We found 229 results that contain "mid-semester"

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We suspect that now, since the semester is over, you likely will not be giving your students much formative feedback. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use this time to improve the efficiency of your feedback processes. Now that the semester is over, you have a great opportunity to do some forward thinking about next semester. And, if you plan it right, we think you can actually provide your students with more feedback, while spending less time delivering that feedback.
 
Although designing a semester plan for your class seems like a daunting task, it allows you to frontload scheduling due dates, giving you more time during the actual semester to flesh out the specifics of your course (like assigned readings and class activities) as it progresses week to week, assignment to assignment. To create this kind of plan, we are providing you with starting points that focus on two essential functions of your classroom: what you ask students to produce, and what kind of feedback they will need for those products. By creating a rough timeline of assignments and feedback, you can avoid overbooking your schedule (and yourself), and respond to students more efficiently.
 
As you will see, with this feedback plan, students receive feedback throughout the whole process of producing their research papers and projects, and get feedback on every minor product that leads up to the major products. The feedback is also designed so that students receive feedback on each of the goals for the Research Unit.
 
While not all teachers have the luxury to control all parts of their assignments or schedule, we hope and believe the strategy of developing a Feedback Plan is flexible enough to work for many teachers.
 
Designing a Semester Plan

Make a list of your major assignments. When will you introduce an assignment to your class? What are the goals of those assignments? How long will these assignments take for students to complete?


Make a list of your minor assignments. What smaller activities does the class need to complete to support that major assignment? How long will those take? Will they require feedback from you, their peers, the class as a whole (hey we have plenty of resources to help you with this btw)? Where will these varieties of feedback be most beneficial for students in your class?


Identify places where students need feedback. Do your students need your feedback on one major assignment before they can complete the next one? What goals do the minor projects support?


Consider your own schedule. Now is also a good time to remember to plan your semester timeline in accordance with your own academic life–are there weeks you will attend conferences? If you are a graduate student, when are your final projects due? When are your exams? Maybe avoid scheduling due dates around this time.

Designing a Feedback Plan

Schedule products. After you’ve listed your major and minor assignments and the amount of time they’ll take, begin placing them on a timeline.


Identify goals. Based on the overarching goals for a unit or a semester, which goals does each of these assignments support? Articulating these in advance will help guide how you design feedback prompts in the future.


Identify kinds of feedback students can receive. Knowing that there are a variety of ways to respond to student work, identify specific kinds of feedback students can receive to enhance their performance along project goals.


Distribute feedback moments across time, and distribute labor across people. This is a point we emphasized in our earlier posts — don’t plan all your feedback to come at once. If you distribute the work of feedback across time, students will receive more — and more focused — responses, and will likely absorb more of their feedback.


Distribute the labor of giving feedback across people. Students will receive more feedback (and, we believe, will learn more) if you give them the responsibility of responding to their colleagues at critical moments in a project.

 

Academic Calendar  Fall 2020 (FS20)
Classes Begin: Wednesday, 9/2/20 Middle of Semester:  10/21/2020
No Classes: Monday, 9/7/20 Holiday: Thursday, 11/26/20 - Friday, 11/27/20
In-person classes end at the Holiday break: Wednesday, 11/25/20Classes End: Friday, 12/11/20     Finals: 12/14/20 - 12/18/20 Grades Due: 12/22/2020 by 4 p.m.
Academic Calendar  Spring 2021 (SS-21) *Semester dates have changed due to COVID(See the Provost’s email in October 2020 outlining the calendar changes.)
Classes Begin: Monday, 1/11/2021 Middle of Semester:  3/3/2021
No Classes: Monday, 1/18/2021 *Break Days: Tues, 3/2 - Wed, 3/3 and Thurs, 4/22 - Fri, 4/23
*Classes End: *4/23/2021 *Finals:  4/26/2021 - 4/30/2021 Grades Due: 5/4/2021 by 4 p.m. 
*Note: the last two days of the semester, April 22&23, have no classes in preparation for finals.
 
