Hiatus end; new blog focus

Dear readers,

I haven't posted here at Tablet Pedagogy in over a year. Thank you for your patience! After a summer break (2018) and earning tenure, I spent fall 2018 on a sabbatical leave. As I was not teaching for that half year and was focusing on advancing the biology research side of my career, I did not generate many new thoughts to share here.

Now, I'm back in the saddle! I have two graduate courses this semester. Having now started teaching both (once) at this time, I'm already elated to share a new idea for a first-day-of-class approach.

I'm also happy to share that my philosophy of effective teaching has been shifting over the last few years, as it should. If you are a regular reader, you probably noted that my initial posts here at Tablet Pedagogy were all about the use of mobile technology in classes. Lately, my interests have grown beyond technology itself to the appropriate use of technology, as well as many other pedagogies and approaches, to achieve the goal we're all after: improved student outcomes.

The result of this shift is that I will be posting most of my new content on a separate blog. At this time, I feel it is best for me to abandon the "Tablet" moniker here and to brand my thoughts more broadly.

At my new blog, I will continue to proffer ideas about effective education. Hence, I welcome you to continue to join in the conversation with the EduProffer:

https://eduproffer.blogspot.com

Building interactive videos: tool review

Why to Read this Post

In fifteen minutes, you can edit any publicly-available video, including your own, to add an interactive quiz for your students. Here are free software tools that let you collect answers from students, and providence incentive for students to complete assigned video-watching assignments!

Background

A few years ago, I decided to start making small steps to improve the learning atmosphere in my collegiate course in genetics (enrollment ~80). The main premise of the trajectory of my course improvement is that if I make class more engaging and interactive then students will attend more, better understand the application of course content to life, and their learning will improve.

Over that time, one of the major changes I've made has been to "flip the classroom." In such a blended-learning approach, students access the course content on their own before class (either by reading or, more recently, by watching video lectures) and spend their in-class time discussing the content with the instructor, asking questions about ambiguous or complicated content, and practicing using the content.

A major push I have made is to create custom video content for this class. I've recorded many videos of various types to augment this course, including:

• Lectures using Lightboard/Learning Glass technology
• Class trailer videos (i.e. class previews)
• Jigsaw exercises
• Demonstrations of how to use particular types of research equipment
• Screen capture to show how to use software and websites
• Recordings of my in-class content as well as office hours
• Exercise and exam keys

I've also spend a fair amount of time identifying videos I want to share with my students and that others have created and made available on sites like YouTube. After all, there is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to educational materials. But, I still suggest that potential benefits of creating your own videos are that:

• your students see (and hopefully appreciate) the effort you're putting into your class
• the content is customized for your class

Up until this point, some of my obsessions about videos have been:

• captioning them for accessibility (this obsession is motivated by legal issues)
• creating tables of contents for my videos to help students more easily navigate longer videos
• using YouTube analytics to glean information about student video use and what it can reveal to me about how I can improve instruction

Now I have a new obsession, thanks to some egging-on from my colleagues: integrating quizzes and other interactions into videos!

Here's an example of what an interactive video might look like. This is a screen capture video of my computer screen as I play (and interact with) a short video I created and added questions to:

I just yesterday co-led a discussion among California State University system faculty about:

• various tools that can accomplish this goal
• their pros and cons

You can view the video of my co-presenter's (Erik Wasinger's), remarks about the use of Camtasia software to add quiz content to videos here: https://youtu.be/aNxZd3FqLWc but I haven't included Camtasia in my review, mainly because it is a tool you have to purchase.

Here, I review the following four software tools that let you add quiz content to videos:

• Adobe Captivate (support site)
• Vizia (support site)(support site)
• EdPuzzle (support site)
• PlayPosit (support site)

Executive Summary: PlayPosit > EdPuzzle > Vizia > Captivate

Of these four tools, my top three are all web-based tools. PlayPosit earns my top rating, mainly for intuitive interface and ease of use, price (free) and available features. EdPuzzle is also free, but has a little bit less flexibility/freedom in how to share content. It would share top honors with PlayPosit, except that the option to upgrade (for a price) to a PlayPosit Pro account ($144/year) means you always have the option of getting more power (including question types and analytics) from PlayPosit compared to EdPuzzle. Vizia has a smaller feature set than the first two, but must critically, at this point, I have to report that quiz responses do not immediately show up in the Google Sheet & .csv files that record those data (and sometimes, when I demo-ed my quizzes, answers never showed up). Captivate ends my ranked list because, as you'll read below, it isn't really a video quiz-creation tool (although it can do that, kind of…) and because of the price ($30/month or $349 for educators). As most Adobe products, it is a very powerful tool, but it also has a steeper learning curve than the first three options.

