Tag: Accessibility

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Caring for your future self by reverse engineering the syllabus

There are only so many weeks in a semester. There is also a certain amount of material that must be covered, assignments that must be set, and marking deadlines that each course must meet. So, there will inevitably be a few heavier weeks from the instructor’s perspective, just like there will inevitably be some heavier parts of the semester for students. Some of these are likely to occur near the end of the course once most of the material is on the table. This is how so many of us end up with an overwhelming end of semester push, or an impossible week of marking and covering new material, or too short a marking turnaround time. 

Sometimes, in calculating how to manage and spread out such weeks, it can be tempting to compartmentalize our teaching responsibilities as though we were not also people with lives outside of the classroom. It can be equally tempting to assume the same of our students: that ours is their only class, that their only responsibilities are as students, or even that their priorities are course-related. 

None of these assumptions is fair, either to ourselves or to our students. 

So, one purpose of this post is to serve as a reminder at the course design stage that we all have obligations, responsibilities, deadlines, and expectations beyond any given course. And part of the purpose of this post is to serve as a reminder that we cannot predict the future, nor know every obstacle and emergency that will arise in a given semester. And if all I convince you to do is acknowledge these facts as part of your instructional design process, then this post will have been useful. 

But if you want some advice on how to take account of these features, then read on to learn a bit more about how to reverse engineer your syllabus to hopefully meet more of your own needs as a complete person, and more of your students’ needs as people with lives outside of your class. Partly, this is an exercise in brainstorming about foreseeable conflicts in an attempt to better prepare for them. 

Start with the most mechanical, most fixed features of the course itself: class meetings and times, university holidays, grade submission deadlines. You may wish to use a syllabus date generator such as this one: http://wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmaker/generic/ 

Next, add personal dates and appointments. I put these next because you are the only one who can account for these. Your birthday. Important family events (cousin’s wedding? Spouse’s birthday? Parent’s anniversary?) Concert tickets. Grant deadlines. Medical appointments. Conference dates. Travel dates. Daycare pick up. Vet appointments. Note which of these are absolutely fixed, and which are more flexible. After all, you have a life outside of the classroom, and you are best placed to know what that entails. 

Third, add department, professional, college obligations and dates. You likely have less control over these, and potentially less prior warning about them, but they are worth trying to account for even if only roughly. Is there an open house that you’ll be expected to attend? Are there set department meeting times on Tuesday afternoons? Internal scholarship deadlines when students will be asking for reference letters? If you are not starting a new job, you may be in a position to anticipate an approximate pace and time commitment. But even in a new position, some preliminary approximation should be possible, and some fixed expectations should be available. These are reasonable questions to ask.

After these 3 steps, you might be able to recognize some weeks that are already heavy and stressful, prior to your scheduling any course materials or deadlines. Try to flag these. If nothing else, it is useful to be able to anticipate when an intensive week is coming. But ideally, you might be able to schedule some easier teaching weeks to coincide with these heavier commitments weeks, or at least avoid scheduling your heaviest teaching weeks to coincide with already heavy weeks. 

Now, start to draft readings and assignments, but do so by working backwards. When is your marking deadline? How many days or weeks will you need to mark and provide feedback for a given class size or assessment style? How many classes of new material between assignments or tests? How many days or weeks between returning assignments with feedback and starting the next assignment? In each cycle of new material, assessment, and providing feedback, try to schedule some wiggle room in case something comes up. 

On your already flagged heavy weeks, consider scheduling a film viewing or a review session if it’s pedagogically appropriate. Schedule material that you are very comfortable with. Do not schedule your midterm with a 3-day marking turnaround on the week of your parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, nor in the same week as that completely new material. 

At this stage, you may have a preliminary outline of the course and a good preliminary idea of how the pacing will work for you. Highlight the heavy weeks and post reminders in your calendar or other system of organization.

I advise at this stage that you spend a little time thinking through these same issues from a student perspective, which has the added bonus of continuing the project of managing your own pacing and workload. Admittedly, I spend less time on this, but I want to notice ahead of time if I am assigning the two longest and densest readings in the course back to back, or if one week is both a heavy reading week and a heavy assessment week. 