Note: This checklist can also be found in the Instructor - D2L Self-directed Training site in D2L.To access it, go to D2L > Help > Training and scroll down to find the self-enrollment link for the Instructor D2L Training
 
This checklist assumes that you already have a course developed that you are copying to a new semester. If you are starting new, skip step one, or ask your department if there are existing courses you can copy. MSU creates a blank course shell for every course offering, with students already populated. Enrollment adds and withdrawals are automatic. Go to Communications > Classlist in your course to see enrollments.

Copy content from a development course or previous semester course to your new semester. Some courses may already have content. Check first before copying.

Start in the new blank semester course, or course you want to change.
Click Course Admin > Import/ Export/ Copy Components.
Select “Copy Components from another Org Unit” and Search for offering
Search for the course to copy “from” and click “Add Selected”
Select “Copy All Components” - Be careful to only do this once.* If there is already content in the site, items will be “added” and may result in duplication of content, activities, grade items, etc. that can be difficult to clean up.

Go to Course Admin > Course Offering Information. Make the course active as soon as possible and check the start and end dates. Students will not see a course in their My Courses list until you make it active. Even though you make it active, they will not be able to access the course until the start date. Students will see when the course is scheduled to start in their My Courses list. Also, consider making the end date past when grades are due so students can check their grade details.
Add/Edit a Welcome Announcement to provide information on how to get started.
Add/Update Syllabus and Instructor Information.

Create a module such as Getting Started to place your introductory materials.
Add documents by dragging and dropping files from your computer.
Use the pull-down menu and select Change File to update existing items.

Add other personalization items such as a welcome video and narrated lectures by using any of the following options listed under Upload/ Create, including Video, Create a link, or Create a file.  In Create a file, use Insert Stuff > My Media or Insert Stuff > Enter embed code, to insert a video from Kaltura MediaSpace (see the resources at the end of this document).
Add/edit D2L due dates on activities. They will also show up automatically in the D2L Calendar and students can subscribe to receive notifications. Enter/Check start dates, end dates, and due dates by clicking on each module in the Table of Contents. Click on dates to edit and a calendar will popup for selecting new dates and times.

Go to Course Admin > Manage Dates to check all dates on one page.
Use bulk offset dates for moving multiple dates at once from one semester to the next. 
Click on the column titles, such as Start Date, to sort and bring items with dates to the top.


Keep in mind that activities such as Discussions, Assignments, and Quizzes can be accessed from a separate navbar menu outside of Content, so you will need a start date on the activities as well as the modules if you don’t want students to access them until a specific time. See Managing D2L Start/End/Due Dates for more detail.

Check that links are working and all media have captions (look for CC or closed captions).
Check whether items are visible. Use Bulk Edit, closed eye or slash on icon is hidden.
Review Checklists, if used. It’s best to edit these from the Course Tools > Checklists page.
Check for specific dates within content, if used. To make content lessons and activities reusable without a lot of editing, use general terms, such as “your first post is due by Wednesday and replies are due by Sunday” and rely on D2L dates for specifics because they can be bulk offset. Avoid using specific dates in recordings if you plan to reuse them. List specific dates in items that are changed every semester, such as the syllabus and announcements.
Check Assignment, Discussion Topic, and Quiz settings - see Bulk Edit for some of the quiz settings, such as attempts allowed.
Check that Turnitin settings for assignments are correctly set as needed.
Check Communication > Groups, if used, and check whether you have auto enrollments or if you need to enroll users manually. For more information, see D2L FAQs on Using Groups.
Subscribe to your Course Questions Discussion topic or other discussions by going to  Communication > Discussions > (topic title) and Subscribe (from pulldown menu). Check your notification settings to get an instant notification by email (pulldown by name at the top).
Check your gradebook “settings” (see the link at the top of Manage Grades). Check the box if you would like to display points in the managing (instructor) view. Do you want the Final Calculated Grade (subtotal) visible to students? See how to setup a gradebook and how to release grades in the Gradebook tips document. Also, see the D2L Help link from any course navbar.
Impersonate the Demo student to view how a student sees the course and submits activities. The “preview as a student” option, accessed by clicking on your name at the top, is useful for quick checks of how students see content but you will need to impersonate the Demo student to practice submitting assignments and seeing feedback. Go to Communication > Classlist > “Student, Demo” and use the pull-down menu to Impersonate. Select your name at the top to stop impersonating. Two to three days into the semester, go to the Classlist and click on the “Last Accessed” column to sort. Consider sending a reminder email with tips on how to find the course to any students who have not started (check the boxes by their names and then click the email icon).