From the bottom to the top,

4. Adobe Captivate

It is expensive (I used the two-week free trial to test it), and its primary use is to build interactive web-based quizzes. This is the only tool I'm reviewing that is a stand-alone software package (the rest are web-based tools). You'd probably recognize Captivate-like content as online training modules that your employer has you complete for things like sexual assault, FERPA compliance, and so on. Captivate is, basically, PowerPoint on steroids: it uses a slide-based approach to creating content. You can place video on one slide, and then insert a following slide that contains a quiz. Captivate isn't a direct video editor, like the rest of the tools I'm reviewing. Thus, you can't insert content in the middle of the video unless you, yourself, split your video file into two at the point where you want to add an interaction. Then you'd add those videos on two separate slides, with a third (quiz) slide in between. However, the upside to Adobe is that it has a vast number of education-oriented widgets that are way more than just multiple-choice or free response. For example, there is a word search widget! A big drawback to using Captivate might be that you save your content as a .SWF file that you then have to have hosted on a website somewhere; .SWF files also require web browsers to have Flash installed to play. In other words, you need to have web-hosting tools to use Captivate content (which your institution might already have), and the viewers of that content may have to do a little work on their end to make sure their web browser is configured properly to access it. Here's a demo I made using Captivate (although access might expire when my free trial expires…and ignore/close any "error" messages that might pop up - it should, hopefully, still work)

3. Vizia

Free and easy to use. This is the first video tool I used as I was preparing this review. Aside from the issue I mentioned above that some quiz responses seem never to get recorded (which could be a major concern if you're using this for summative assessment & grading), it is an easy tool for anybody to use to accomplish the basic goal of inserting interactions into videos. Here's a demo I made using Vizia.

2. EdPuzzle

Here's a demo I made using EdPuzzle. Because you have to be signed in as a student to an EdPuzzle classroom to access the content, the demo link takes you to a YouTube video of a screen capture of me using the EdPuzzle-based video quiz. This sign-in requirement might either be a feature or a drawback, depending on your position. The only edge EdPuzzle has over the other tools is the ability for you to add instructor audio comments at specific points in the video. In the other tools, if you wanted to add comments, you would do that either as a free-response question in which you simply do not pose a question (and don't expect a response from the viewer) or by adding a hyperlink to a separate web page where you provided that additional content.

1. PlayPosit

Both EdPuzzle and PlayPosit share some features that I would particularly appreciate but won't apply to all of you. Because I teach at a school that is a Google campus, I like the ability to sign in to both of these tools using my Google educator account (through my campus single sign-on). Likewise, both of these tools can integrate with Google Classroom. PlayPosit edges out EdPuzzle because (with the for-money version) PlayPosit can integrate directly to your campus learning management system (LMS, like Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) PlayPosit also gets the edge on not requiring students to register/login to their system to view your video quiz content and also offering (with the Pro version, $144/year) additional question types. Here's a demo I made using PlayPosit. 

My suggested considerations when choosing which of these tools to edit your videos

• Cost
• Capacity (how many users? how many videos?)
• Where does the movie you want to edit need to be located? (can you upload a movie yourself? does it already have to be on the web with a publicly-accessible URL?)
• Where will your interactive video be hosted when students access it? (do you have to download a file and find a place to put it on a website?)
• How does your audience access the video quiz? Do students have to create an account; is student login required?
• How much does the tool cost to use?
• What types of questions can be deployed?
• When editing a question, can you use rich text (e.g. bold, underline, italics, super/subscript)? Can you attach an image to be displayed?
• What sorts of data can be collected? How are the data reported? What analytics tools are provided? Is LMS integration supported?
• Is question skipping allowed?
• Does the service provide the ability to organize your quiz-embedded videos in any way? (i.e. a folder or "classroom" structure)

Here is a table of how the different software tools address many of these considerations:

Other considerations, which might be relevant to you but I didn't include in this review, could be:

• accessibility/captioning support
• can the video quiz be embedded (with provided HTML code) into an existing webpage?
• ability to share (and use others') video quizzes created in the same tool
• FERPA compliance

When using your own videos

When creating your own video to add quiz questions, I've found that it can be useful, with most of the software packages above, to intentionally insert "white space" (in the case of my demo video above, those were a few seconds worth of solid black) where you intend to place questions. Later, when you're editing the video to add interactions, this provides buffer space between the end of video content and the start of the quiz. Otherwise, it can be quite jarring to have speech end and a quiz immediately displayed. I prefer having the video content end, and then have a couple of seconds of nothing before the quiz is displayed. For those of you who use Apple's Clips app to create classroom videos, this is easily accomplished by ending each video segment where you intend to place a quiz question, adding a solid black image to your Photos library, recording it for a few seconds, and then moving it in between video segments where you will eventually add an interaction:

Best Practices with Interactive Video

• Use video quizzing in clips for students to watch prior to class to collect formative feedback so that you are aware what students understand (and what they don't) by the time class starts
• Collect summative feedback while requesting students to employ information and skills in new situations by integrating existing videos (like news media, TED talks, and the like) with questions. This approach might also help students relate class content to "real life."
• Instead of collecting formative or summative data on student understanding, leverage the ability to insert information (not necessarily a question, or perhaps a rhetorical question) into a video. For example
• After a section of video that you think might be particularly complicated to understand, you might insert a statement containing a URL that students could navigate to for additional perspective (a textbook chapter, or a different video on the same topic)
• You could ask the student, at that point, to reflect on articulating what is most difficult to understand, or to identify the specific point when they feel they started to lose focus. The student could either provide that feedback during the video, or you could ask them to bring a response to class to engage a live discussion
• Interactive videos don't just have to be quizzes; they can support and enhance student mindset and provide them a sort of on-demand, adaptive support.