Part of my process is to add a ‘number of pages’ column to the reading list for the course. Obviously, page count is not the only relevant indicator, but it is a tangible metric that students can use to anticipate heavier and (somewhat) lighter weeks. Again, I try to pace the heavy weeks, and sometimes draw out a longer reading over two classes, or replace an excessively long reading with shorter pieces. Making this information available in the syllabus will help students to do the same sort of semester planning.

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Inclusive responses to ChatGPT

In response to ChatGPT, there is a lot of temptation to return to ‘old school’ assessments, such as oral exams, in-class essays, or pen and paper exams. These types of assessments would make academic dishonesty such as using ChatGPT very difficult, and so would also present the clearest proof that assessments were completed with academic integrity. Unfortunately, they also heavily penalize any student unable to attend or perform the skill in question at the appointed time. In order to avoid this exclusionary pitfall, I advocate for keeping learner-centred pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at the core of any changes you may make in response to ChatGPT. Ultimately, that will mean maintaining some space for choice and flexibility in your course design.

The learner-centred approach advocates that students should be actively involved in their learning. Time and space allocated for course work should prioritize student learning and student needs, as opposed to lecturer or teacher needs. That means that class time allocated for assessment should prioritize formative over summative assessment, and should be balanced by class time devoted to non-assessed, learner-centred activities. That may include flipped classroom techniques. It may mean a level of choice and flexibility in the assessment designs. Or, it may mean prioritizing activities that help learners to make their own meaning out of the materials of the course – perhaps through discussion, or free-writing, or other creative forms of response. That is, it is unlikely to mean frequent in-class testing.

In Universal Design for Learning (UDL), there is a recognition of the great diversity amongst students: diversity in needs, in capacities, in interests, in perspectives, and in abilities. UDL advocates anticipating as broad a range of learners as possible, so that by the time students sign up for a course, the course will already have been designed to meet their needs. UDL advocates designing a level of flexibility and choice into the course, materials, and assessments from the outset, so that students are empowered to adapt the course to their own needs. For example, in-class writing assignments could be an option and a way to fulfill a particular assessment requirement, but it would be better if one-time, in-class assessments were not the only way to fulfill that requirement.

In advocating for learner-centred course design and UDL, there is a broad category of response to ChatGPT and LLM that has me particularly worried: high-stakes, in-person, one time assessments. In a previous post, I highlighted the ways that prior research about academic dishonesty might give us insight into the ‘new’ world brought about by ChatGPT and other large language model AIs. In short, academic dishonesty is most likely to arise where there is time-pressure, grade-pressure, or peer pressure. High-stakes, one-time assessments increase those pressures rather than alleviating them. If ungrading is not an option (and it is not an option in many contexts), consider a variety of low-stakes and flexible assignments where the time, grade, and peer pressure are alleviated, and the temptation towards academic dishonesty is lower.

Against high-stakes all-or-nothing assessments

Many proposed responses to ChatGPT suggest replacing at-home, untimed assessments (such as essays and take-home tests) with in-class, time-limited assessments. Some proposed responses swap word-processed assignments for handwritten assignments. And some proposed responses replace written tests and assignments with oral presentations or exams. Each of these proposals take relatively flexible written assignment styles and replace them with fixed and unimodal assignment styles, and each of these responses narrows the range of students who can succeed at the assignment. In the process, this narrowing diverges from principles of Universal Design for Learning .

Of course, no one intends to exclude students with diagnosed accommodation needs. Indeed, students with diagnosed and documented accommodations are often legally protected, and will have relatively clear (though nonetheless onerous) procedures for accessing accommodations such as extensions, submission procedures, and alternative assignment formats. But these procedures can only be initiated after the course has been set in motion. They require individual exceptions to be carved out, one at a time, and place a burden on the student – not to mention the instructor who responds to them individually.

