thank you everyone for joining me we're going to discuss some teaching strategies for engaging our students and how we can rethink our long lectures and just a quick look at what's on the agenda for today we're going to do a quick round of introductions and then i want to hear from you a little bit we're going to talk about some hurdles and obstacles that we can encounter when we're engaging with long lecture material after that once we kind of address what what the barriers are then we can look at things we can do to to revamp the long lecture i think i have eight different strategies for you today we're going to follow it up with just some other considerations some factors that you're going to want to take into account when you decide how you want to structure your course and how you want to set up your lecture material and of course the final q a and the wrap up but if you have questions along the way comments let me know i'd love to hear from you so you can turn on your microphone or type in the chat and we'll just save that final session for the very end all right so if you wouldn't mind finding that little chat icon and letting me know your name maybe what courses you teach or if you're not a teacher what your role is at niu and then what do you find most challenging about lectures and again you can use the chat or the microphone i should have said whichever you prefer thanks anna so you teach intro to enviro econ and game theory grad math micro and you find breaking up lectures difficult particularly if you can't find that natural stopping point ah okay i may have some suggestions welcome jeff you're teaching special education some of your classes meet okay once a week and three hours can be a big challenge absolutely i i know about those classes welcome rachel so you're teaching seed faculty reading math methods course devices can pull student attention yes yes i'm guilty of this as well and i apologize i hope i pronounced this correct as a pharah you're an assistant professor of sports management and you're trying to keep up participation and involvement particularly this time of year is that because of the weather or covid or all of the above welcome bill nice to hear from you so bill is teaching music and he finds keeping our students um engaged consistently it can be an issue absolutely you're teaching human resource management and you're wondering how to make something more fun instead of boring lecture slides interesting great yes so these are all of our distractions right now yeah so we're still in coven and now the weather's getting nicer and we really want to go outside it's all of the above absolutely okay so this gives me a little bit of insight into some of the struggles that you're experiencing or concerns that you may have and the reason that i kind of asked for this right away is because i i like to get the obstacles and the challenges you know right out there in the open so i think now is the time where we can dive into that if we acknowledge what these obstacles are then we can go about addressing them so i do want to talk about you know why are we doing this like why are we reimagining our lecture well as many of you mentioned there are some potential barriers that come with long lectures so during the pandemic we heard a lot about zoom fatigue but this can happen even in a traditional face-to-face classroom so you can still experience this draining fatigue and it's echoed by our students so they kind of feel this exhaustion after a long lecture and rather than feeling motivated or incentivized to dive into their coursework they may feel like they actually need to take a step back and take a break from their course work so it can actually become a missed opportunity we also have to contend with distractions and i know i saw something about that in the text chat you know in an online environment this can be even more magnified there could be distractions such as household background noises or even the temptation to multitask right if you're online you might have another tab open another browser open you're trying to do more than one thing at once students are experiencing the same thing but regardless in any setting the human mind does begin to wander and so we see this when speakers begin to ramble and lose their train of thought and we can also see it when students begin to zone out and miss some of that pertinent information that's being discussed in our courses and then the third one that i put up here is kind of the seal this feeling of isolation uh when we're working with long lectures i heard one instructor at niu say that when they were recording lecture material it kind of made her feel like she was a paid actor there was no interaction with her students and it's easy to imagine that students are also left feeling isolated and disconnected so if we know that these are some of the potential barriers that come with our long lecture then you know we've arrived at the stage where we can revise our approach to lectures and in doing so we want to think about our best teaching practices the goal here is not to eliminate lectures they do serve a valuable function and we want to impart that new knowledge to our students but instead we're going to look at how we can make these lectures more engaging so students are more likely to retain that knowledge historically in a lecture setting students were expected to absorb all of this new content so you can kind of see that sponge image that i have up on the screen typically teachers took on a very strong leadership role and students followed along but now increasingly we're seeing there's more of an emphasis on this self-directed student learning so teachers take on more of a facilitator role and in doing so students are encouraged to test and apply their skills so it's in this theme of active learning that we can think about ways to reimagine the lecture scenario and one of the most effective ways that we can do this is to revisit our lecture session and align it with your course learning goals or your stated course objectives if you'll recall a strong learning objective typically uses an action verb and it asks students to complete some type of observable behavior so for instance you can just kind of try to fill in the blank by the end of this course students will and you put in your action verb my background is in teaching english so i might have said by the end of this course students will write a research essay right they're doing something that i can physically observe but by the end of a lecture session you might consider answering the same question but on a smaller scale so if we say by the end of this lecture students will understand we know that we need to kind of pause i see this happen a lot we can't physically climb into our students heads and check out their cognitive you know abilities so instead of saying students will