Conclusions

Although my initial interest in learning how to add quizzes to videos was to enforce student use of the videos, just from having spent a weekend playing with the available tools, I now can see so many more potentially powerful uses of the ability to edit videos by adding interactions. If you have additional uses of such interactions, please share them with me! How do (or would) you use this power in or out of the classroom?

Preaching to the choir

Last week, I gave an invited presentation at my local Mac User Group meeting (Fresno Mac Users Group, FMUG)

http://www.fresnomug.com

The MUG learned about me through one of my former colleagues, who had seen me give an untethered presentation (about the biology research my undergrad and grad students and I conduct at California State University, Fresno) using my iPad and iPhone, and ExplainEverything. You can view that presentation here, if you're interested in learning more about mutations, in a presentation geared to a lay audience:

https://youtu.be/bM9R7MlF3mo

I hadn't known we had a MUG in central California! I was elated to be asked, and it was great to be back in the company of local die-hard Apple evangelists. When I was in high school in Oregon, I took regular advantage of that local MUG (in Corvallis), and I vividly recall borrowing my mom's car to drive there monthly to rub elbows with the other Apple geeks. My strongest memory of the CMUG meetings was the one where I purchased (and had installed) 4x 1 MB RAM chips to replace the 4x 256k RAM chips in the MacPlus I had inherited from my parents when they upgraded to a 9500.

Yes, my family are famously: slow adopters of new tech and/or advocates of the "drive it until it dies" approach (cars in my family tend to be on the road 20+ years before they get replaced). I'm the same way, which sometimes makes me a less-capable advocate of technology because I'm often behind the curve on having the latest and greatest, but that's another story.

I had three main goals of my presentation to FMUG (an overview video, produced in Clips, is at: https://youtu.be/rYo1Zc6niAk):

Goal 1. To demonstrate how Apple builds accessibility features into their hardware and software. As an example, I used these screen shots that show how inaccessible (to us red-green color-blind folk) color pickers used to be, as recently as System 7, shown here:

The introduction of the crayon color picker may have seemed childish, but that the colors were accompanied by names was a huge deal to those of us who rely on this sort of information so that we color grass green and not brown or red!

Here, just for fun, is a current version of the Apple color-picker (left) and a color-blind simulated version (right). To me, the two images look identical. To you, if you aren't color-blind, this gives you an idea of how I view the world and why it is useful to have color accessibility.

For more information, please refer to this resource for choosing color-blind friendly colors to use in media you produce!

http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/#pallet

Goal 2. To broadcast information about Fresno State's "DISCOVERe" program, launched in 2014, which is a 1:1 tablet program (but not exclusively Apple, and probably inevitably moving to a BYOD approach). As a program that is entirely voluntary for faculty to join, and then design at least one course to use mobile devices to increase student engagement and success, we have quadrupled the number of DISCOVERe courses, as well as students enrolled in DISCOVERe classes, over the past three years; we have almost 200 faculty fellows of the program now, while our initial cohort (of which I was a member) numbered 32. Most importantly, I wanted to share with FMUG (and you, too!) that in a single semester last year, DISCOVERe faculty who chose to adopt open educational resources, like iBooks, saved our students a total of over $117,000 in course materials costs!

Goal 3. To share my love of Clips. The highlight of the presentation was a live demonstration of Clips. I first showed a few examples of Clips I had produced, after which questions from the audience immediately turned to the captioning (which I pointed out was a critical component of accessibility).

Not surprisingly (to those with Clips experience), the biggest audible *gasp* in the room came when I gave a live demonstration of Live Titling. Many audience members had previously asked how I created the captions, but I held off on answering those questions until I got to this point!

After I was done demonstrating Clips, I was surprised to hear from the audience that most of them had not heard about Clips and wondered, after I showed them the basics of using this app, why Apple hadn't made a bigger push to promote Clips! I told them that this was one reason I was here, and that I would continue to be a resource for them in their adoption of Clips.

In every presentation I give, I want to make sure the audience leaves with information or a skill of immediate value. So, tonight, I asked all of them to brainstorm how they might use Clips in their lives. We had a great conversation about using the app to (for example) send multimedia greetings to family members via social media, and one kingergarten teacher asked me if it would make sense for her to record herself reading picture books for her students.

I remarked both that Clips would be reasonble (for short books like picture books) but I emphasized a

Key Benefit

of Live Titling in videos: that this accessibility feature is not just for the deaf, but that non-native English speakers (and those, like children, learning to read and write English) really benefit from hearing the word and seeing it written at the same time!

By the end of the meeting, I had demonstrated another way to use Clips: as an aid to newcomers (to any event or organization). Clips, especially in conjunction with time-lapse video using Camera, are great to show people how to navigate from one place to another, as I did here for students at the start of the semester to show them how to get from our lecture classroom to my office on campus:

https://youtu.be/HjzOSJNksXQ

This could work just as well for directions to a church, to your house for birthday party invitees, and so on. Here, I used Clips to provide FMUG a resource to share with new members to help them find the FMUG meeting space!