Note: Using Select Component Copy and bulk offset dates
*To bring select content in bulk from another D2L site, and to use the bulk offset dates with your course copy, use the Select Component Copy option instead of “Copy All.” If you make a mistake copying into the wrong semester course, or have duplicated items accidentally and need to empty or reset a course, see the MSU help documentation on how to Reset a course and delete everything.
More Resources: 
D2L Help (help.d2l.msu.edu)

D2L Training Opportunities
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Using Assignments with Turnitin and TURNITIN SYLLABUS STATEMENT
D2L Course Export and Backing up Select Student Data
D2L Retention Policies
Quick Discussion Grader in D2L

Technology at MSU (tech.msu.edu)

TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES FOR FACULTY & ACADEMIC STAFF


TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION

Zoom (msu.zoom.us/)

How Do I Join A Meeting? Provide this to your students
How Do I Share My Screen?
Zoom Tips: Managing Your Audio Source (video)
How to Record Using Zoom (video)
How to Upload, Create Clip and Embed in D2L (video) Embed in D2L: Upload/Create>Create a File then Insert Stuff>(My Media or Enter Embed Code)

Kaltura Mediaspace: (mediaspace.msu.edu/)

Kaltura Mediaspace & D2L Integration
How to upload media in Kaltura MediaSpace
Embed your Kaltura MediaSpace media in D2L Brightspace
A Guide for Captioning Video
Ordering Machine Captions through MediaSpace

Instructional Technology & Development (tech.msu.edu)

Getting Started
Learning Objectives & Course Components
Blended & Online Courses
Online Course Structure
Setting Expectations
Running a Course
Quality Matters at MSU

Additional Support
The Instructor - D2L Self-directed Training site is updated monthly with current D2L Brightspace tutorials and other reference materials, Instructor - D2L Self-directed Training Self-Enrollment Page.
If you cannot find your answers in the Instructor D2L site, contact the MSU IT Service Desk at (517) 432-6200, ithelp@msu.edu.

Photo by STIL on Unsplash
 
Assessing Your TeachingAt the end of a semester, we know it’s tempting to completely disconnect from all that happened in your classes as soon as you submit grades. While we certainly hope everyone has had a chance to recharge, we also hope you’ll set aside some time to assess your teaching before next semester begins.This practice is a crucial piece of your overall development as an educator and can greatly impact your work with the next group of students. Below are some suggestions for reflecting on the past semester: taking stock of where you’ve been with students this semester and using that information to guide your decisions next semester.
Learning From Your Final AssessmentWe can’t underscore enough how important assessment is in teaching and learning. It’s the means with which you gather the necessary info you need on student learning and make evidence-based decisions on where to go next. Now, in ending the semester, you have the focal point of your final assessments to provide evidence out of which to base future teaching decisions. And whether you’re teaching the same course or a completely different one, there’s still much to be gained from this kind of reflection. To help your reflection in connection to your final assessments, we offer the following questions:
Three Questions for Reflecting Forward:1) Did you meet your learning objectives? 
You hopefully set out work in your course with some specific overall learning objectives for students. Did students meet them? What evidence do you have in your final assessments? In what areas were they strongest? In what areas did they struggle? In meeting or not meeting your learning objectives, you have some clear areas of focus and further development. 
And by connecting back across your objectives and final assessments, you can take stock of what you believe worked well for teaching and learning and what did not.
 2) What instructional practices worked best?
Think back to the instructional practices and activities connected to the strongest and weakest areas of your final assessments.  Perhaps students struggled most with synthesizing certain elements of your course or analyzing a key text. Or maybe you realized students just weren’t able to adequately back up the claims they made in the final paper as you hoped. What instructional activities did you design in order to support them? By identifying these specific practices and activities, you can begin to address any common patterns or clear areas for future focus.3) Where do you need to grow next semester?
Answering this final question–in light of the previous two above–can send you into next semester with clear teaching goals and areas for your own development. If you’re teaching the same course again, then we’d suggest you start proactively identifying and adjusting areas of your course you know need to work better. If you’re teaching a completely different course, you can still make sure you’re focusing in on similar learning outcomes and/or areas of instructional practice even if the content isn’t the same. For help, in addition to seeking out the assistance of other instructors in your college, we’d encourage you to take advantage of the digital resources we offer on the #iteachmsu Commons website (iteach.msu.edu), and The Graduate School and MSU Academic Advancement Network workshops. We regularly offer resources and opportunities on our blog, as well as via social media and through in-person workshops. If you aren’t already engaged with us across those spaces, perhaps make that part of your development goals for next semester.