understand it's kind of a passive word we know we need to implement some type of an activity that measures that level of understanding so we're going to try to make sure that we're doing something interactive with our lecture material so that's kind of the first step in reimagining our lectures all right i think we're now at the stage where we can talk about revamping the lecture and so as promised i have i think it's eight different strategies for you so we're going to start with the student-led lecture a student lecture requires a degree of responsibility and it also changes the flow of the course when you have different presenters you're going to have different styles and so automatically the course becomes more dynamic with each new person who takes the lead in a discussion having student-led lectures also gives you a break you're not always on the spot we want to try to eliminate that feeling of you're being paid as an actor right we don't we don't want that scenario anymore so when you introduce student-led lectures consider also incentivizing your students let them know that their section will appear later on in the course so whatever topic that they're covering is going to appear on a test or an assessment or it's going to be crucial to being able to complete the following homework assignment but the lesson that they are delivering is going to directly relate to future course work with undergrads they may have never seen this model kind of fully developed so you may want to incrementally lead them into the student-led lectures you might want to start with giving them just a small section of the lecture a particular topic versus grad students they may have seen this modeled previously and so now you can up the level of responsibility you can ask them to teach an entire unit whether that's a chapter again a specific research topic but you can give them a bigger piece of that lecture that they can take over when you ask your students to lead the lecture also consider asking them for different styles of presentations do you want them to do something other than a powerpoint are they going to be doing this as individuals or is this going to be a group activity also ask them once they deliver the lecture are they required to facilitate some type of follow-up activity and if so what expectations do you have for them as lecture leaders all right the next one and is the flipped classroom model and i know it's been growing a lot in popularity so it might be something that you are familiar with it's this idea that the students are going to spend most of their time testing their knowledge and skills practicing and doing various activities to enhance their learning but the instructor may do some lecturing it's just on a smaller scale so as you can see kind of in the model here we've we've kind of flipped the ratio so a great way to start facilitating this type of environment is actually to begin by changing the structure of your lecture so one way that you can do this is to start your class with an activity and again this could be a group activity it could be a solo activity students could be doing it individually but give your students a problem that they actually have to solve don't give them any of that new lecture content you're going to withhold that and then see what they do this is a period where you get to observe can they even solve the problem if they do how is their progress is it slow is it clunky could they have done something more efficiently after you've put them through this activity of problem solving switch to the lecture material provide them with some new insight that directly relates to that problem-solving activity that they just completed and then the third stage here is you're going to want to return to the student reflection period and you're going to ask them to finish the statement if i knew at the start of the class what i know now i would have done what what would they have done differently this is allowing them to take into consideration their behavior but how their newly acquired knowledge also impacts their behavior a second option for a flipped classroom environment or a flipped classroom lecture environment is to ask your students to conduct and share some of their own research typically when we think of lecturing for our students we're the ones who are in charge of coming up with the content but this is an opportunity where you can bring your students into the fold so once you set the groundwork for a specific topic ask your students to locate some current media that directly relates to the concept being discussed and you can ask them to get creative are they looking at news articles blogs scholarly journal articles podcasts youtube videos it's a great way to introduce other types of media as well which will also help with their attention span so as part of the lecture follow-up ask them to link their resources you could do this in a blackboard discussion board so that everybody has quick access to these resources you can ask your students to provide a quick summary or to discuss their own opinion of the resource that they found and then after they've done their first initial post you can ask them to do follow-ups and to remark on their peers findings this idea of reversing the order kind of goes hand in hand with the flipped classroom experience so i want to encourage you to think about your lecture content in regards to any way that your students can access your your coursework which also includes with blackboard so we know that at niu over 95 of our faculty request a blackboard course each time they they teach a course and this was true even before the start of the pandemic so we know that there's a heavy reliance on our lms system so when we look at our courses you want to look at the structure how are your students interacting with the content we know that our students are probably logging into blackboard for things like quizzes activities homework you know as well as your lecture material so your lecture material could be a recorded lecture or it could even just be where you've posted your powerpoint notes and so one concern that we hear from faculty is that they don't know if their students are listening to those recordings or reviewing the powerpoint slides and if you find yourself in this position and you're worrying about whether or not your students are actually engaging with the content it's an opportunity for you to consider changing the dynamic of how students can approach their blackboard content one popular method of organization that we see is dividing your course into weekly modules if you have 16 weeks you have 16 modules and as you go into your week a lot of times you'll see the lecture content posted at the top right the first thing that we ask them to do is to review the new material but sometimes students might be bypassing it so ask yourself what would