I was honored to share the power of Clips with my new Apple allies in Fresno and to build new  connections between my campus and community. Again, you can view my FMUG Clip here: https://youtu.be/rYo1Zc6niAk

Student Attitudes about Classroom Clips Videos

Last (Fall) semester, I incorporated some newly-developed technological skills, related to Apple's Clips app, to augment my upper-division biology majors class in genetics using instructor-created and brief videos for students to use in various scenarios. I've blogged about these before:

• Introducing yourself; your classroom

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/clips-power-use-cpu-2-higher-ed.html

• Class "trailer" videos to on-board students to the topic of each class period

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/teasing-with-trailers-aka-clipmercials.html

• Jigsaw exercises and remote instruction

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/cpu-3-jigsaw-clips-engagement.html

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/10/active-learning-week-meets-clips.html

• Describing and annotating processes in locations it is difficult to get your entire class to

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/cpu-4-real-world.html

Separately, I created a digital course manual (which, sadly, is not in iBook format yet) where I curated these Clips and other movies and resources I created, as well as open-education resources. I distributed this resource, called "GATC" (for "Genetics Assets and Tools Companion"), to my class at the start of the term.

  My intro Clip for students on using the GATC: https://youtu.be/YJv4DWraPmg

I'm happy to report that I just received my written comments from student ratings of instruction, and here are excerpts from those related to these videos and digital content I was able to produce using Clips and other Apple (and related) software and hardware: iPad, MacBook Air, QuickTime, and ExplainEverything (for lecture capture video recording)

  http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2014/10/tablet-tech-and-blended-learning.html

I'm sharing these to suggest that the blog posts above may contain some valuable practices for using short videos in the context of a student's classroom experience. For full disclosure, I should also mention that, as part of my course augmentation with technology, I also employed pre-class video lectures that students watched before coming to class; this was not accomplished with Apple hardware or software (see an example of one of my Lighboard, a.k.a. Learning Glass, videos at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnfpWBduB-A).

Student comments

"I love the GATC Course manual because he highlights the exact topics that we should focus on and he makes lots of information easily available to his students."

"I appreciate the recorded lectures that are posted on YouTube. Sometimes I don't get stuff down in time and it's nice to be able to go back and listen to Dr. Ross' explanations again."

"The class discussions made it easier to learn the information. The before class videos were also very helpful."

"The way in which Dr. Ross incorporates technology allows for his students to better understand the material at hand."

In all, I think a critical point here, for dissemination as broadly as possible, is that educators can make positive impacts on students using mobile technology even if the students don't all have a device. Apple technology only in the hands of the instructor can still help engage and inspire students!

Clips in live presentations about using Clips in and out of the classroom

Background

I've written before about using Apple's Clips app to create a variety of types of videos (including trailers and jigsaw microlectures) to drive student interaction and to help them understand the importance (or relevance) of material. Some relevant posts are:

• http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/08/this-project-e-clips-ed-my-summer.html
• http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/teasing-with-trailers-aka-clipmercials.html
• http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/10/active-learning-week-2017-online.html

Today, I gave a presentation about the use of videos in (and out of) class to engage students. My audience was the Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) 2017 conference. I took advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate a new (to me, at least) use of Clips in live presentations.

Why Clips?

Challenges

Although I wanted lots of platform time to give my presentation, I was only afforded a ten-minute lightning talk (but thanks to DET/CHE for accepting my application and offering even that much time!) Now, I assume I'm not alone in feeling a bit of stress and nervousness before I give any sort of presentation, especially to this many people with such a wide background (a relative handful of faculty; mostly administrators, technical staff, and instructional designers). However, my nervousness is not about speaking in front of large groups (which I actually really enjoy…) - the only real source of concern I have is that I keep to my allotted time! I have a tendency to let my remarks run long…

Panorama of the audience in the ballroom

Another challenge (which I didn't know about beforehand, but should have learned to expect at conferences, by now) is that the ballroom projects to two screens. I always find this awkward for presentation, because I have a tendency to want to use a LASER pointer to point out specific items on my slides. However, in the "dual screen" conundrum, one has to favor pointing on one screen (and thus only to half of your audience). Talk about the "digital divide!"

Panorama of the audience view of the front of the ballroom

Why Clips?

Yes, and…

My feeling was that Clips could help me address both obstacles.

• I would create my presentation media in Clips, by recording all of my pre-prepared slides into a single Clip, and then export it as a movie file that I would play as a projected video during my live presentation. Because of the ability to control the lengths of individual component videos of a Clip, I would have control over how much time I could spend on each topic (slide) I wanted to cover, and thus be able to fine-tune the total length of my presentation to fit within my ten minutes.
• As my presentation is on the use of videos in the classroom, I also wanted to demonstrate the abilities of Clips itself. So, not only did building the original video in Clips make sense, but it also allowed me to demonstrate Clips features that are difficult to incorporate into one, seamless, presentation: like adding posters and stickers. So, by pre-recording my Clip to be my projected presentation material, I was able to add in those elements. Critically, this helps with the "dual screen" conundrum, because all of those graphic elements added in Clips to help provide contextual information and to highlight specific parts of slides are projected along with the video itself - so both sides of the room get the same animated presentation.
• Another benefit is that, if you are nervous and shaky with a LASER pointer when you give presentations, this approach avoids the need to use such a pointer, even if you are only projecting to a single screen. Also, if you are presenting on flatscreen TVs (for example), on which LASERs don't show, this is the perfect solution: do all of your "pointing" within Clips!

