Notre Dame Global Classroom – Connecting Students from Across the Globe

Notre Dame encourages students to broaden their experiences by participating in overseas study experiences. Seventy-five percent of our students participate in study abroad programs, which ranks #2 in the nation for percentage of undergraduates who study abroad.1  What happens, though, if a student needs to complete a particular course to stay on track for her degree and that course is only offered on-campus? What about students who are home for the summer and want to take classes at Notre Dame, rather than taking those classes from another school and then transferring the credits?

How does a residential university known for its outstanding teaching bring those strengths to the world of online education and distance learning?

The Chief Academic Digital Officer, Elliott Visconsi, approached the Office of Information Technologies with an intriguing challenge: would it be possible to design an environment that provides an engaging teaching experience for distance education, but do so at a much lower cost than other universities have been able to achieve?  How close could we get to a face-to-face experience between teacher and student, and between the students themselves, while at the same time using existing technology solutions that Notre Dame has already invested in?

Hence the genesis of the Notre Dame Global Classroom pilot project for Summer 2019.  At the request of the Provost Office a prototype distance learning space was built which removes as many barriers as possible to teaching online while retaining the personal connection between the instructor and students, that face-to-face instruction is known for.  The Global Classroom was located in the Teaching Studio in the Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center to take advantage of the multimedia resources that Notre Dame created as part of the Campus Crossroads Project.

The main design goals were to:

    • Create a space that feels familiar to instructors who teach face-to-face on a regular basis.
    • Remove technical barriers for the instructors so they can focus on teaching.
    • Control costs by reducing support requirements and standardizing on a core set of peripheral devices in the studio.
    • Further reduce costs and complexity by using the Zoom conferencing platform that Notre Dame has already invested in.

Three online courses were offered as part of the pilot:  Programming Challenges with Dr. Peter Bui from Computer Science and Engineering; Data Management with Dr. Mike Chapple, Academic Director, Master of Science in Business Analytics; and Corporate Financial Management with Dr. Katherine Spiess, Associate Professor of Finance.  The classes, which began the first week of June and ended the last week of July, took place Monday through Thursday evenings between 5:30pm and 9:00pm EDT.

“The Martin Media Center was envisioned and designed to be a multimedia production center for all of campus.  The Teaching Studio, in particular, was named as such to reflect the importance of supporting academic use-cases within the media center.  It’s gratifying to see the Global Classroom using this studio to further Notre Dame’s educational mission.” Dan Skendzel, Executive Director of Notre Dame Studios

The physical space was designed with flexibility and presence in mind. Two large monitors are the main focus of the space: one for Zoom’s Gallery View monitor and the other for active content, such as the chat window, the active speaker, or other important content. A confidence monitor sits below and features content to aid the instructor. An auto-tracking camera follows the instructor as s/he moves to create a more interesting and engaging class.  All of the production tasks have been simplified so a single student in the role of a “technical TA” can run the entire live experience.

All students can be seen at all times by the instructor via the Gallery View in Zoom.  It’s easy to signal the instructor and ask to be called on. Instructors can organize students in virtual breakout rooms and assign discussion topics or in-class problems to work on.

“Using the Global Classroom allows me to interact with students around the world in a much more impactful way.  I’ve used the classroom this summer to teach an online course to Notre Dame undergraduates spread around the world participating in internships and study abroad programs.  In a recent class, I had students join live from Denmark, Brussels, Hong Kong, South Africa, and right here in South Bend. The global classroom allows me to see each of them individually and engage with them directly, similar to the on-campus experience.”  Dr. Mike Chapple, Academic Director, Master of Science in Business Analytics

“This is my third summer teaching an introductory online Finance course so I can compare teaching in the Global Classroom with what I did previously. Teaching in the Global Classroom is a much better experience for me as the instructor than teaching my online class from my office. In the Global Classroom, I can walk around and interact with my students in a much more natural teaching environment than when I manage the Zoom classroom from my office computer.”  Dr. Katherine Spiess, Associate Professor of Finance

“Being able to see my students and interact with them was a huge change from what I had previously with my previous online course… This is much more interactive, much healthier, and a better learning experience for my students.” Peter Bui, Associate Professor of Computer Science

The pilot of the Global Classroom ran for eight weeks during the Summer of 2019 as a partnership between the Office of Information Technologies (OIT), the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Digital Learning.  The feedback gathered will inform improvements to the design, and help inform a sustainable business model to place the Global Classroom on sure footing and enable it to become a resource that enhances Notre Dame’s mission as an institution of unsurpassed education, pursuing rich collaboration around the world.

  1. https://international.nd.edu/students-scholars/

Improving Grading in Large Classes with Gradescope

“I have been using Gradescope since the Fall of 2015. This program has been extremely helpful to evaluate the students in my classes. Beyond the student evaluations, I have been able to better analyze how I provide assessments and instruction in the classroom. With the ability to go back and look at the statistics of each question, I can review difficult content in class and even create multiple choice questions based on essay questions. Overall, I have been extremely happy with Gradescope and the responsiveness of the folks from Gradescope.”  Jennifer Robichaud, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of Biological Sciences

In 2015 Jennifer Robichaud and Kristen Lewis were looking for a tool that would improve how grading is done for large classes in the Department of Biological Sciences.  They discovered a product called Gradescope, which had its beginning in the Computer Science department at UC Berkeley.

Gradescope saves time grading existing paper-based assignments and exams while also making grading and feedback more consistent.  Gradescope works well for multiple question types:  paragraphs, proofs, diagrams, fill in the blank, true/false, and more.  Gradescope also enables you to grade programming assignments automatically or manually.

