Teaching goal of spring 2014

According to the suggestion from IC office last semester and students' evaluation, I plan to conduct some intervention in my R341 class:

1. Add more icebreakers at the beginning of each class.
2. Enhance interaction between me and my students.
3. Be more assertive in class
4. Modify learning content (remove irrelevant content, add some fancy/advanced skills to motivate/fascinate students.)
5. Balance students' progress (between outstanding students and slower students)

Reflection of midterm evaluation

I released midterm evaluation last Wednesday. By today, 23 out of 30 students filled out this evaluation form. Underneath form is the summary of their responses about class and instructor:

Class
Like/Enjoy	Dislike/Not Enjoy
Work with Photoshop (9) Hands-on practices (4) Techniques and skills that students can use in the future (4) Create website from sketch through Dreamweaver (3) Instructional powerpoints (3) Small projects (2) Interactive class	Fast pace (hard to keep up with) (5) Lack of basics/background introduction (3) No teaching assistant (2) Some skills are not relevant (2) Chatting students (talk policy could be more strict) (2) Strict attendance policy Group work
Instructor
Strength	Need Improve
Very knowledgeable in subject area/Clearly knows what he is teaching (12) Always willing to help (9) Very patient (5) Can usually answer any questions students have (3) Never hesitates to go back and re-explain a concept or procedure if someone does not understand (2) Good at explaining class content (2) Stay after class to make sure students understand the material	Go over the course materials/instruction too fast (3) Hard to completely understand the spoken instruction (3) Not clear on what is required to students

From students responses and reflections, we can see students value the skills and techniques that they can use in their future career and daily life. In contrast, students don't like the skills that are not relevant. This is what we need to consider when we re-design this course for following semesters. We need to make sense all the knowledge points covered in class. If the relevance of a certain knowledge point can not be identified, we need to remove it.

Some of the students argued that the pace of class was too fast, and it was difficult for them to keep up with the instruction. There were several factors that might lead to this situation:

1. Some students had little technology background. They barely knew any computer program before taking this course. They might have difficulty to keep up with the pace. At the same time, other students who had more prior knowledge or related background didn't have this issue. I might need to spend a little more time on explaining the basics for students who have less prerequisite knowledge. And for some of the key points, where it is easy for the students to get lost or confused, I need to slower the pace and elaborate more.
2. Some students were chatting while I was lecturing. Although I encouraged my students to communicate and learn from each other, it was not good time to do that while I was providing instruction. Maybe emphasizing on talking policy could help with this situation as well.

My class has 30 students, which makes it is impossible for me to answer every students' question during the lab time, especially when my students are on very complex tasks. Moreover, when I was presenting, some students who had difficulties to keep up with the instruction would raise their hands, which was also encouraged because immediate feedback would be extremely helpful in hands-on activities. However, when it happened too frequent, the pace of class was broken. And other students would start to chat. And I had to spend more time to have them back on track. Students suggested that a teaching assistant might be very helpful.

Some of the statements about class attendance policy were not clearly defined, which led to some students' misunderstanding. We need to change some wording of the syllabus and better clarify the class attendance policy.

I also need to improve my presenting skills (better pronunciation and louder voice ) to make sure all the students can understand my instruction. Sometimes, I might have skipped some steps, which were obvious or self-explanatory. However, not all the students are at the same skill level. Students who are at the lower level need to be considered more.

4C/ID model in practice

This week my students were working their first individual project, creating a website from sketch. At first, since we have been going through this process for about five times, I planned to demonstrate the whole process again at the beginning of the class. Then let them do it by themselves. And then I realized that I underestimated the complication of this task. They had some difficulties when doing it independently. Although my students went through all the steps for several times, they did it by following my demonstration, and they have never gone through the whole process in one time. So there is a gap. According to van Merriënboer's 4C/ID model, the scaffolding should be removed corresponding to students' progress. Apparently, I removed the scaffolding to fast. So I created a job-aid to help them through this process and tried to use it in another section I taught. This time students' reaction was very positive, which indicated that this intervention really helped.

1. Controlling of the tempo of the class is kind of challenging. Sometimes students would asking questions while I was talking. My first reaction was always stopping and answering their questions. On one hand, I felt this kind of immediate feedback really helped students. On the other hand, I felt like this kind of interruption was breaking the tempo of teaching. Sometimes I would forget where I was before the questions. And the experience of students might be affected by the interruption. And I noticed some experienced instructors wouldn’t answer students’ questions when they were on important topics. And they would come back to the questions right after they finished their topics. This is what I need to learn and apply to my class.

2. Since the major component of this class (R341) is group work. There are 8 group assignments/projects throughout the semester. How to make sure all the students contribute evenly and fairly to the group is always a challenge. Different situations happens to various group that have this issue. For example, for one group, one student had really passive personality and just waiting other group members to assign job to her. However, other group members didn’t really know her and didn’t assign anything. After one group project, both sides complained. For another group, a technique issue (Google Drive didn’t work) happened on the weekend before the due day. Without enough communication between group members, all of them were working on their own parts and other ones’ parts. And they all complained they couldn’t get responses from others and did more than what they should. From these cases, we can tell the complexity of group work. You never know what will happen to a group. But the most important thing is to encourage group members communicating with each other frequently.

Teaching goals for Fall 2013

As an instructor with technology background, I'm pretty confident with my subject expertise on teaching content of R341 (Multimedia in Instructional Technology). However, I could do better in interacting with students. So, I plan to improve it this semester. Underneath is my tentative objectives to achieve this semester:

1. I plan to learn from other teachers who are teaching similar courses with R341. So, I will join at least one social network of instructors, share my teaching experience with other instructors teaching multimedia technology courses, and asking help from them every week.
2. I plan to receive more feedback from my students, so I would let my students to file out anonymous form to collect feedback from them every 3 weeks. And students may get 5 extra points for fill out each form.
3. Add more activities in class to provide opportunities for students to ask questions.