I don't think any of us would argue that the students we have in our classes today are increasingly diverse. They bring different experiences with them to class, different learning styles and preferences, different levels of engagement with the content, and different goals for their learning. Fortunately, we have many different frameworks and ways to approach this challenge in our teaching.

However, whenever I talk with teachers (both K-12 and higher ed) about UDL, student choice, or personalized learning, I often get the same question: "By providing these modifications, aren't we just lowering the bar?" It's an interesting question if you think about it. If, when we provide choice, the different options don't address the same learning goals or require the same level of rigor, I think they might have a point. But just providing options or choices doesn't mean that the expectations are any different for student learning. In the end, it's all about the learning goal.

Considering barriers
Currently, I'm participating in a seminar with faculty members across our university focused on personalized learning and UDL. In our discussion last week, we talked a bit about different pathways to the same learning goal. One great contribution of UDL is the recommendation to consider unnecessary obstacles to students' learning. Sometimes, we unintentionally create unnecessary barriers for our students to demonstrate what it is that they know. 

For example, the type of question on an exam can make a big difference for students. One student might tend to overthink things and struggle with multiple-choice questions. Given the exact same topic, however, he might be able to write a very substantive response in a short answer version. Similarly, I might have difficulty conveying my ideas in the form of a written essay. If, however, I was able to create a short video or audio response to the question, I might be better able to articulate my thinking. And in the end, unless the ability to answer multiple-choice questions or write a structured academic essay is part of the actual learning goal, it doesn't seem to me that it should make a difference what format a student chooses to express him/herself.

Providing options without lowering the bar
If you are still reading this, I'm guessing there's a good chance that you agree with the benefits for providing students with some choice in their learning. Even still, it can be difficult to navigate this balance between providing choice and ensuring rigor. What are some simple modifications we can provide for our students to eliminate unnecessary barriers while maintaining the level of rigor?

1. Be clear about your learning goal. Before considering how you want students to demonstrate understanding, clearly define the learning goal. What are the critical components? What can be pruned away without sacrificing the intent of the experience? Once you're left with the essential elements of the learning goal, you're better able to determine different possibilities.
2.  Think outside the box for exams. Rather than having different sections of the exam be comprised of different question types, why not provide a menu of choices? For example, to gauge understanding of a particular topic or concept, you might normally develop a series of multiple-choice questions. Why not offer a parallel set of short answer questions covering the same content? The students could then choose which set of questions to answer.
3. Consider different forms of writing. Oftentimes, we default to two or three types of writing assignments for our students - brief reflection statements, structured essays, and longer form papers. Why not stretch our thinking out a bit? Students could share their reflections in the form of blog posts and comment on each other's work. They might also be challenged to write a white paper for public consumption. They could also write an editorial or contribution to a blog or newspaper. Having an authentic audience for their work can be quite motivating to encourage students to put more time and effort into their writing.
4. Provide students with voice. Audio recording tools on mobile devices and laptops make it very easy for students to record an oral response to a question or prompt. This can be a great option for students who are not fast typists or who have difficulty expressing themselves in writing. You can even use a tool like Voicethread  that enables students to respond to prompts through audio recordings rather than the typical threaded discussion board in BlackBoard or another learning management system.
5. Consider different modes altogether. Depending on your content area and learning goals, it can be productive to think about very different types of ways that students can present their understanding. You might provide options once a semester or for every major assignment. For example, a video can be a great way for students to express nuanced understandings of different topics. They might be able to express themselves through artwork – either digitally or in analog form. They could create a concept map to illustrate different relationships. Or why not let them propose a unique approach of their own?

Assessing different options
Once we get past the question of rigor, many teachers worry about how to assess learning in these different formats. It would be a huge effort to create different rubrics or assessment criteria for different student products. Surely you can't assess the quality of an essay and a video project, right? I'd actually argue that as long as you anchor different options to a particular learning goal in most cases, the various products can be assessed using the same grading criteria.

Reflection responses, blog posts, or audio responses can all be judged in the same way when your rubric assesses the clarity of ideas. A video and essay could be judged on the quality of the argument articulated in either.  Once we get past focusing on the form, we can consider multiple options that work to maintain rigor and provide them choice at the same time.

What strategies do you employ to provide students with choice?
Please post your comments below. 

​I was late to the Twitter game compared to many of my friends and colleagues. It was only about 18 months ago or so that I made a conscious effort to commit to using the service for professional connections, sharing, etc. Many of my colleagues are much more active (10,000+ posts) and more connected (thousands of followers). I was just very skeptical of its value compared with the time and effort I’d need to put into it to derive any real benefit.
 