happen if you switched up the order what if we had your students doing an activity first next what if you kind of mandated that order that now that they've completed an activity they need to go to the lecture content and again um like we said it kind of goes hand in hand with that flipped classroom environment after they've done an activity then they had to watch the recording or look at the powerpoint notes then they had to complete the reflection and the way that you can do this is you can use your blackboard technology there are rules that you can use so if you're in a blackboard original course you can use your adaptive release rules in blackboard ultra it's called conditional availability but these rules are what you put in place that structure how and when your students can access the material so before you can go on to the reflection you need to have listened to the recording type of thing so again if we change the structure if we completely rearranged our course and then we mandated through the use of our blackboard tools that they go through a sequence of steps would this make our lecture content more engaging okay so i'll pause just before i move on to our next one did that all make sense about the the blackboard tools that you have at your disposal or any other questions all right all looks quiet in the chat so i can move on another option here is that we can bring in a mystery guest again we want to try to increase the number of voices that are heard throughout our course so i have thrown onto the slide here some different options of people that you can bring into your course part of creating that engaging environment is to make sure that we have variety all right not everybody that need that you can invite into your course has to be a field expert either so if you can find an author you know maybe it's the author of an article that you actually introduced in the course that would be wonderful but if not you can still do this on a smaller scale so you can think about role playing options and one example of this is a science instructor needed to discuss i think it was chemical reactions and so they could have outlined what would happen when you combined these different compounds in a traditional lecture but instead of just doing a regular lecture on these you know chemical reactions they brought in some friends to act out the scene as the actors bumped into each other students were presented i think with three different options what chemical could they add next and again the actor would act out the the role of that particular chemical compound and so they would set off a series of events on stage that the students could observe they could see these people actually bouncing off of each other another example that comes to mind is actually someone brought in a medical expert and they decided they wanted to this was again the medical expert this was the guest speaker but they decided that they wanted to test their students knowledge of infectious diseases so students wore a sign on their back with the names of their infectious disease and other students were called upon one at a time and the person that was called on had to either provide a symptom a treatment or a long-term effect of the disease and the student with the card uh then they had to guess their disease so it was a very you know kind of strategic way to to get together to to act out scenes to bring in new voices and it eliminated this need for the instructor to have to lead the discussion every single class period all right so i i do want to talk to you a little bit about micro lectures um but again i do want to ask you a question here so if you wouldn't mind you can again use your microphone or type in the chat but in your opinion what is the ideal length of time for a recorded class lecture 10 minutes that's you've recently switched to that 20 minutes 15 minutes anna says no clue that's fair enough anna something that you can pause excellent okay so i have one more question for you in your opinion what is the ideal length of time for an in-class lecture rachel oh you see what i did oh somebody said 10 minutes someone said 15 minutes okay and it says no because it's a waste to show up for 15 minutes 75 minutes with breaks okay great bill says it depends on the material no universal rule it's subjective to each lesson okay great what i do sense here though is actually some consensus from your answers so when we discuss micro lectures it's not this idea that we're going to try to cram a bunch of material into the span of a few minutes because inevitably you'll never get it all in but instead it's this idea that you are dividing up your lecture into multiple segments and even anna's suggestion well 75 minutes could be a great lecture but we're going to take breaks so it's still that same idea that there's going to be a pause there's going to be a break and so one of the ways that you can go about doing this because there are different types of lecture formats you could do a recorded lecture or it could be in a face-to-face classroom but you're going to want to make either a timeline or an outline of what you want to discuss this also helps eliminate some of the areas where you're going to stumble or ramble and then you're going to mark the areas where you're going to either stop the recording or you're going to switch gears in your course giving your students a break is a wonderful idea or another idea is if we're going to take a break anyway let's make sure that we dive into some type of an activity so if it's an in class lecture be sure to ask your class you know some sort of a question usually not a yes or no question maybe a problem-solving activity maybe a group work doesn't have to be a graded assessment i do want to stress this we're not trying to increase your grading workload by any means we're just going to kind of space out our lecture material okay and how can we do that well one of the ways that we can do this is we can introduce an interactive video quiz so i did promise to let you know about some different tools and technologies that you can use as we look at ways to break up our lecture so we do have and i use video platform keltura which will take any recording and turn it into an interactive video quiz this is actually an example that you're looking at on the screen of the starting slide that students would see and you can customize the message so i can even tell my students this video is 15 minutes long please watch it in one sitting all questions must be answered and then the quiz will be submitted at the end so this idea of the interactive video quiz is that the students are going to start the video they will be prompted to pause and answer a question once they've submitted their answer the recording picks up where they left off and it resumes playing until the next question appears so again i do want to stress it's an