As the semester comes to an end, advisors and educators can experience emotional exhaustion, compassion fatigue, and times of heightened stress. In this article, explore MSU resources to support mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, which are provided to employees for free or at a reduced cost. Below are links to these opportunities, as well as guided mindfulness exercise videos.MSU Health Resources and Programs

MSU Employee Assistance Program (EAP): MSU faculty and staff who are interested in personal counseling are directed to MSU EAP, which offers free, confidential short-term counseling and referral services for MSU employees and members of their immediate family. 
Emotional Wellness: The Office of University Physician offers emotional wellness articles, coaching, courses, and additional resources. Learn techniques to successfully navigate a range of human emotions and improve personal well-being. 
MSU WorkLife Office: The WorkLife Office partners with the community to create an inclusive, responsive work environment where all faculty and staff are respected and supported toward well-being in work and personal lives. The WorkLife Office offers free events and workshops on topics ranging from recognizing burnout, grounding strategies, well-being at work, stress management, and more!
SPARTANFit Fitness Assessment:  This comprehensive fitness assessment will help to determine your current level of fitness. A series of resting and exercising assessments will help establish baseline measurements which can then be used to set goals, monitor performance, and assess progress throughout your exercise program.
Health4U Programs:  Health4U is focused on helping the MSU community explore the fundamentals of a health-promoting lifestyle by providing access to high quality, evidence informed, and culturally conscious health education and support. 
CAPS Koru Mindfulness Workshop: MSU Counseling and Psychiatric Services offers 4-week long Koru Mindfulness Meditation groups, teaching participants how to train their minds to work mindfully with thoughts and emotions.  Groups meet weekly for 75 minutes to learn life transformative skills that increase resiliency and flourishing in the face of life's stressors.
Wellbeing in the Garden: Beal Botanical Garden is a favorite place for people from campus and the community to unplug from the chaos of their everyday lives and enjoy the beauty of plants and nature. Wellbeing in the Garden also provides programming that can give you a path to improved wellbeing.

External Resource for Advisors

Compassion Fatigue and Burnout in Academic Advising: NACADA presentation focuses on academic advisor stress and burnout, including theories and models addressing compassion fatigue. Additionally, this PowerPoint provides easy-to-implement self-care interventions for advisors.

Guided Mindfulness Exercises
Regular mindfulness exercises can help you to identify and manage difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The following video and audio guides are available to assist you with developing your mindfulness practice. 
Additional videos and recordings of mindfulness exercises can be found at LivingWell.org. 
Mindfulness Meditation to Help Relieve Anxiety and Stress
Mindfulness Guided Meditation - 5 Minutes

MSU educators are invited to view a workshop about giving meaningful feedback to students. This workshop is open to any educator who is interested in learning about strategies and tools for meaningful feedback.The workshop aims to provide educators with an interdisciplinary space and community to consider ways of providing effective and meaningful feedback to students. The professional development provided will offer peer-to-peer interaction with information and discussion that considers feedback strategies and tools across disciplines. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about strategies and tools for providing feedback to students, exchange ideas about feedback, and practice and implement ideas about feedback for course design, pedagogy, and practice.
 
By participating in this workshop, participants will be able to:
 

Identify characteristics of meaningful feedback and its importance for student learning
Reflect on ways we already use feedback in our classrooms
Consider opportunities and challenges for feedback in our classrooms
Generate ideas with colleagues on how to implement feedback in the classroom (both small and large classrooms) 
Develop and revise ideas for implementing feedback in the classroom, based on workshop discussions and peer feedback
Create short- and long-term goals for implementing ideas into the classroom
Connect with educators across campus to build community and conversation

 
The Meaningful Feedback Workshop originally took place on February 26, 2021 (synchronously via zoom). 