Today I’d say I’m moderately active (I’m @markhofer if you'd like to connect). I try to tweet out interesting articles that I find online, I share blog posts I’ve written, and I’m taking baby steps towards creating more connections, participating in tweetups, etc. I think this might be hard for me, because I’m not much of a social media guy. I have LinkedIn and a dormant Facebook account, but I’ve never really enjoyed or figured out the best way to make these tools worth the investment of time and energy. When I read about colleagues in higher ed using Twitter and other social media services in their teaching, I’m particularly skeptical.
 
Finding balance between skepticism and open-mindedness
The place of technology in teaching and learning can be a bit of a polarizing topic. There are some folks who would argue that technology has no place in the college classroom. Even if they are personal users of technology, they argue that these kinds of tools create distance between the students and the instructor, distract from learning, and may even make students lazy in their thinking. On the other side, of course, you have the technology evangelists who not only promote the use of technology in the classroom, but go so far as to disparage those who resist. I think that as faculty who care about student learning, growth and development, we have an obligation to situate ourselves somewhere in the middle between these two poles.
 
Just because I’m naturally a bit skeptical about Twitter in the classroom doesn’t mean I should dismiss the possibilities out of hand. I recognize that increasingly my students are active and engaged in these spaces, so it makes sense to consider the possibilities. Like with anything, though, I feel like tools and resources should be selected based upon how they serve students and engage them in my course content. In an effort to better judge the tool's affordances and constraints, I decided to do some research. Fortunately just at that time, I came upon a resource created  by Jamison Miller, PhD student and graduate assistant in the William & Mary School of Education Technology Integration center,  called Twitter for Educators.
 
Miller highlights four different strategies for using Twitter in courses:

• Continuous asynchronous discussions throughout a course
• Focused, synchronous “tweetchats”
• A Twitter essay activity
• A synchronous Twitter journal club
  
  

I was intrigued to read through these four examples because they were clearly thoughtful strategies to use Twitter in a substantive way. Based on these four examples, I’ve identified a few affordances and constraints of this tool in the classroom.
 
Affordances of Twitter in the classroom

• The informal feel of Twitter and short length of tweets might encourage greater and more organic participation in discussion, particularly in responding to each other.
• The 140-character limit for tweets forces students to synthesize their ideas and be concise and clear in their communication.
• “Unleashing a tweet into the world,” as Jesse Stommel phrased it, encourages students to consider their audience, tone, and perspective.
• If also active on Twitter, students can engage directly with the author(s) of an article or book used in class using an @ reply.
• Using a specific hashtag for a journal club or community reading allows students to quickly tweet their reactions, ideas and questions as they go, which may promote increased engagement in reading and connections around ideas from a text.

Constraints of Twitter in the classroom

• The 140-character limit may encourage shallow ideas and thinking.
• The character limit can also make it difficult to provide context for contributions.
• It can be difficult for students to reference texts and sources as they contribute online.
• Asynchronous discussion is not threaded in the way that a discussion board allows – consequently, it can be difficult to follow a string of tweets as a conversation.
• Using Twitter as a back channel during an in-class discussion may create a kind of distance between participants and may decrease active engagement in the face-to-face discussion.

In the end…
I found it interesting that in exploring some examples and thinking through the affordances and constraints that Twitter can be both a positive and a negative. Much of the value or limitations with Twitter as an instructional tool depends on how it would be used and for what purpose.
 
While I am still suspicious of Twitter as a way to post substantive contributions or to facilitate sustained threads of discussion, I’m starting to understand targeted ways that Twitter might be useful in my classes. In particular, I like the idea of Twitter journal groups for students to share ongoing ideas related to a reading. I worry a bit that this might lead to a muddled, difficult to follow collection of isolated and de-contextualized notes. Like anything, I suppose, it will take some trial and error experimentation and some input and advice from my students to make this a meaningful learning experience for my students.

Where do you stand on Twitter and other social media tools in the college classroom? More importantly, why?
Please post your comments below. 

The following article is a guest post from Barbi Honeycutt, a speaker, scholar, and author. Dr. Honeycutt is the founder of FLIP It Consulting in Raleigh, NC, and an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University. She facilitates workshops, shares strategies, and creates resources to support educators who want to develop learning environments that involve students, increase engagement, and improve learning. You can connect with Barbi at flipitconsulting.com & @barbihoneycutt

For the past five years, the “flipped classroom” model has dominated conversations in all areas of education. From K-12 classrooms to college lecture halls to corporate training programs, educators continue to experiment with the design and analyze the results to determine if the approach actually improves student learning and engagement. Now as more educators are becoming well versed in the approach and have started implementing flipped strategies in their courses, they are beginning to ask more questions and share their experiences. Here are the top three most frequently asked questions I hear from faculty about the flipped classroom model in higher education:
 
