Revolutionizing online engagement and interaction at South Plains College

The challenge: Emergency remote teaching highlights the need for effective teaching tools

The emergency switch to online education has presented many institutions, including South Plains College’s English department with a great challenge: to ensure an active learning environment which stimulates quality feedback, meaningful interactions, and collaboration.

With the view to offer “an extremely quality” learning experience for students, Sharon Race – Head of Department for English and Buffy Ratten, Assistant Professor of English at South Plains College seek for innovative ways to enable both student-student and student-content interaction in online setting. That’s why the instructors decided to adopt the FeedbackFruits tool suite, thanks to its proven capacity to enhance student engagement and interaction after a successful pilot.

“Online education has become an extremely competitive environment and we want to offer an extremely quality product… FeedbackFruits is helping us to introduce new and innovative ways of allowing students to interact with one another and with the content in the online environment rather than the traditional ways.” - Sharon Race, Head of Department of English

The solution: Incorporating several FeedbackFruits tools to sharpen language and critical skills

Sharon and Buffy adopted the tool suite in their Composition I & II classes, which focus on English language and critical thinking skills of undergraduates. The courses feature both synchronous and asynchronous sessions, where students undergo a number of writing, comprehension, and feedback assignments. Several of Feedback tools were incorporated into each assignment: Peer Review is used for peer feedback on draft essays; Interactive Study Materials allows students to answer questions and make notes on videos and texts; Comprehension helps guide students with reading texts; and Discussion on Work is used for both text analyses and building social engagement between students.

Activities throughout the course were aimed at both improving communication in the English language and creating space for interactivity in the online environment of the course, with tools being used to support these objectives in various ways:

In Peer Review, students submitted essays individually and reviewed others’ work  based on a 7-point scale-rating/comments rubric, before writing a final reflection in the tool. The received peer feedback was used to iterate on improved final versions.

In Interactive Video, lesson materials such as explanatory videos were annotated with questions and discussion threads, allowing students to indicate if a concept needed further elaboration in class.

With Comprehension, students practiced the SQ3 (“Search-Question-Read-Recite-Review”) reading method, identifying the sections and structure of texts, and seeing their peers’ annotations.

Discussion on Work was used to set up an online forum in which informal discussion topics were posted in a weekly “Wednesday watercooler chat”. The tool was also used to pose questions about reading assignments, with students encouraged to leave written responses and engage with each other’s interpretations.

Activities were used both formatively and summatively, with grade weighting being made explicit to students. Throughout the course, student comments, answers and questions were used to inform in-class discussions, and in-tool analytics were used to keep track of student performance and progress along each activity.

‍

The outcome: A smooth, and satisfying teaching and learning experience

Using FeedbackFruits tools throughout the course has greatly enhanced the education quality, as remarked by both the instructors and students.

Learning and using the tools had been “super easy”, according to the instructors. The abundant tool functionalities such as grade- and group-synchronization, assignments copy, and creating templates helped save plenty of time while reducing the manual workload of data entry and activities set-up. Professor Race has this to say about FeedbackFruits tools’ impact:

“FeedbackFruits is seamless inside Blackboard: it's a robust suite of tools that helps us to create courses that are sophisticated, professional-quality products.”

Another advantage that FeedbackFruits offered was access to student analytics, which shows learners’ progress and performance for each activity. Such insights allow instructors to identify the knowledge gaps or challenges, and to make timely interventions.

Compared with the native Blackboard discussion boards, instructors found FeedbackFruits Discussion to be “smooth, well-embedded, and with no clicking outside”, resulting in “great levels of engagement and critical thinking”.

As for students, they greatly stressed how all FeedbackFruits activities can be accessed within Blackboard without the need for external tools or sign-ins. This significantly spared the extra cognitive load of navigating numerous sites and software to engage in course activities.