Checking Your Course Materials & Resources
In anticipation of starting a new semester it is always a good idea to check the materials you plan on using for your course. Here are a couple of pitfalls that could happen, and how you might protect yourself. 
 
1)    Where did that go?
Sometimes we link to library resources such as journal articles, books, or media and we expect that the link will be ‘good’ in perpetuity. However, over time things shift and change. It is a good idea to use stable links to ensure that your resources will be available to students when they select the link you have provided. Here is the library resource on using stable links in your course - https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/stablelinks
 
2)    It’s not the limits we set…
Some resources have a limit to the number of individuals who can access the resource at one time. It’s kind of like the olden days when there were only a few copies of a book in the library for hundreds of students. The same occurs in some digital resources. It is a good idea to ensure that your resources don’t have any restrictions, and if they do, that you are aware of these prior to adding these to your final syllabus or course reading list. Here is a library article to help with these situations - https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=917727&p=6913084
 
3)    Deadlines and other support help
If you are experiencing an issue with access or availability to course resources from the library, you should contact them as soon as possible in the planning process. MSU librarians are very skilled and knowledgeable about the availability of resources and suggestions for alternatives when necessary. Here is a link to help with course materials - https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=917727&p=6913084
 
 The aforementioned points are related to resources and materials available through the MSU library. It is always a good idea to check your links and access to third-party resources and materials that you have ‘used in the past’. Over time open and free resources can become fee-for-access (e.g., you will receive a 401 Unauthorized error), as well as being removed from the web entirely (e.g., the dreaded 404 ‘Not Found’ error). Checking these resources early can help you avoid last minute panic and scramble to find alternatives for your course.

If you’re wondering, “do I have to wait until end of semester evaluations to see if my changes improved student’s learning experience,” the answer is no! There are simple ways that you can check in with students in your course throughout the semester. Dr. Ashley Moore is an Assistant Professor in MSU’s Department of Teacher Education. Dr. Moore shared some of her approaches for “checking in” in this current remote learning environment. 
Every two to three weeks, Ashley distributes a Google Form to her class. She discloses at the start of the semester here commitment to this practice and includes questions related to her instructional approaches, materials, and uses of technology. The survey is anonymous, so learners can share feedback without fear of retaliation (just like with the mid-semester feedback survey). As a part of this practice, Ashley compiles the results into key ideas and themes to share out with her students the next week. Her reasons for this are two fold: 1) it helps students feel heard, and 2) it reifies that students are often not alone in their feelings/feedback. Transparency in regards to decision making is key in Dr. Moore’s courses, and the data from these brief check-ins help her provide evidence for why decisions are being made and calling out changes in real time. Two samples from Dr. Moore’s TE 101 check-in surveys are included below:

In real time, Dr. Moore uses a few approaches to check in with her students. Ashley utilizes...
Zoom polling: (learn more about utilizing this Zoom feature here: Polling for meetings – Zoom Help Center)

to check in on how people are feeling after a reading or activity

Knowing where where students are emotionally influences how they engage and how as an instructor, Ashley considers structuring the remaining dialogue

Basics on course prep

Knowing whether or not students have purchased the course readings and whether or not they have arrived is good for level setting expectations. 


“Exit ticket” in Zoom chat: 

Directive: Drop one word or phrase about how you’re feelings as we wrap up class

Ashley used the chat from synchronous class to send synthesis email to students containing: overview of the meeting, highlights from the discussions, and reminders of expectations and upcoming deadlines


Class (verbal) dialogue:

Ashley uses Polleverywhere  to allow students to send in questions and comments to the call anonymously and in real time. She then uses these comments/questions to continue driving and prompting class conversation. 

If there is anything harmful, Ashley can identify it in the background and reframe before introducing to the class

Intro check in - 

Ashley logs on 15 min early to her synchronous course meetings. She plays music and usually displays a meme or prompt - asking for responses as learners log in. 

Example: What's one thing you're proud of yourself for doing in the past week?

She starts class officially with an overview of the day then addresses the comments from the intro check-ins generally.


