Learners grow through collaboration and feedback, and the best instructors evolve and respond to the group before them. To learn more about enabling collaboration and a culture of feedback in online classes, we caught up with Nichole LaGrow, distance learning coordinator and adjunct professor for The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, an educator who is rethinking her course design to adapt to her students’ needs. LaGrow has been teaching and working to improve distance education experiences for nearly 20 years and uses PlayPosit to create a flexible, responsive classroom environment for her online students. LaGrow started her position at UWGB in 2019, just before the pandemic. Luckily, she and many of her colleagues were able to leverage PlayPosit lessons as part of the university’s response to emergency remote instruction.
“When you’re teaching, you’re always evolving,” LaGrow shared. “There would be a problem if I was giving the same lecture I gave 20 years ago when I started teaching. Now, I am giving students more options, allowing them to pick and choose what they want to engage with and think through what is interesting to them.”
Approaching online asynchronous teaching with the same design thinking as face-to-face teaching allows LaGrow to offer a full learning experience, even if they never meet live. Using PlayPosit polling in her video lessons (PlayPosit Bulbs), LaGrow asks for and receives feedback about the content so she can adjust her teaching throughout the course term. She explained, “PlayPosit helps me shape the class as it unfolds. When I teach face to face, I don’t just have everything ready on the first day of class. I am responsive to my students. In my distance education classes, PlayPosit allows me to be responsive to my students.”
One way LaGrow has achieved this goal is by using PlayPosit’s new Peer Review application. She shared, “The new peer review tool has changed some of my purposes for using PlayPosit because it enables me to leverage PlayPosit in a much different way. Peer Review has allowed me to rethink my assignment design. Rather than just writing papers, I have my students do presentations in which they're sharing what they learned about the different authors with other students. So it’s expanding other students’ knowledge as well.”
By giving her students choice and voice, she is allowing them to take a more active role in learning American Literature. Instead of everyone writing a paper on "The Great Gatsby," students choose from a selection of books and create literary reviews using PlayPosit Peer Review to share with their peers. Classmates can then comment and ask questions within the Peer Review lesson, creating a collaborative, feedback-driven experience with the students driving rather than the more traditional “sit and get” approach to learning literature that distance education typically affords.
“As a distance education coordinator, I want us to embrace innovation and think differently about how we leverage technology to support our pedagogy,” LaGrow shared. “So for me, it’s always about pedagogy first. And, to be honest, that’s one of the reasons I really appreciate PlayPosit - I am still controlling the content I’m creating and the interactions I add like video resources or linking out to the e-text of that author so they can see that information in the same lesson.”
Prior to the pandemic, LaGrow was using PlayPosit but she’s stepping out of her boundaries now with Peer Review, creating an interactive syllabus playlist (with a completion certificate) for each class, and curating previous video lessons (Bulbs) to a playlist for review. She explained, “PlayPosit allows me to mimic the way I would teach the class in person because I am able to pull those resources in and I am able to check in to see if my students are understanding and we’re moving together. So, PlayPosit gives me that insight that I wouldn’t have had if I just posted a video by itself.”
When asked if there was more she wanted to do with PlayPosit, she laughed and asked what she hasn’t tried yet. Sharing that she wants to build more collaborative experiences, LaGrow said she hopes to continue using PlayPosit to expand the flexibility of her courses.
“A final word of advice. It can feel like, wow, there’s so much I can do. But, just start small and [PlayPosit offers] instructional design support, tailored guidance, open office hours, and partner trainings. I was one of the first advocates but I was using it in a very small and targeted way, start with where it makes the most sense for your class. I’ve always had a positive response from students time and time again.”
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