Workflow

Before the Presentation

1. Create slides in PPT (static graphics); export each slide as its own image
2. Locate any existing video material (like Clips!) that you want to incorporate into your presentation
3. Move those graphics into your Photos library to access from Clips
4. Record (and voiceover) each slide image and movie within Clips - this ensures that you record the appropriate length of time for each slide or movie for you to be able to provide live oral remarks when you replay the Clip to your audience and provide your live comments at the time.
5. Export the completed Clip as a video to your Photos library

During the Presentation

1. Connect your iOS device to projection
2. Launch Clips
3. Access the exported video of your Clip in your Photos Library
4. Make sure live captioning is enabled but doesn't display in real time as you speak (mis-translation during your live presentation might be distracting, I've found…)
5. Start recording (using the recording lock is a good idea, so you don't have to hold the "Record" button with your finger during your entire presentation!)
6. Speak as the movie imports into Clips - deliver your remarks as the movie runs

Protip

When you export your Clip as a movie, make sure that your live titles are hidden, so that they don't appear on the video while you're speaking. That way, when you say something different than you did when you originally recorded the clip, it isn't obvious to the audience!

Drawbacks to Clips for live presentation

You must download your Clip movie to your Photos Library in advance - do a dry run of using Clips for presentation before you go live - that way you won't have to wait for the video to download and load before you can begin!

If you think you won't have internet access on your iOS device for live presentation, then you can't live caption. In that case, one workaround is to use a different device to record your audio while you present, and then use that audio track, played into the speaker of the iOS device running clips, to "live caption" the presentation later.

The visual format of the Clips app does not have a "presentation view" (nor should it, as this isn't its function), so the audience sees all of your Clips screen in a live presentation/recording approach. A related issue can be that the square format of a Clips video might project in too small a format for audience viewing, depending on the set-up of your presentation space. This issue with format is currently compounded by relative little user control over font size in Clips-generation banners, stickers, and the like.

Alternative solutions that don't involve Clips:

• Keynote and Powerpoint can do timed slides and embedded video
• Instead of using Clips for the actual presentation, one can simply play the exported movie in full-screen mode (this is a "cleaner" look, as it doesn't involve projecting the Clips user interface along with your content).

Is using Clips efficient for live presentation?

After I created my slides (in PowerPoint), it didn't take me long (maybe an hour) to create the ten-minute clip, and perhaps another half-hour to edit the live captions - mostly adding punctuation, which doesn't automatically happen.

A side benefit of preparing the presentation in advance is that you can export the live-titled (captioned) video to your favorite social media site to share with the world before you even give your presentation! I even opted to share the YouTube URL for the presentation at the end of my talk! (https://youtu.be/6H9b8G4BPcE)

As a final aside, I also used Clips to create trailers to promote attending my presentation:

• https://youtu.be/SSuwd_IYfb0
• https://youtu.be/h3YlwGAvURs

Since my presentation this morning, I've been receiving feedback from colleagues about the apparent power of Clips and the multiple ways I use videos (especially those made with Clips) in higher ed to engage students. With the help of Clips, my lightning talk turned out to be enlightening to my peers!

Universal Design for Assessments w/Technology (UDAT)

And, like that, in my blog post title, a new acronym is born.

I had a fantastic meeting this afternoon with one of Fresno State's SSD (Services for Students with Disabilities) staff. Without divulging too much detail, I have a student who approached me in confidence about a disability (reported to me as dyslexia, although I'm not sure that was a formal medical diagnosis) that the student hoped I would be able to accommodate.

At the time, I felt torn. I pride myself in being as equitable as possible, so I immediately started thinking about how I might accommodate disabilities in a fair manner.

I feel absolutely fortunate that we have such caring SSD staff (as well as faculty) who are invested and committed to helping students succeed. Today I learned (and am sharing) a couple of points about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) that might also be useful to you!

Briefly, my student mentioned that it helps to be able to read exam questions out loud, which is clearly something that isn't feasible in a traditional lecture classroom-style written exam. So, feel like I have a few options if I want to accommodate this approach. One I'll rule out, and I'll explain the others further. My hope is that, every time you design a student assessment, you'll consider (as is a premise of UDL) pro-actively adopting the couple of viable options I'm about to describe.

1) Write multiple versions of an exam
No, I don't promote this. It is a lot of work, but more critically (I feel), there is no way to write multiple exams that fairly (and critically) assess students. Sure, you could write multiple-choice items in which you switch the order of answers, but because I avoid multiple-choice tests like the plague, I'm not comfortable with this approach. A similar, but more practical approach, might be:

2) Write "choose-your-own-adventure" exams
This approach is also not equitable, but I'm a bigger proponent of this than writing and distributing (randomly) multiple exam verisons. I like the idea of writing one section of an exam in which a student is presented with a few different questions (all worth the same number of points and assessing the same concept), where the student selects and answers one question. This can give students with learning disabilities the option to pick the question format that they're most comfortable answering. No, this isn't perfect (and there is, of course, no panacea for treating all types of learners equally), but it seems like a reasonable approach.