Using tactics like these described by Dr. Moore can help you determine if the changes you’ve enacted based on mid-semester feedback are meeting the needs or if further adaptation is necessary; rather than waiting until end of year evaluations!
 
To read more about Ashley’s background and hear about her graduate experiences check out: https://grad.msu.edu/spotlights/ashley-moore 

For the last few weeks, we have been offering time-saving tips for delivering feedback to individual students and to larger groups as they work on projects for your classes. But we suspect that now, since the semester is over, you likely will not be giving your students much formative feedback.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use this time to improve the efficiency of your feedback processes. Now that the semester is over, you have a great opportunity to do some forward thinking about next semester. And, if you plan it right, we think you can actually provide your students with more feedback, while spending less time delivering that feedback.
In this post, we detail the design of a semester and feedback plan to maximize the amount of feedback students receive on their work and minimize the time we spend writing to students.
Designing Semester and Feedback Plans
Although designing a semester plan for your class seems like a daunting task, it allows you to frontload scheduling due dates, giving you more time during the actual semester to flesh out the specifics of your course (like assigned readings and class activities) as it progresses week to week, assignment to assignment. To create this kind of plan, we are providing you with starting points that focus on two essential functions of your classroom: what you ask students to produce, and what kind of feedback they will need for those products. By creating a rough timeline of assignments and feedback, you can avoid overbooking your schedule (and yourself), and respond to students more efficiently.
Designing a Semester Plan

Make a list of your major assignments. When will you introduce an assignment to your class? What are the goals of those assignments? How long will these assignments take for students to complete?
Make a list of your minor assignments. What smaller activities does the class need to complete to support that major assignment? How long will those take? Will they require feedback from you, their peers, the class as a whole (hey we have plenty of resources to help you with this btw)? Where will these varieties of feedback be most beneficial for students in your class?
Identify places where students need feedback. Do your students need your feedback on one major assignment before they can complete the next one? What goals do the minor projects support?
Consider your own schedule. Now is also a good time to remember to plan your semester timeline in accordance with your own academic life–are there weeks you will attend conferences? If you are a graduate student, when are your final projects due? When are your exams? Maybe avoid scheduling due dates around this time.

Designing a Feedback Plan

Schedule products. After you’ve listed your major and minor assignments and the amount of time they’ll take, begin placing them on a timeline.
Identify goals. Based on the overarching goals for a unit or a semester, which goals does each of these assignments support? Articulating these in advance will help guide how you design feedback prompts in the future.
Identify kinds of feedback students can receive. Knowing that there are a variety of ways to respond to student work, identify specific kinds of feedback students can receive to enhance their performance along project goals.
Distribute feedback moments across time, and distribute labor across people. This is a point we emphasized in our earlier posts — don’t plan all your feedback to come at once. If you distribute the work of feedback across time, students will receive more — and more focused — responses, and will likely absorb more of their feedback.
Distribute the labor of giving feedback across people. Students will receive more feedback (and, we believe, will learn more) if you give them the responsibility of responding to their colleagues at critical moments in a project.

Check out a model feedback plan based on a unit Matt used in his class in the Spring 2015 semester.
 
As you can see, with this feedback plan, students receive feedback throughout the whole process of producing their research papers and projects, and get feedback on every minor product that leads up to the major products. The feedback is also designed so that students receive feedback on each of the goals for the Research Unit.
 
However, this feedback plan is designed to minimize the amount of time Matt spends writing to students. During the whole unit, he will only need to write to students two times (Week 3 and Week 7), and might write a total of 3 paragraphs to each student. But, he will also offer individuals feedback through verbal feedback during scheduled class time and in individual conferences (Week 8 and Week 11), and provide verbal feedback to the whole class on several occasions (Week 2, Week 6, Week 7).
 
While not all teachers have the luxury to control all parts of their assignments or schedule, we hope and believe the strategy of developing a Feedback Plan is flexible enough to work for many teachers.
 
We’d Love to Hear from You: What methods do you use to schedule your assignments? What projects take up the most time during your semester? What do you do when the timing of a unit is too fast or slow? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gomes, M. & Noel Turner, H. Lighten Your Load: Planning for More Efficient Feedback Next Semester. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu