Room for Improvement

If you haven’t heard by now this is not our first attempt at building an online course. Rhett and I have been involved in many online course developments at the U of R over the last five years. But one thing we rarely ever get the chance to do is get student feedback prior to a course’s first delivery. That’s why we were so excited that we’d finally get that chance. Early in the development process we set the goal that we wanted to make this the best course either of us have been a part of. So first just a quick thank you to Ayodele, Osas, Dwayne, & Matthew. Your feedback has been very helpful and will certainly give us a much better chance to reach our goal. We’d like to take some time to respond to a few comments and suggestions in particular. Some suggestions we plan on incorporating into the upcoming prototype modules, some that will have to wait for the course to be fully developed, and unfortunately others that will have to be omitted altogether. We’ll also cover some changes we plan to make following the discussions we had in our most recent class about accessibility.

We received a lot of good feedback regarding our course prototype. One thing that seemed to come up multiple times is that our colleagues think there should be more peer-peer interaction. Since this course is blended with one synchronous session per week, we do not want to overload students with too many tasks and add more mandatory components of this class. However, these comments did make us realize we had the opportunity to increase collaboration among students. As a result, we have added a “connections forum” that students can use to  exchange information with each other and create their own study groups or practice sessions! This will be an optional component of the class for anyone wanting to get some extra practice with their peers! This is a welcome change as there are many benefits to study groups when learning a language. According to Milena Quaresma, a speech language therapist, students who study language together experience multiple benefits such as receiving feedback from each other, practicing listening to the language with different accents, and gaining confidence in their speaking to name a few!

Another suggestion that came up multiple times was incorporating more feedback on the H5P interactives we’ve created. Feedback is a beneficial addition that can take an interactive from good to great and far too often it goes unused. Unfortunately there are several H5P types we’ve used that do not have an option to provide feedback, but there is occasionally a workaround. For example, each of our modules is filled with Dialog Card H5Ps for students to review the newest words or phrases they’ve learned. When students flip over a card they can select whether they were right or wrong in their response. Each wrong answer will go back into the pile for them to try again. Now even though this H5P type doesn’t include feedback we can actually go into the text overrides and change the standard response they’re shown once they’ve answered all of the Dialog cards correctly. We’ll have to wait and hear back from Michael, the instructor, on what he feels the best response would be, but even incorporating German language by like “Richtig!” and “Falsch!” (Right! And Wrong!) will be a positive change. Thankfully many other H5P types we’ve used such as Dictation or Multiple Choice have actual feedback settings, so in most cases we’ll be able to make a small change that is sure to have a big impact.

One challenge we faced was that in the actual course development we are mainly focused on the Module books including both the videos and H5Ps that come with them. Many missing elements need to be discussed with Michael before they’re created, but for the sake of the prototype we had to do a bit of improvisation. First, the quiz questions were ones we created on our own. One reviewer caught an error in one question and while that won’t be a big deal for this prototype it still stresses the importance of sticking to our course profile and ensuring each activity is reviewed with a close eye, otherwise when the actual course comes around a tiny error could slip by semester after semester. Second, the early stages of the course have yet to be fully developed, so certain aspects don’t currently exist. A couple reviews mentioned additions such as a brief reference to assessment strategy in order to provide clarity to students, or outlining clear participation requirements for the synchronous sessions. Rest assured that while these changes may not make an appearance in the prototype, we agree wholeheartedly with ensuring the students understand what’s expected of them and will undoubtedly be implementing these recommendations before the first offering of the course.

Next we will discuss some of the feedback that we unfortunately are unable to incorporate into our course design. One of our reviews was very diligent in their testing and noted that dark mode does not work well on our course. This is a very good point, and admittedly something we wish we could fix. Unfortunately the integration of dark mode is done on the developer side of things (back end) and we are not able to make changes to get it to work properly. However, this flaw in moodle’s dark mode has been noted and passed onto the information technology development team in hopes that they will make a repair in the future! Another comment was that the online etext was not working for our tester. We personally made a mistake here, since the text being used for the course is a paid resource we could not provide access to it for our reviews. We should have mentioned this ahead of time so they did not spend any time trying to access this course.

Relating to UDL, we have tried to include components to support many learners already, but there are new things we will be including based on our most recent class! First, we have put a significant effort in ensuring that the caption files for the videos are correct. This meant correcting all of the English and German manually (Kaltura does a pretty good job of automatically captioning English, but the German became gibberish in the files). This will allow students to read live captions while playing the video, or download the file to read on their own. Additionally, for all textbook exercises we have created H5Ps for students who prefer tactile learning, and for those who prefer pen on paper can still complete the exercises and get the answers from the lecture video! When designing H5Ps we always consider accessibility guidelines published about H5Ps. We try to avoid inaccessible H5Ps the best we can, however, whenever we do use one that is deemed inaccessible in some way, we will always provide an alternative presentation of the material to ensure everyone can view it in a way that works for them. Lastly, we designed a “getting started” section that is intended to allow students to interact with the learning environment in a friendly way! This section shows students the format of the class, where to find resources, how to interact with various H5Ps and even lets them participate in a zero-stakes quiz in order to gain familiarity with the tool. We are hopeful that this effort results in students becoming very comfortable with the course and how to interact and navigate with it, before it actually begins! 

One thing we will be changing to make the course more accessible will be changing the links to open within the same tab instead of a new tab. We were operating under old best practices which stated that opening within the same tab could make students lose track of where they are and become distracted or even accidentally close the tab. Katia pointed out (and it is supported by accessibility standards) that now the best practice is to open links within the same tab, as opening new tabs can be disorienting for screen readers.

Lastly, there is an accessibility improvement that we would like to make, but are unable to currently do so. As mentioned in our course profile, we are using a paid Ebook as the textbook for this course. Despite combing through open access resources, the instructor we are working with was unable to find one that was satisfactory. This brings up a cost consideration. Adding additional cost to a course can be inaccessible to many students according to Teaching In a Digital Age. We have brought this up with Michael and he is aware of the barriers the added cost can bring up. As a result, he has told us that he is considering exploring what might be involved in developing his very own open textbook as a future project. This is not something that we can develop right now, but we are hopeful that in the future this may be something incorporated into this class!

We will be meeting with Michael later in the week and we can’t wait to share all of the beneficial advice, suggestions, and recommendations we’ve gained by being able to use GER 111 as our course prototype! We are so incredibly thankful for this opportunity and know that the Michael is thankful too! One step closer to making this our best course development yet!