3) Write UDL exams!
I realized today that, in a course like I teach, which is specifically designed to incorporate mobile technology, there are some readily available approaches I can use to make life easier for the huge variety of students I have in my classes. In this specific case, I know that many students with dyslexia can benefit from hearing a question read aloud and/or having the student's response read aloud. This might not be practical in the traditional testing situation, in which many students are seated in the same room, and every effort is made to reduce distractions, including noises other students might make (including reading aloud to themselves!) Fortunately, I'm in a situation where I can reasonable inform students that they can bring headphones to exams and use their mobile devices to use text-to-speech software to read the questions in the PDF exam to them. I've never thought to mention to students that, with digital materials, these sorts of approaches are available. And, as is the principle of UDL, making such approaches available doesn't just benefit students with documented learning disabilities. Everybody can potentially benefit from having such options open to them!

In conclusion, I urge you to reflect on the exams you prepare. Ask yourself not only "Are they accessible?", but "How much do I explicitly demonstrate to students how they can use technology to enrich assessments (and not just learning, as many of us focus on in class!)?" 

As my SSD staff member noted today, some accommodations are legally required for students, but we would do best to help them learn how to advocate and find solutions for their disabilities that can be used beyond the boundaries of academia. Once they graduate, they'll be fending for themselves in the workplace, and we will do them a valuable service if we can help students with learning disabilities establish and practice their own methods of accommodating their disabilities!

Course Materials: Faculty vs Textbook Publishers (& Faculty?!?)

Colleagues,

I am in need of professional succor! In a bout of irony, it was during open-access week, which concludes today, that my considerable efforts to reduce costs for course materials to students in the California State University (CSU) system have been assaulted. My goal here is to share the issue at hand and, hopefully, to collect your feedback and perspectives!

The Background

Being one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world, the CSU system, which serves a huge number of financially disadvantaged students, has a number of programs that emphasize reducing the total cost of education, particularly with regard to course materials. These include Merlot, Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$), and others, with other CSU programs supporting them (e.g. @courseredesign, @cool4ed @courseredesign, @affordableCSU on Twitter).

We also have local initiatives, like Fresno State's "Be a Hero" campaign to promote faculty-bookstore communication, which helps give our bookstore time to research alternative (lower-cost) materials and to ensure that orders can be placed far enough in advance to get the best price on materials.

Over the last couple of years, as part of Fresno State's 1:1 mobile technology initiative, called DISCOVERe, and also as a faculty cohort lead in the CSU Course Redesign with Technology program, I have been working to adopt Open Educational Resources (OER):

• I record course materials as videos for students to watch before class
• I develop my own exercises for students to use to practice class concepts
• I supplement these resources using OpenStax textbooks. These are open-access PDF textbooks that my students can download and use as references.

Doing this, I saved my students over $11,000 in expenses this semester alone.

The Challenge

While celebrating my intellectual contribution to my field and these cost savings for my students, I received an e-mail from a former student. The student had transferred to a different CSU campus and requested my course syllabus. The student's major department at the new campus wanted to evaluate the content of the class to see how/whether it articulated with their requirements.

To my disbelief, after I provided the syllabus, the student later sent me an e-mail response from the department. They made two main points:

• The OpenStax textbooks I listed on my syllabus aren't suitable as upper-division textbooks: "The texts for the course aren’t genetics texts, but, rather, fairly basic online biology texts that we might use to teach our freshman-level core biology class."
• That, although I provide much more detail in class (as evidenced by lecture capture videos, course exercises, exams, etc.), it would take too much work for the new campus to assess the quality of my instructor-created OER to accurately measure whether my upper-division genetics class would substitute for theirs: "The content has also not been demonstrated to be equivalent, but the level of verification this would require is more appropriately done at the university level. Faculty don’t have the time to do a point-by-point articulation between the two courses." It would be unreasonable to ask the faculty at the new campus to watch my lecture videos to do this sort of articulation assessment.

So, in the short-term, I might be saving students money, but am I doing them a favor? Now this student has to pay to retake a class.

The Call to Action

I was taken aback. Now that I've had a week or so to reflect, I'm still puzzled by this response from a sister CSU campus. I can understand that perhaps the individual faculty who responded aren't on board with our system's emphases on reducing course materials costs, or they don't want to take the time to evaluate the rest of my course materials (which I can understand). Regardless, this anecdote raises a larger issue that I think we must all, ultimately, address through discourse:

• Should the choice of textbook used in a class be the sole determinant of whether units transfer? more broadly
• Should the choice of textbook, alone, represent the quality, "depth of content," and rigor of a class?

Using the choice of textbook itself to deny my former student the ability to avoid re-taking a course borders on ludicrous. If this is how it is going to be, then I'll just put the latest and most expensive "real" textbook on my syllabus, just so it is listed there. After all, just because materials are listed on my syllabus as required doesn't actually guarantee that any student has actually purchased the textbook, much less cracked it open and used it!

Ultimately, I believe that this isolated encounter means we need to take action. This event might indicate a broader perspective in higher education about the importance of which textbooks are used in classes. Please consider informally reaching out to as many of your colleagues as you can to help inform our profession about:

• the value of blended learning (flipped classrooms) and instructor-created course materials
• the concept that lecturing from a textbook is not the only (nor the best) method of helping students learn

Finally, please remind them of how much course materials cost our students, and that adopting OER is a useful method of helping students afford to earn a college degree!