interactive video quiz the idea is that you're going to pepper in questions as they're watching your recording as opposed to just laying out a whole bunch of quiz questions at the very end of the quiz so this is something that you can do as a graded or ungraded exercise so if this is something that interests you i will be sending out some follow-up information after this workshop and i can let you know more about how to build the video quiz one of the things you'll notice here is that i put this video is 15 minutes there's still some debate as to what is the ideal length of time for a lecture so i i was curious just to see what you put in the chat there's not a necessarily right or wrong answer with it statistically speaking we do know that really long lectures tend to lose their audience members along the way so again it is good to put in these breaks or these pauses and with a recorded video we would typically tell you to mark it at 15 minutes or under and again that isn't to say you know if you have 75 minutes of content that you're going to try to cram all of that into 15 minutes it just means that you're going to have multiple recordings available so that people are more likely to to budget their time they'll sit down for 15 minutes and then after that they'll pause they'll go take care of whatever distraction is calling their attention and then they'll come back for the next video segment students we've discovered are more likely to watch smaller clusters of videos than to remember to pause a video that's longer in length so we do know that our students if they have a really long recording they'll probably just let it run but then they'll they could even just leave the room so again when we're trying to look at our students engagement with our our lecture content we try to break it up into pieces for them the next idea that i have for you is kind of a fun one and when we look at our lectures a lot of times we encourage our students to take notes but there is an opportunity here for students to do more with it so as instructors we do want to boost their kinesthetic their auditory and their visual learning skills if they conflict you know kind of back and forth between the different modalities the different styles of learning then they're more likely to succeed in their academics so the next time if you're wondering if your students understand that new material that you've presented you can ask your students to create either a concept map or a flow chart to check their knowledge and i have two different options for you on how you can implement this strategy so the first one is that you lecture on a new idea a system or a sequence but then you're going to follow it up with an assignment that asks students to map out what they envision that concept look like and this works particularly well for either abstract concepts or theoretical frameworks something where students can't look up a pre-existing model in a google search basically we're trying to to bring in some of their creativity you don't want your students to all have the exact same looking flow chart or concept map your second option is again you can lecture about an idea a system or a sequence and you can introduce a sample scenario so you're going to ask your students to map out a scene based on that new information that you just lectured on so an example that i have for you that i i've used again in my own teaching is i lectured on the literary concept of the anti-epiphany moment and this is when characters in a novel may face a moment of realization and instead they choose not to change their behavior which results in a series of consequences so i've asked students to then read a short story involving a number of characters so they can choose who who they want to work with and but they have to map out that character's plot line that they felt exemplified the anti-epiphany trajectory so i do also want to send out a follow-up link for you i have found that there are actually these great tutorials that are already pre-existing they're made for students quick video demonstrations that teach students how to use either google docs or a microsoft word document to create their own custom flowchart or concept map so it's a great exercise that you can introduce in class you can put in the link and ask your students to watch you know this tutorial video on how to create a concept map and that can be part of their homework so that they can then in future instances in your course or maybe elsewhere can use the kind of the self-directed exercise that allows them to to kind of build a new skill so again we're going to take our lecture material and we're going to ask our students to apply it all right so we're we're getting closer towards the end here we're doing really well on time we also have what we consider to be the muddiest point so hopefully this image kind of makes you smile a little bit the muddiest point is where we give students an opportunity to voice concerns over areas of confusion so once you have presented this new material you've delivered your lecture you can then require students to submit a question about something that they don't understand or something that they want to know more about to get full honesty from your students it's a great idea to introduce this maybe as an anonymous exercise maybe they'll feel you know less shy or less bashful about asking for clarification so if you're in a face-to-face class you could consider asking students to fill out a slip of paper and dropping it into a bowl before the course concludes if you're teaching online you could ask students either to fill out an anonymous survey or if you're a blackboard ultra user you could ask students to fill out an assignment but you would just enable anonymous grading so you could view all of the student submissions without knowing who it came from the follow-up part to the muddiest point though is so once they've submitted a question and they said you know i need more clarification i don't understand this or that then you want to actually speak to those to those questions and so then it's time to decide how you want to address that so you could of course answer their questions maybe even in the following course you know you can check to see if there's a theme maybe there's a reoccurring question that came in from your students or you could divide your students up into groups and you can ask each group to collectively answer one of the muddiest point questions so again it's letting them become self-directed learners if they don't know the answer that can be a great opportunity for them to investigate and do some research and see if they can come up with it i apologize if you can hear the honking i'm on campus and the geese are right outside my window so again with the muddiest point the two main questions are what is unclear to you you know it's just try to create