1. What is the flipped classroom?
This is probably the most controversial question. Depending on where you look and who you talk to, you will find different definitions, models, and interpretations of what a flipped classroom is. My mission for the past five years has been to encourage us to expand what we mean by “flipped” classrooms. Most of the discussions focus on the use of videos which students watch before class. However, many of us in higher education have pushed against this limited definition. There’s more to student engagement than watching videos of lectures. And a video of a lecture is still a lecture. Even with more innovative and engaging videos, most educators are expanding on their interpretations of what it means to flip a classroom. The model was first introduced as “inverted” instruction by Lage, Platt, and Treglia in the Journal of Economic Education in 2000. Many educators who are using the flipped classroom model may not be familiar with this history, and I encourage you to take a look at that article for some of the original thinking as this idea was beginning to take shape.

In my work, the FLIP means to “Focus on your Learners by Involving them in the Process.” It’s actually based on my teaching philosophy and my research. I have developed a 4-part framework which includes the integration of student development, instructional design, learning environment research, and faculty development. All of these components are essential to creating a successful learning experience.
In this framework, the pre-class work focuses on the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and the in-class work focuses on the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I show educators how to design active learning strategies to involve students in the process of applying, analyzing, and creating knowledge during class time.
 
2. How do you encourage students to actually DO the pre-class homework and come to class prepared and ready to participate?
This is the number one most frequently asked question!  It’s not a unique problem to flipped classrooms since we have always assigned homework and expected our students to come to class prepared. But since the flipped classroom relies heavily on the pre-class work for student engagement, more faculty members want to know how to encourage students to actually DO it.  I recently wrote two articles to help address this question, and I approached them from different perspectives in an effort to start analyzing how we can address this challenge. In the recent Faculty Focus article, I address the challenge from the perspective of holding students accountable and making the learning visible. In a separate blog post titled 3 Strategies to Encourage Students to Complete the Pre-Class Work in the Flipped Classroom, I addressed the question from the perspective of student motivation. Using Dan Pink’s AMP model as a framework, I encourage you to take a closer look at how your pre-class work is designed.
 
The main point is students have to know their pre-class work is valued, relevant, and not “busy” work. Once you meet that expectation and they see how their work contributes to their success in the classroom, they are more likely to do the work and not get left behind when their peers are prepared.  And peer pressure can be a strong motivator too!
 
3. What can I do about student resistance? What if they still don’t do the work or participate?
This is the second most frequently asked question!  I don’t know if I’ve ever talked with a faculty member who had 100% of the students 100% prepared and 100% engaged all of the time in every class. Students have “off” days just like we do, and sometimes life gets in the way of the best laid plans.  However, the first place to start is to understand where the resistance might be coming from.  The college classroom can be a scary and intimidating place for some students. And when we add a new way of learning on top of that stress, some students may shut down or choose to disengage. My favorite resource for addressing this challenge was written by one of my teaching mentors, Dr. Richard Felder. His work on the intersection between the active learning classroom and the stages of grief is fascinating, and I wrote an article titled 5 Ways to Address Student Resistance in the Flipped Classroom based on his findings. It might be a helpful place to start as you think about who your students are, where they are coming from, and what prior experiences might be influencing their behavior. I always say, “Support your students in flipped and active learning classrooms. Just as you are learning how to teach in this way, they are learning how to learn in this way.”

Please post your comments below.

Design thinking is a hot topic in education from elementary school to continuing professional education in a wide variety of industries. According to IDEO, a global design firm and one of the key players in this space, design thinking is “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” While not dramatically different than other approaches to creative problem solving, the focus on empathy, rapid prototyping and iteration make design thinking highly relevant in courses and programs that attempt to encourage innovative thinking.

Interest in design thinking in higher education in particular has exploded in recent years. I was introduced to design thinking through Professor Michael Luchs from the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary. In this Luminaris podcast episode, Luchs explains why design thinking resonates with him and how he leverages the approach in a course he teaches on Sustainability Inspired Innovation and Design. Since their initial forays into design thinking, the Mason School has launched the Jim and Bobbie Ukrop Innovation and Design Studio – an amazing space that encourages innovation and creativity. Under the guidance of Mason professor Graham Henshaw, we recently engaged in a design thinking bootcamp to help reimagine a more student-centered approach to high school.

Just as with personalized learning, it can be difficult to wade through the myriad resources available online to learn more about design thinking. In this post, I wanted to provide a quick annotated list of resources related to design thinking that I’ve found helpful. Like in the personalized learning post, I hope that these resources will help to get you started on your own exploration of this engaging approach to innovation and problem solving.