The OIT’s Academic Technologies group is partnering with faculty across the academy on a one year pilot evaluation of Gradescope.  If you think you might be interested in helping us evaluate Gradescope please fill out this form and we will contact you and help you get started.

How does Gradescope work?  There are five basic steps after students have completed the assignment or exam:

1. Faculty upload a blank version of the assignment or exam and indicate the locations on the form where they expect student names and answers to be located.  This creates an outline of the exam for Gradescope.

2. All student submissions are scanned and uploaded to Gradescope.  Gradescope automatically detects the first page and creates separate submissions for each student.

3. Gradescope automatically matches student names written on the exam with the class roster. 

4. Gradescope recognizes similar answers and groups them together for easier review.  The instructor and TAs then create rubrics to help streamline the grading process.

5. After grading is complete and students are provided with feedback grades can be released in Gradescope and sent directly to the Sakai gradebook if desired.

For more detailed information about how Gradescope works please visit Gradescope’s site.  For more information on the types of assessments that are best suited for Gradescope please see “Assignment Workflow.”

As with any pilot, some unusual behavior or issues should be expected. We will do our best to quickly address these issues, learn from them, and use them to help us make an informed decision about continuation of the service.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, funding and support beyond the pilot is not guaranteed. Faculty and student feedback will help us understand Gradescope’s benefits and shortcomings, and this feedback will be instrumental in determining whether Gradescope moves beyond the pilot stage at Notre Dame.

To sign up for the Gradescope pilot, please fill out this form.

Academic Tools to Enhance Student Engagement

StudentLaptopEvery instructor wants to see their students engaged and passionate during class. This is not always easy to do, and there are so many educational tools and websites one could use that it can be difficult to know where to start.

Summer is a great time to explore teaching methods and tools that can enhance your students’ learning experience. The Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, the Office of Digital Learning, the Hesburgh Library, and the OIT’s Learning Platforms group are available throughout the summer to consult with faculty who may want to redesign certain aspects of their courses.

We would like to introduce you to four tools that are used here at Notre Dame, but which may only be known by a subset of faculty:

 
Interactive Texts & Essays

Some faculty express frustration that students do not read in ways that engage the text deeply.  Many online tools present information in ways that foster casual, hasty momentary interactions. 

By applying principles of learning design, the Office of Digital Learning has created online reading material that engages, rather than distracts.

Guided readings helped our students navigate through some very complicated texts on the relationship between theology, history, and epistemology. The best texts are those that have been read actively: they contain highlights, underlines, and notes in the margins. An online platform can have many distractions with popups from other applications and casual web searches just a click away. By requiring students to advance through our readings by actively engaging them rather than passively scrolling down, ODL has made a breakthrough in digital learning.

Mahan Mirza, professor of Contending Modernities, Keough School of Global Affairs
 
Cloud-hosted Programming Environments

How do you manage distributing, collecting, and grading coding assignments?  How much time do you spend helping students install, update, and maintain their programming software on their personally owned computers?

Vocareum offers programming environments for a large number of programming languages, such as C++, Java, Python, and R, just to name a few.  Faculty create their course assignments and manage due dates, etc.  Students access the assignments through a web browser, without the need to install and maintain programming environments on their personal computers.  

It reduces the amount of time that faculty spend dealing with programming environment issues, and allows them to put the emphasis on teaching and providing valuable feedback to students.

For the last two years, I’ve been using Vocareum (integrated with Sakai) as means of providing Python and Jupyter notebook services to students taking my courses in Chemical Engineering. This cloud-based service largely eliminates the need for students to download and maintain a complex programming environment on their own laptop. For large classes, this significantly reduces a large source of frustration for some students. Another important benefit, which I didn’t appreciate until gaining experience with the tool, is a much more rapid turnaround to students. The ability to review, comment, run, and grade student homework assignments all within an integrated cloud-based service is an enormous savings of instructor resources. I urge any faculty colleague using programming in large courses to take a look at Vocareum.

Jeff Kantor, professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Live interactive audience participation with Poll Everywhere

What are students thinking about a concept, opinion or lesson? How well did students grasp the essential concepts that you just spent 15 or 20 minutes explaining?  How many students can correctly identify a key region of a complex graphic that you have on display? 

Some faculty rely on tools that allow you to “ask the audience” for immediate feedback.   We recommend Poll Everywhere, a web-based interactive response system that students can use from their phone, their tablet, or their laptop.  Polling results are available in real-time.

We’ve been using Poll Everywhere in God and the Good Life since we started teaching it. Our course has about 150 students per section and each class meeting features an extensive debate. Poll Everywhere enables us to score the debate, gauging crowd views both before and after the students offer argument and giving live feedback on how arguments persuade those in the audience to change their minds.  It’s been easy to setup, flexible across the semesters, and most importantly — it gives our student audience members a voice in our class debates.

Megan Sullivan, professor of Philosophy and the Rev. John A. O’Brien Collegiate Chair

 

Students illustrate their journey with electronic portfolios

The learning process doesn’t often produce dynamic artifacts. But when students use ePortfolio to tell their learning story, they are able to incorporate multi-media elements to demonstrate all aspects of their growth, in their own words. The very personal result illustrates – quite literally – how far they’ve come in a way that traditional summative assessments often cannot.

I love using ePortfolio because it allows students to gather their work and see evidence of their growth, plus it gives me, as an instructor, invaluable feedback about what students find to be most important and most effective in my course. Because we use various types of media in my Intermediate Spanish class, it’s an excellent tool for capturing videos, images, voice recordings and print media, and presenting it in a user-friendly way.

Elena Mangione-Lora, professor of Romance Languages and Literature

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