However, students with diagnosed accommodation needs are not the only learners whose needs are undermined by high-stakes, in person, one-time assessments. In general, UDL does not limit itself to responding to the diagnosed and delineated needs certified and circumscribed by accommodation gatekeepers, but rather anticipates a wide diversity of learning needs – documented, diagnosed, or otherwise – and designs the course to meet as many of them as possible.

Students with undocumented accommodation needs will have no prescribed procedures available to them, yet their learning needs can still be anticipated by adhering to principles of UDL. The student with a child home sick from daycare, or the student caring for a parent in hospital will have to explicitly disclose their circumstances in order to plead their case for accommodation, and they might still be refused. The student whose emergent medical situation is awaiting assessment by a specialist, or the student whose evolving mental health crisis is in flux, may not be in a position to explain or request the accommodation they need. Indeed, they may not know what they need until they try a few things. But in navigating a course with a level of choice or flexibility, they can still find their own path up to a point, and do so without having to rely on disclosures or instructor mercy.

The student with a broken arm might not have much difficulty pleading their case, but accommodating their in-class, handwritten assignment might nonetheless be onerous for both learner and instructor – requiring out of class dictation, testing centre bookings, or other time-heavy individual accommodations. But allowing flexible modes or occasions of submission for low-stakes assignments, and limiting (if not eliminating) the use of high-stakes, one-time, in-person assessments will help diverse students navigate the course according to their own learning needs.

Indeed, high-stakes, one-time, in-person assessment practices may place unbearable burdens on instructors as well, depending on class size, student population, and the availability of university support. Oral exams of 10 minutes per student would require about 7 hours of exam time for a 42 student class, assuming there were no scheduling issues or time overruns. In-class and timed assessments also presume that the instructor will never have an unexpected emergency, that the university will never have a snow day or tornado warning, and that the fire alarm will never go off during class time. Yet, all of those things and worse have been known to happen.

For these and other reasons, implementing high-stakes, in-person, one-time assessment strategies as a response to ChatGPT will exclude many students, place a burden on instructors, and place particular burdens on vulnerable students. To the extent that you can recognize ChatGPT and also maintain a flexible, student-centred learning environment, everyone involved in the course will benefit.

A learner-centred and non-punitive approach could acknowledge the existence of ChatGPT, recognize it as a temptation, and also offer learners the tools to help resist that temptation. But, in the very least, do not accept excluding students in the name of maintaining academic integrity.

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It’s in the Syllabus!

When I was an undergraduate student, a syllabus consisted of only the most basic information for a course, and typically, it fit on a single sheet of paper. A syllabus was a simple list, usually without flourishes:

  • Course name and course code.
  • Professor’s name, contact information, and office hours.
  • Classroom and meeting times for the course.
  • Basic assessments and deadlines (essays, exams, assignments, and how much each was worth).
  • Sometimes, a rough schedule of the weekly reading schedule for the semester.

Times have changed. At the institution I taught at most recently, the syllabus template was 6 pages long prior to describing any of the assessments, or listing any readings. My syllabi over the last few years have typically stretched to about 12 pages, and sometimes more.

The modern syllabus is a much more formal document than the single sided photocopy I was handed on my first day of class. It is sometimes treated as a contract between students and instructor, sometimes treated as a pedagogical tool, and nearly always understood to be the fundamental source of information about a course. It tends to specify policies, rules and regulations, texts, and assignments for a given iteration of a course, especially in cases where courses are offered in multiple sections by different instructors. That makes it a very important resource for each student, and an opportunity for each instructor and course designer.

The problem is that as syllabi have grown in length and detail, they have also become increasingly inaccessible and overwhelming. Understandably, students don’t always read these multi-page documents full of legalese policy statements and multiple changes in formatting. Even when students do read the syllabus, they may predictably miss important details. Students miss crucial course information so ubiquitously that an industry of memes has popped up around redirecting students towards the syllabus. Mocking students for struggling to find crucial course information is neither mature nor productive, and I don’t recommend it. But, what should instructors do?