this low stakes environment where they actually are are willing to to voice the their confusion and the other part is what do you want to know more about maybe they've started to grasp a concept but they need some more information again this is a great place for them to to get involved and to ask you those questions all right so we're we're getting down to our final stretch so there are just some other considerations that we need to look at with our our lectures um so as you go about you know kind of reimagining your your lecture content we're going to have to ask some some hard questions and most of these questions that i i think i want to put on your plate are things that don't really have a right or a wrong answer but your decision is going to impact your overall course structure so when we start thinking about our lectures we're going to need to take into factors things that maybe even aren't in our control for instance how do you plan to handle lecture engagement for large roster classes have you factored in some ungraded activities that can help enhance your your students learning while also not increasing your grading workload right we're trying to to boost this engagement um but maybe not change the entire grading structure we also want to look at how and when are we going to be doing these lectures so are you planning on lecturing during scheduled class time or is it something that they can watch in a recorded format through blackboard on their own time do you record your lectures and if you have recorded lectures in the past are you willing to consider experimenting with it to see you know can i can i make them smaller can i can i do these condensed micro lectures again micro lectures is still a subjective term i didn't want to give you a hard and fast rule for how long your recordings would be i would say you know if you're looking for at least a ballpark range for a record lecture 15 minutes and under is a is a good good neutral starting point and if you've never recorded your lecture would you be willing to try it to see if that frees up that valuable in-class time where you can actually work on activities and finally my last question is you know if you have lecture materials and your students do not appear to be listening either to the recorded session or maybe they're in your class but it's like they're not retaining the information have you considered revising your lectures is this an opportunity for you to edit them to crop them when we format our our lectures we always want to think about how does this impact our students course progress and is it relevant and essential to their other activities so if you have all of this lecture content which may be wonderful and glorious but they don't actually need it to complete any of their other activities do we need that lecture content so do you have crucial information that can be kind of deployed systematically through the use of those either adaptive release or conditional availability rules but think about what information do they need and when are they going to get it and so once you've answered these questions you'll have probably a better grasp on how you want to structure a lecture that boosts engagements and helps students retain that information we ultimately want our students to look at lecture material as something that's interactive all right so i know we did really well on time today which is good i always feel so guilty when i get you right before lunch i know you must be counting the minutes i think we can probably move on then to q a any questions concerns or suggestions i suppose as a final question for you when you structure a lecture have any of you ever actually charted your lecture do you do you come up with an outline before you jeff go ahead yeah i've done it in the past i've i've learned it from a fellow faculty member where he kind of he did what you suggested earlier like map out the time of what you're going to talk about um and i've done that before i found it pretty helpful and once i got into the flow of things i kind of stopped doing it right part of the problem was that it became kind of a it just came became one more thing that i had to it became a distraction for me almost is that not only was i teaching but i have to refer to my schedule and then jump back and forth and you know sometimes my schedule would have five or six things on it and just it got overwhelming sometimes sure sorry yeah it's basically storyboarding so yep it's this idea of not even just that i have bullet points i'm going to talk about but it was actually like you kind of took a look at the timeline you're like well i think i need 10 minutes on on this particular topic the other one only requires three so yeah it can be a little bit um daunting when you do that sometimes you do feel that you've you've taken on additional work did you ever find out if did it cut down on your lecture time or did it increase it or any noticeable difference um no i well my goal at the time wasn't to cut down on my lectures um so it didn't but i'm kind of getting to the point where i think i'm this semester i've been actually going through all my power i go through my powerpoints every semester this semester i purposely went through some and tried to exercise some of the unnecessary slides and i was a little bit successful not entirely successful sure yeah i think sometimes then when we rethink our lectures it's not even about shorter longer it's just focused and purposeful with our intent great thank you yeah my kind of my biggest challenge right now is just how do i find the time to make so many all these revisions i want to make to all my classes it's it's pretty overwhelming so i've been taking making baby steps but i don't know if anyone has recommendations for ways to do it if you can never find a a place to repurpose some of your existing content you know in more than one course and more than one section i definitely recommend trying to especially if you're recording something try not to put date and time stamps on any of your your videos so that you can repurpose it over the course of you know more than one semester the interactive video quiz sounds great to me you want to try to do it i i can teach you that workshop i will send you some follow-up information um that's a tool that i've worked with extensively so it is really nice knowing that you've put your your recorded lecture out there and now you get to see whether or not people understand it anna likes them she says she uses them a lot wonderful yes and it can be graded it can be ungraded but again it is kind of giving some of this ownership back to our students yes i will give you all of this valuable information but i do need you to do something with it wonderful well thank you so much i'm going to hang around and i'm going to stop the recording and if you have any other questions please let me know