How to integrate technology into post-pandemic face-to-face courses

1. Generate continuous engagement

It is easy to generate student engagement and interaction within F2F contexts, but the challenge lies in how to maintain this beyond the classroom. Flipping the classroom is considered an effective way to address this issue, with students studying the materials before class, and instructors addressing learners’ questions about the content during in-class sessions. In fact, faculties struggle with getting learners to actively engage in the preparation stage, and making sure all students study the content. This is where technology steps in. 

With FeedbackFruits, instructors have plenty of options to creatively use multimedia content to create engaging pre-class experiences.​​ Interactive Study Materials and Comprehension utilize social annotations to turn static, passive preparation activities into engaging experiences, where learners gain deeper understanding, and participate in discussions via in-line questions/ discussion points. As students come to class well prepared, instructors have more time to address the prominent issues emerging through observing student performance during the preparation phase. 

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Read more: 5 ways to flip the classroom with Interactive Video‍

Technology can also strengthen, and optimize interactions during in-class sessions. For example, instructors can liven up the lectures by adding questions to the slides; distributing interactive quizzes to activate students at the beginning. Interactive Presentation and Quiz are two FeedbackFruits tools that enable this purpose. 

As engagement tends to die down after the class finishes, it is important to generate continuous conversations and discussions. With FeedbackFruits, instructors are presented with endless options to create multiple avenues for faculties to communicate with students, generate multi-level interactions beyond the classroom. Online forums, or symposiums are among the best ways to initiate continuous conversations, which can be easily created using the Discussion on Work and Discussion on Topic. 

2. Allow for time-saving, effective course design 

When designing F2F courses, faculties often find themselves struggling with a load of manual, clunky tasks, such as exporting, importing grades to the LMS; recreating course activities; accessing student analytics; and many many more. Technological advancements offer institutions endless potential to minimize the time spent on these clunky tasks, while maximizing the teaching and learning outcomes. 

Here are the few ways in which technology, particularly FeedbackFruits solutions can help you and your faculties save plenty of time for F2F teaching: 

1. FeedbackFruits tools automate every step of the course set-up, from instructions writing, evaluation/ feedback rubric creation, grading configuration, to groups/ peer reviewers assignment. 

‍Example: Group Member Evaluation tool allows faculties to incorporate a group evaluation activity where students assess their peers’ contributions to in-class team projects. In this tool, instructors can configure any step of the learning activity in just one platform, from writing instructions, assigning groups reviewers, designing rubrics, to deciding on grade weighting of the assignment steps. 

2. All the grades produced within FeedbackFruits activities are automatically synced into the native gradebooks, saving faculties plenty of time manually exporting and uploading grades to the LMS.

3. If a course runs successfully, faculties would without doubt want to scale to other classes. For either F2F or online classrooms, it is challenging since there is no systematic way to store and distribute the learning activities. With FeedbackFruits, faculties can generate templates from existing activities, rubrics, or feedback comments to reuse or share them with colleagues quickly and easily. This saves instructors and faculties plenty of time having to create brand new assignments, thus strengthening collaboration among institutional departments. 

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3. Create inclusive, equitable, and accessible learning environment 

Education needs to be responsive, and accessible to each and every student, regardless of the course settings. And technology plays an indispensable factor in helping institutions cultivate inclusive, equitable learning environments, whether it is online or face-to-face classrooms. 

The presence of diverse learners with diverse needs, backgrounds, and abilities require the use of multimedia materials, assessment practices, and feedback. FeedbackFruits solutions allow faculties to generate these multimedia course aspect, by supporting faculties in:

• Providing content in multiple modalities (documents, audio to video; and in formats accessible to all learners (e.g., adding subtitles, including alternative texts to images, increasing text size or brightness).
  ‍Tool suggestions: Interactive Video, Interactive Document, Interactive Audio

• Curating different ways in which students can interact with the study materials, by using social annotation, online discussion forums, or interactive quizzes.
  Tool suggestions: Comprehension, Discussion on Work, Discussion on Topic, Quiz

• Issuing multi-layer assessment activities (peer feedback, group evaluation, and self reflection) to initiate interactions, and encourage students to learn from each other.
  Tool suggestion: Peer Review, Group Member Evaluation, Self Assessment‍

• Offering students multiple ways to provide feedback, not just limited to text-based comments.
  Feature suggestions: FeedbackFruits instructors and students always have the option to attach pdf files, audio or video alongside their feedback.