There are very good reasons to include as much course information as possible in the syllabus, but the more information is included, the more likely it is that any particular piece of information will be overlooked. It is a good idea to include as much information as possible, because this is the document that students will return to the most. Many colleges and universities view the syllabus as a policy document or contract, deviation from which is problematic. For this reason, the syllabus really does need to be comprehensive. But, as a result, students will not read every word of it, and that’s okay. I have a few strategies to help you – and your students – get the most out of the syllabus.

  1. Reframe

First, recognize that the student is not the problem. The syllabus’s length and comprehensiveness is both the problem and a desirable feature, and it is more or less set in stone by institutional policies. Focus your energy on incentivizing referencing the syllabus regularly, and additional energy on building nets (and networks) to help everyone get the information they need, when they need it. Additionally, recognize that every student is different, and a diversity of student learners is a good thing. Some students will read through the entirety of every syllabus, but that it is perfectly reasonable that some (or many) students will not.

2. Redundancy

It is worth building redundancy into the syllabus. Make sure that the most important information (deadlines and avenues of communication) are communicated in more than one way. Perhaps they arise more than once on the syllabus, and perhaps they are additionally available through course webpages. As deadlines approach, highlight them in course communications (lectures, announcements, emails, etc.). Offer multiple pathways to find the same information.

3. Easter Eggs

Incentivize reading through the syllabus. Some people use syllabus quizzes to ensure that their students absorb the most important information in the syllabus. I once taught a course that offered a bonus mark (of 0.5%) for completing an introductory discussion post. It wasn’t hidden in the course materials, but the bonus mark wasn’t highlighted as much as other material. If they found information about the bonus mark, they were likely to find other more important information about the course in the process. I’m not sure what I think about hiding money and directing students to it in the syllabus, but it seems designed to prove that students don’t read the syllabus, rather than incentivizing reading the syllabus in the first place.

In recent courses, I have asked students to include a cute animal picture with each email. I view it as my own version of the brown M&M rider. If students email me with a cute picture attached, I know that they have had a good look at the syllabus and haven’t found the information they were looking for. (And they are probably not alone.) I’ll answer the question and add a course announcement on the course webpage, or a post on an FAQ page, or send out a course-wide email. If they email me without the cute picture attached, it’s no big deal, but it’s slightly more likely that asking me is their first port of call. And that is useful information, too. In either case, I will try to answer the question they have asked and also direct them to where they might find more information, but I’m less likely to generalize my response to an email without a cute animal picture.

4. Accessibility

Of course, all syllabi should use accessible and screen-reader-compatible formats. Choose accessible fonts and document formats. Provide alt-text for any images. Check the (minimum) accessibility requirements at your institution, but see if you can aim higher than that.

It should be clear by now that I am not impressed by the ‘It’s in the Syllabus!’ memes. They belittle students for something that is perfectly reasonable and understandable. So, when you are working on your next syllabus, remember to think about it from the student’s perspective, and create a document that will help the whole class to get on the same page throughout the course.

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Be there or be square: Attendance and Academic Success

We all know that attendance is linked to academic performance, right? Better attendance typically means higher grades, and lower attendance/higher rates of absenteeism is linked to lower academic performance? This is so well known in academic circles that many university professors include the connection between attendance and academic performance in their introductory lectures or in their syllabi.

Yet, in the Covid era, many have also become increasingly aware of impossibility of perfect attendance in many cases. Between illness and caregiving responsibilities and work commitments and financial hardship, there are lots of students for whom attendance in class is not the top priority. Universal design for learning suggests that we should design our courses so that students who face barriers to attendance don’t face additional barriers to academic success. After all, mere attendance shouldn’t be a pedagogical aim for most of us.

The temptation to make attendance part of assessment is real. Every instructor wants to encourage attendance in general. We want our students to do well, and we want them to get the most out of our classes. We want to encourage attendance because it is so hard to lecture to an empty room and impossible to run a lab or an engaging activity with too few students. We need to strike a balance between accommodating students who can’t attend, encouraging attendance for those who can, and building pathways to success in the course for both sets of students.