Active Learning Week meets Clips

As I've mentioned here before, my campus' 1:1 program is not Apple-centric. So, I've mainly focused my efforts on developing ways for faculty to use their iOS devices to benefit students. I'm currently a co-leader of a California State University (CSU) faculty cohort working to augment courses with technology (the CSU CRT program). I recently led a videoconference with my cohort (using Zoom) that focused on various ways to use videos in (and around) class. Of course, I featured Clips! This despite many of the faculty in my cohort not being in 1:1 mobile device programs or classes.

One of the reasons I was inspired to focus one of our cohort meetings on Clips is because I had just used Clips to generate a video to celebrate AAC&U's Active Learning Week. This annual event, which just passed, is organized by Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) and hosted on the STEM Central website. Briefly, the goal each year is to have teachers sign an online pledge to incorporate one active learning exercise in a STEM class (and this year, they added the goal of making that activity culturally responsive).

It just happend that, around Active Learning Week, I was scheduled to be at the annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), which meant I would miss one day of my genetics class at CSU Fresno.

Yes, and…

Being digitally inclined, I had already been planning on leaving my students digital activities to work on in my absence; then I decided to up the ante and also be available on Zoom for my students to consult.

Another (optional) part of the Active Learning Week pledge is to create a video to showcase one's activity. This is where I knew that I had to use Clips - both to generate my class activity, and also to promote it!

Active Learning with Clips: Jigsaws

I've already written a blog post about using Clips for jigsaw activities, so I won't duplicate that information here. I'll just point out that it is fantastic that I can be states away from my class and still create a few short videos for different groups of students to watch and become content experts in.

In this class, the topic of the day was "genetically modified organisms" (GMOs). So, I made a few Clips introducing different potential GMOs. My students were tasked first with developing their own definition of a GMO. Then, each student watched one Clip and then shared that information with students who watched the other two Clips:

• https://youtu.be/nRUWkNmkvGE
• https://youtu.be/cil4B0PZbo8
• https://youtu.be/rEaJKeO0wSk

Their group task was to determine whether any of the examples in the Clips above met (or did not meet) their definition.

Using Clips to Advocate using Clips

Clips made a fantastic platform for me to create in-class, interactive material for my students even when I wasn't present. It also allowed me to create a video showcase of the process. Please watch it here! https://youtu.be/EW-C6IAU8Iw

And so, this is the process I described to my course redesign faculty cohort. If you're interested, you can watch my presentation and the ensuing discussion here: https://youtu.be/l2dLy53RKR4?t=15m45s

Caveats

As a result of:

• using Clips to create jigsaw videos, and then
• performing synchronous online videoconference during a class meeting, and then
• using Clips to create a video about the process

I encountered a few…opportunities:

• It turns out, it is a good idea to put the "Do not disturb" sign on your hotel door if you don't want housekeeping to work on your room during class
• I thought an efficient and productive strategy would be to wait until my travel home to create the Active Learning Week video summarizing my use of Clips to coordinate active learning, in my physical absence. I learned a few additional things I'd like to share:
• An airplane flight is a great time to go back and edit live caption text (especially if you remembered to bring headphones)
• It is difficult to get a clean audio recording when doing live caption voiceovers on light rail or when sitting at the gate (unless you really want to have the gate agent's voice in the background)
• For some reason, even though I had already downloaded all of the posters and soundtracks and other Clips media, I had to do so again (in the absence of wi-fi)…I'm still trying to figure this one out. Maybe Clips had auto-updated, and new versions of Clips require those media to be downloaded again?

Next year, let's all participate in Active Learning Week (even if you don't teach a STEM discipline!)

Active Learning Week 2017: Online Instruction & Video Jigsaws

For the second year in a row, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) is hosting a focus on Active Learning in STEM classes. This year's Active Learning Week has two focuses. First, as last year, the goal is to have faculty employ active learning in the classroom. This year, an added request is that the activity be culturally responsive.

Last year, I participated, and I prepared a video about my active learning day approach.

This year, I am away at a conference, so I am leveraging Active Learning Week as an opportunity to use technology to help students have several active learning experiences in my absence. Briefly, I designed activities (and instructions) for students to follow in my absence, particularly involving group work (using the jigsaw approach), and my students and I also teleconferenced using the Zoom platform.

I simply want to use this opportunity to show you the basic framework of how I did this and to tout the successes of this approach. With significant advance planning (indeed), I was able to hold class when not physically present with my students. There are definitely some deficits with such an approach, as some of my students later pointed out in an exit survey. Despite some shortcomings, as a first attempt, I feel that I am developing a useful and pedagogically appropriate approach for marrying mobile technology and active learning to help students become self-directed learners.

2017 Active Learning Week Video

Please watch the video I prepared for AAC&U's Active Learning Week to showcase these efforts and to explain how it was all done! Enjoy this new video: https://youtu.be/EW-C6IAU8Iw

CPU #4: The Real World

The problem: I often talk about techniques and "real-world" practices in class, but we don't often have (i.e. I don't often make) time to go into details.

Yes, and…

Clips Power Use (CPU) #4:

Use a video to let students access the hidden world! I've spent the last week (or so) in class describing an experimental technique in genetics, but I can't (unfortunately) invite all 75 of my students in my lab to participate in, or even watch, this type of experiment. So, I used a video to bring the experiment to them! I used my phone to record video of me performing the experiment, then edited out the "fluff." I edited the resulting video segments into my photo library, and then imported into Apple's Clips app. I added Posters and animated icons, and had a great and fulfilling time doing it all!