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Inclusive teaching also involves personalizing the learning experience to stimulate student autonomy and self-efficacy. FeedbackFruits can help faculties create plenty of opportunities for personalized learning, by generating interactions, authenticity, data insights, and more. Here are some of the ways to leverage technology-enhance personalized learning in F2F courses: 

• Create authentic assessments that replicate real life scenarios (group projects, poster presentations, conferences, podcast production, etc.). E.g., Discussion on Work helps instructors organize an online symposium where students can showcase their research poster. 
• Provide instant, timely feedback, and mentorship using feedback tools (Peer Review, Automated Feedback, or Group Member Evaluation). E.g., ‍FeedbackFruits Automated Feedback tool harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate instant, formative remarks on lower-order aspects of student academic writing skills (spelling, citation, or structure), allowing teachers to focus on higher-order aspects (argumentation, reasoning) tailored to individual needs. ‍
• Access student analytics to identify existing problems, and make timely adjustments to address students’ needs. E.g., Using the analytic dashboard in Interactive Document, instructors can go over the questions and responses to identify the most prominent knowledge gaps, then bring these to address in face-to-face or synchronous sessions. This results in a much shorter and more effective lecture.

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4. Enable the development of transferable skills 

Employability and career readiness have moved to the forefront of course design and learning outcomes, as students increasingly emphasize the importance of employment prospects in selecting educational destinations. Whether it is online/ hybrid or in-person setting, faculties should go beyond transmitting information, and helping students develop their professional identity.

Though institutions are making great effort to accommodate student career preparedness, there are significant gaps left unaddressed, often due to a lack of time and resources. This is where technology-enhanced learning comes into play, by aiding instructors to create an environment that stimulates employability skills and prepares students for their future career. Here is an example of how incorporating FeedbackFruits solutions into in-person classrooms can significantly stimulate skills development: 

‍Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an effective approach to cultivate collaboration, and critical thinking. The challenges of implementing a TBL activity within F2F setting involves maintaining student engagement during the Preparation stage, reducing time on manual set-ups for the Readiness Assurance Phase (RAP), and highlighting the prominent issues to address in the Clarification session (without having to go over tons of student papers). Instructors can easily address these issues by incorporating digital tools into each stage of the TBL process: 

• For the pre-class preparation stage, use Interactive Study Materials to vary the course materials and enrich them with questions or discussion points for students to answer. Doing this encourages students to engage in meaningful interactions with the content, peers, and the instructors. 
• This is followed by the iRAT and tRAT step, where students worked individually then in groups to answer a quiz based on the pre-class content. The Team Based Learning tool can be used to optimize the iRAT and tRAT step, saving instructors plenty of time designing, printing out all the tests, and finally grading all the papers. What’s more, the tool presents real-time inputs on the quiz performance, like which questions get the most wrong answers, or which false answer options are clicked on the most. 
• With these real-time inputs, instructors can organize a fruitful Clarification Session, where the misunderstandings, miscommunication, and knowledge gaps as shown in the quiz’ performance are highlighted and resolved with the students. 
• Now that students have a clear understanding of the subject matter, it is time to apply this knowledge in an Application Exercise. Several tools like Peer Review, Discussion on Work help create platforms for students to work together, exchange feedback to improve their final product. 
• To ensure students’ group contribution and accountability throughout the group work, instructors can issue peer/ group evaluation by the end of the TBL activity. Group Member Evaluation tool offers all functions to issue this assessment practice, from designing feedback rubric, assigning group reviewers, to calculating the final scores. 

Dr. Michelle Steinhilb of Central Michigan University provides a great use case of integrating multiple tools into her TBL activity in a hybrid course. 

5. Create a learning community 

One of the key takeaways over the past transformative period is the power of the learning community. Creating a sense of belonging in higher education has far reaching effects: Students become more engaged, are more likely to return for the coming semester, and most importantly, develop a growth mindset which is critical to their future career success. It is easier to generate connections, and interactions in physical classrooms with the presence of both students and instructors. However, the challenge lies in maintaining continuous interactions. In other words, institutions need to find a solution to extend the learning community beyond the classroom border. Technology, again, with its affordances, allows for creating opportunities for off class conversations and interactions. 

With FeedbackFruits, instructors enjoy plenty of options to facilitate a strong, continuous learning community: 

• Discussion on Work and Discussion on Topic helps create asynchronous discussion forums, where students can questions regarding the in-class sessions, and seek help from the instructors
• Meaningful interactions can be generated through technology-enhanced social annotation. With Interactive Study Materials, instructors and students can raise questions, and discussion points by annotating the materials.

Conclusion

Institutions might not feel the need for technology when returning to face-to-face classrooms. In fact, the potential of digital-enhanced learning extends beyond the remote setting. As shown in the previous section, incorporating technology into in-person courses can bring plenty of benefits, from saving faculties time in manual course set-ups, supporting inclusive pedagogy, initiating the transfer of skills, to creating a learning community. Though institutions might fear the effort required for technology adoption, many digital tools (including FeedbackFruits) offer great user experience, and ample support for integration and implementation.