Curated list of design thinking resources
Design Thinking – A Unified Framework for Innovation – In this article from Forbes written by Reuven Cohen, readers are introduced to design thinking. Cohen walks us through his three-day bootcamp experience at the Stanford d.school. This walkthrough of engaging in a substantive design thinking experience really provides some insights on the process from a participant’s perspective.

Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking – Offered through the d.school at Stanford, this toolkit provides everything you need to host a design thinking short course using the design thinking methodology. The site provides step-by-step instructions on how to prepare for the short course, a playbook for facilitators, videos, and sets of really interesting “mixtapes” to go for a deeper dive into understanding and experimenting.

Design Thinking for Educators – IDEO has created this helpful toolkit for educators to integrate design thinking in their teaching. The site provides a great overview of IDEO’s approach to design thinking, four great examples of design thinking in schools, a number of high quality videos, and a free design thinking toolkit. While designed for K-12 teachers, the toolkit can be useful for educators at all levels to create design thinking activities for the classroom.

IDEO U – IDEO has designed and offers three online courses exploring different aspects of design thinking. While I haven’t taken any of the courses, given the high quality of IDEO’s materials and deep expertise in design thinking, I’m sure they will be good.

Design Kit: Facilitator’s Guide – This free, online course will equip you to offer your own design thinking workshop. The outcome of this asynchronous course is that you will develop the plan for a full-day, hands-on, introductory workshop for 5-20 participants on design thinking. The Facilitator’s Guide includes all of the materials you’ll need as well. I’m looking forward to beginning this experience in early February.

What resources have you found useful for design thinking?
Please post your comments below.

I’m working with a team here at William & Mary to design and facilitate a faculty seminar series on personalizing learning in our teaching. I’m really excited to be working with a faculty colleague from Modern Languages and two senior academic technologists to plan what we hope will be an energizing and productive experience. Our goal for the participants is for them to redesign a course syllabus or project to provide students with more choice and opportunities to personalize the learning experience. For faithful Luminaris readers, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ll be working to weave in Universal Design for Learning principles throughout.
 
As we plan out the sessions, I’ve begun to do some background reading on personalized learning in higher education. I recently wrote about what higher ed can learn from K-12 in relation to personalized learning, but I’m just now digging into the topic from the higher ed perspective. In this post, I’ll summarize a few of my key “ah-ha” moments and finish with a selected reading list if you’re interested in digging deeper into the topic.
 
Key points related to personalized learning in higher ed
It seems to me that personalized learning is typically conceptualized a little differently in higher ed than in K-12. It seems that there is less emphasis on the instructional design side of things, with more emphasis on tools and structures in higher ed. Specifically, as I read through some of the following sources, the following major assumptions or areas of emphasis emerged:

• Personalized learning efforts allow students to move through a course, program or degree at their own pace.
• Courses and programs should be competency-based; this helps, in part, to bridge formal and informal learning experiences.
• Learning analytics connected with the course learning management system can help instructors track student progress, identify areas for further work, and ensure that students master relevant competencies.
• Adaptive learning software, while expensive, is critical to truly personalize the learning experience for students in online or hybrid courses.
• Personalized learning should open up multiple pathways for students to earn their degrees.

 
If one or more of these aspects of personalized learning is of interest to you, I encourage you to explore the following resources that I found helpful in understanding the basics and different aspects of the topic.
 
Selected readings to explore personalized learning in higher ed
What is Personalized Learning from Northern Arizona University provides a nice overview of the approach that has been recognized by a number of groups including Educause, the Gates Foundation and Next Generation Learning Challenges as an exemplary model. The page provides a nice overview of the model, including how their approach to personalization goes beyond more typical online learning approaches to personalization.
 
The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths by Peter Smith for Educause Review traces the historical development of personalized learning in higher education. He goes on to argue how powerful learning analytics and adaptive learning tools provide us the capacity to scale these approaches throughout higher education.
 
The ‘Personalization’ of Higher Education: Using Technology to Enhance the College Experience by Louis Soares for the Center for American Progress overviews how technology tools can help to personalize the learning experience for college students. Specifically, Soares explores how technologies can personalize how students interact with and learn from content, how they can identify courses in which to enroll, and how they can motivate students to persist in college.
 
Adaptive Learning Technologies by Brian Fleming for Eduventures explores one key component of technology-based personalization efforts: adaptive learning tools. The post highlights the key features of adaptive learning and features the work of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon as an example.
 
The Personalized Learning portal from Educause provides an excellent jumping off point to explore key topics and concepts related to personalized learning. Of the resources posted there, I particularly recommend 7 Things You Should Read about Personalized Learning, The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths, and the very cleverly named, Bigfoot, Goldilocks, and Moonshots: A Report from the Frontiers of Personalized Learning.

What readings would you add to the list?
Please post your comments below.