As always, a key benefit of creating videos is not only having an engaging element to share with students, but I can use this video in the future. For example, when I bring students into my research group on campus, I'll ask them to watch this before we proceed with training in how to perform this technique!

https://youtu.be/nywnWXxIalg

As I've suggested before, I branded this new series of videos with an intro bumper that I can use in every video I create - and the video and audio will be exactly the same.

Have fun with your videos!

CPU #3: Jigsaw + Clips = Engagement

Classroom issues opportunities

1) There is only one of me (instructor)

2) There are about 75 of them (students) - which can equate to disengagement

Classroom resources

1) A large, auditorium-style classroom

2) We all have mobile, internet-enabled devices

Approach

In our campus' 1:1 tablet program (platform agnostic: we have Apple, Windows, and Android devices) that is pretty steadily moving toward a BYOD (bring your own device) program, we faculty have been making a significant push toward ensuring that we focus on the pedagogy, leveraging mobile technology when appropriate. We often refer to the SAMR model, and hope not simply to Substitute electronic processes for paper processes, but to hit the Redefinition end of the course augmentation with technology spectrum. Here, one hopes to leverage technology to do something that one could only do with that technology.

This past weekend, I was struck with the idea that I should do something physically active in my class. Not just "active learning" in the sense that students are talking with each other and participating in applying knowledge to problems during class. In my 75-minute class, I realized that I needed students actually up and moving about! So, I tried Modifying the jigsaw approach. In a jigsaw exercise, small groups of students are formed. Then, each student is tasked with becoming an "expert" in one of a few topics necessary to solve a bigger problem. The students must then come together, after that initial learning experience, and share their new knowledge with each other. Then, the group works to solve the problem. This amplifies my reach, and engages the students, especially in large class sections. It helps them by allowing them to interact with each other, and to leverage each other as resources to help understand sometimes complex concepts.

I've heard a lot about jigsaws before, but I've never run a jigsaw in a class before. So, of course, I thought I'd take two steps at once. I'd use Clips to create the content that would provide each group member their own tidbit of expertise.

Preparation

So, in a couple of hours, I developed some graphics to use as part of those videos, and I created three Clips that introduced three related topics relevant to DNA fingerprinting and the genetic differences between ethnic groups. This is the material that individual group members will access to become content experts. Here is one of those clips:

Note that I followed my previous advice and used Posters as transition elements: to summarize points and to inform the viewer of what topic is coming up next. I also used the animated icons to highlight specific elements of the video.

The next question I considered was: how to execute the jigsaw. I settled on the following pre-class set-up:

1) upload the three content Clips to YouTube

2) generate a QR code for each Clip

3) print those QR codes on paper and physically post them in different parts of my classroom

Execution

Then, during class, I had students:

1) form groups of 3

2) each member used a QR code scanner app on their mobile device to watch a different Clip:

3) each group member had a set period of time to watch the Clip by him/herself:

4) additional time was allocated for the members to share the main points of their Clips with their other group members:

5) the groups were presented with questions, requiring application of the Clips content to solve

Benefits and Outcomes

I liked this approach, because it was an easy way to deliver content to different sets of students. More importantly, my objective was realized! Students were up and moving about, for a couple of reasons.

1) they had to get up to get to the printouts of the QR codes they needed to scan to access the Clips

2) you might have noticed: many students had headphones with them, and used them to listen to the audio associated with the Clips. However, I had told the students that they could also leave the classroom to watch the videos, in case it got too loud in our classroom. Most of the students exercised this option!

The enthusiasm of the students for this approach was outstanding! Without instruction, students then rearranged desks (the ones that were not fixed to the floor, anyway) to share information with each other:

and even adopted new technologies (e.g. paper) to share information with each other:

Final Reflections

As the photos and videos above reveal, many students were very engaged with the material and with each other during this exercise, which took about 40 minutes (a few minutes to form groups, 10 minutes to scan QR codes and watch the videos, 10 minutes to share knowledge with each other, and about 20 minutes to solve the problem(s)). That felt absolutely fantastic on its own!

After the jigsaw, when we came together as a class to discuss the group answers to the questions that were posed, it seemed to me that the students were better prepared than normal, and asked more questions (and more poignant questions) than usual!

One key reason to use Clips for a jigsaw: live captioning! As I mentioned above, having students watch (and listen to) videos in class could be a complete and abject failure, especially if students don't leave the classroom and/or don't have headphones. But, with the live captions, it was very easy for me to create those expert-creating Clips, and students can read the captions when they can't hear the audio because of environmental noise!

I will definitely use this approach again: a jigsaw exercise improves student engagement. Although using Clips to disseminate content to different group members is, by the SAMR model, mainly Substitution (perhaps Augmentation), now all of my students can access all of the videos (not just the one they watched) for study resources. I can use the same Clips in future semesters, too! Jigsaw + Clips is a win-win.

As a result of a comment on an earlier version of this post elsewhere, I also came to realize that one could also flip the jigsaw when using short videos to produce "content expert" students. If you have stable student groups, or form groups the class session prior to the jigsaw exercise, then assign those Clips videos to watch before class. Then, during class, you can jump right into the peer instruction and problem-solving!