags on the Piazza page.
Tying in with its promise to build student community, Piazza enables online collaboration among members of the class. Students can submit questions about lecture content or a homework exercise, and questions can be tagged appropriately (“#problem_set1” or “#instructor_note”) so that students can quickly navigate to the content they’re looking for. Questions can be made private or public, and both students and instructors are able to respond to the questions (student responses are clearly labeled as such, and instructors have the option to “endorse” a student solution). Instructors can host online office hours, multiple instructors can all edit the same response (Wikipedia-style), and the site even allows LaTeX input (especially helpful for us math people).
Piazza usage trends for Statistics 145.
It doesn’t seem to me that Piazza is designed for awarding grades for participation, but individual students’ use of the site can be tracked to measure who is using the site and which content is most helpful to students. This feedback might be useful in ways similar to the dashboard tool in Khan Academy.
We’re not sure exactly how much our students will use Piazza, but the site certainly gives us some exciting capabilities to increase interaction between students. Furthermore, the atmosphere generated by Piazza falls directly in line with the backchannel we hope to eventually implement during lecture (the backchannel would implement a collaborative interface for students to ask questions and submit responses in real time—a “live” version of Piazza). Hopefully, as the quarter progresses, we can find creative ways to direct students to our Piazza page and start building the community we desire.