One worry is that attendance is an easily measurable proxy for learning outcomes, and it seems to have a predictive quality to it. We know as the semester progresses whether attendance is waning, and we try to adjust in the hopes of achieving better learning outcomes. Educators at all levels should care about learning outcomes, but should we therefore care about attendance? What if we’re tracking the wrong variable, for the wrong reasons?

The answer, it would seem, is mixed. Yes, there are plenty of studies that show high attendance rates correspond, in general, with high achievement rates, and high rates of absenteeism correspond, in general, with lower academic achievement rates.

But many studies suggest only a weak statistical connection between attendance and learning outcomes or academic results, and there are a lot of hints in the research that suggest that the causal connection is elsewhere.

One reason to think that attendance itself is not doing the work comes from this study showing that students who attend their undergraduate lectures achieve the highest test scores, but the students most likely to attend lectures are also students who had the highest admission scores to university. That is, students who already have a record of doing well academically are more likely to attend class. That strong students attend class and do well isn’t surprising. But what about the students who aren’t attending class, or who don’t have a record of high achievement? What about the students who can’t attend class, now, regardless of what their prior record suggests?

We should (and do!) worry about the reasons why students are present or absent from class. There is a very real worry that we may be systematically disadvantaging students who cannot attend class. In the past, students have made unprompted disclosures to me for missing class when: a war broke out in their home country; they were caring for a family member in hospital; their chronic illness flared up; they were in mental health crisis; they had to be in court; their caregiving responsibilities conflicted with class; they were offered a work shift that they couldn’t afford to turn down; they couldn’t afford bus fare to come to campus for every class. I’ve lost count of the number of hospital selfies and medical charts I’ve received (though, I wish the answer were zero). All of these reasons are legitimate and worthy of accommodation in my books, although very few of them qualify for official accommodation within the university’s policy. And none of these are explanations that students should feel the need to disclose to their professor.

Universal Design for Learning proposes that we consider these students at the syllabus design stage, before the course starts. If the syllabus is designed for the widest possible range of students in mind, the course will be accessible to them without anyone having to disclose their reason for absence.

This study suggests that mere attendance is only weakly correlated with exam performance, but levels of cognitive engagement (to a certain extent) and behavioural engagement (to a greater extent) are highly correlated with exam performance. Büchele argues that what matters most is the level of engagement when students attend class. Cognitive engagement means getting the students thinking in class. Examples of cognitive engagement include using a ‘flipped classroom‘, student activities that make comparisons or connections such as mind mapping, and various types of experiential learning. But in a large class, and on a large scale, those can be hard to achieve. The good news about Büchele’s study is that even (mere) behavioural engagement has a positive impact on exam performance. Behavioural engagement is stimulus-response type of engagement including classroom response activities (such as Poll Everywhere or Kahoot).

Finally, this study finds that although attendance positively correlates with student performance, attendance policies do not have a significant effect on attendance. My take away is that the attendance policy is not going to do the work of motivating students to attend on its own. After all, there is good reason to think that student absences are experienced with regret, or chosen for good reason. Awarding marks for attendance or penalizing non-attendance with mark deductions might artificially widen the performance gap between those who attend and those who are absent. But it won’t have changed how much the students have learned.

A better strategy is to acknowledge the reality of absenteeism and try to build pathways to engagement for students who cannot attend. Perhaps an asynchronous discussion board or online mind-mapping activity for those who cannot attend with the rest of the class, in parallel with in-person discussions and synchronous mind-mapping activities for those who are able to attend.

A final note about the pandemic’s impact on attendance and burnout. Rates of student absenteeism are much higher than they ever have been. And for some portions of the pandemic, even the correlation between attendance and academic performance has dropped off. Many people reported much lower than usual academic performance, irrespective of attendance rates. Pandemic life is hard on all of us, and it is especially demoralizing to find that engagement strategies that worked in the past are no longer as effective.

This brief survey of the literature on attendance and performance suggests that engagement rather than attendance is the thing we should all be tracking. But, of course, engagement is very hard to track. It is much more difficult to track than attendance. As higher ed goes through rapid changes brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, learning outcomes remain the end point aim for.