Whoa September, the month that flies the fastest in the world of higher ed professionals, when new students and faculty arrive, gentle learning management system reminders get sent, and unpredictable foibles of technology arise. For me, it is also the month of many one shot sessions.
Over the last year, I've been paying closer attention to how I manage my time, energy, and attention span to make better decisions at work. From using canned responses to quickly respond to common technology questions, to making Trello cards with instructional design to-dos, it's helped me free up valuable brain space to do bigger experiments with my teaching. I've also allowed myself to give into the 'why not factor' and challenge my perfectionism in the name of experimentation.
Over the summer, a working group within my department called Curricular Connections began creating tutorials to use in First Year Seminars to enable our liaisons do the following:
Share learning goals
Blend instruction sessions to make time for engaged face to face time
Flip sessions completely
The tutorials proved to be an essential proof-of-concept for me such that I was inspired to create one of my own. Enter flipping the basic library session for a foundations class in the sciences.
Over the last three years, I've been invited to come into a foundations course in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies department. This class in particular focuses on science research and methods. The goal of my short(ish) sessions is to introduce students to peer-reviewed materials in science, how to access them using Science Direct and Web of Science and how to cite them using Ecological Society of America style. Generally, this process takes about thirty minutes and I do some to no assessment. This is not a recipe for quality instruction or learning outcomes. Over the last two years, I've felt stymied by this class and following the completion of our tutorials in Curricular Connections, I realized I could do something very similar to completely flip this thirty minute session into a thirty minute assignment AND collect some data.
In the spirit of minimally viable products, I quickly moved to build a tutorial in Google Forms to be used within two weeks of deciding flip (in consultation with the faculty member). Two colleagues gave invaluable feedback as I made some revisions and finally linked to the tutorials in the course site in Moodle. I've been collecting responses steadily since then.
It's perhaps too soon to tell how successful this experiment has been, but there's a proof-of-concept that I am already thinking about how to improve. Below is a link to the Master Tutorial that I hope you will consider using.
I Need a Peer Review Article STAT (Science) by Caro Pinto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mDrSB28zJf8xBaYzP9EvBroUwbGww7790uiUlDBh2tg/edit?usp=sharing.
