International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, a leading journal in its field has recently listed a featured article written by the CIT nursing fellows.

The article published in 2008, “A Rubric for Improving the Quality of Online Courses” (by Jane Blood-Siegfried, Nancy Short, Carla Gene Rapp, Elizabeth Hill, Steve Talbert, John Skinner, Amy Campbell, and Linda Goodwin) describes an evaluation rubric to measure quality in the graduate online curriculum, offering a useful tool for online course development.

Dr. Short and Dr. Blood-Siegfried are happy to know people found this rubric was useful, “Over 1000 downloads have occurred for the first release so I guess they decided to feature it again… It (the rubric) certainly is important for our own programs. I am pleased to see that it has finally been featured. We did a lot of good work that year with our CIT partners.”

The full text of the article is available for download.

About the Fellowship:

Six Nursing faculty and one graduate student participated in a CIT Fellows Program to develop methods evaluate the quality of the School’s online courses. The group created an evaluation rubric, applied it to their courses, and conducted student focus groups to provide feedback about online course quality. The group also performed a curriculum analysis to locate gaps in content coverage in their series of core courses. Visit the Fellows Program archive page to know more about the fellowship participants, activities, outcomes, and student focus group feedback, etc.

Students enrolled in Dr. Julie Reynolds’ Writing in Biology (Bio299), are writing honors theses. To graduate with distinctions in biology, they need signatures from three additional readers: their research supervisor, their faculty reader, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Therefore, the work produced is more public than most college courses. Student often get conflicting feedback and feel torn between competing authorities. One way to address this dilemma is to make the feedback that the students receive visible to all parties, and to encourage students to explain their writing choices in response to that feedback. Dr. Reynolds used Voicethread to make readers comments and students writing choices visible.

In this course, Dr. Reynolds also used Jing to see if it is an efficient and effective approach to communicating both faculty and peer feedback. Here’s an example of a student commenting on another student’s project:

The third part of this project used video to help students gain a better understanding of how scientists read scientific papers. Students interviewed their faculty and recorded these interviews using FlipVideo. The videos were shown in class so students could see the range of expectations that readers have when they read scientific papers.   Here’s an example:

In Dr. Julie Reynolds‘ Biodiversity course, students used Flip video cameras to create a video for public audiences in their community to explain the value of local biodiversity. Students were required to identify their audience, investigate the audience’s assumptions about biodiversity, and created a compelling argument for why that audience should care about local biodiversity. The videos were peer reviewed. Students were able to make more compelling arguments when their work had an authentic audience.  Here’s an example of a student produced video about Lemurs and biodiversity:

Brenda Neece
Curator, Duke University Musical Instrument Collections

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Brenda Neece, title, participated in the CIT’s Student Video Fellows program.  This Fellows track offered a group of faculty from a range of disciplines the opportunity to investigate how to effectively design student video assignments, assess video work in the courses, and technology and support options available at Duke for them and their students.  Neece developed two assignments for her course.

The first video assignment, a Video Musical Instrument Dictionary Definition, was designed to get students familiar with the process of making and video and to become more familiar with the history and function of particular instruments.  Students chose one instrument and produced a short video that defined the instrument, how the instrument is used in contemporary music, and how the instrument works – parts of the instrument, its range, and so on.  They turned in a written draft script before shooting the video and their grade was based on the quality of their definition.  The videos allowed the students to use multimedia to show how the instruments sounds and how it is played – key aspects in their understanding of the course materials.

Neece was pleased with the results.  The students were able to either demonstrate the instruments themselves or find someone in the local community to play the instrument and became familiar with using the technology to present stories and information.  In addition, the students had a session with a librarian and learned how to cite video and audio excerpts in the work they produced.  In the video clip below, Neece discusses the results of the assignment in depth.

The second assignment, a group activity, was creating a video tour of their ideal musical instrument museum.  In the past, this museum tour was done as a written piece with illustrations.  With this new approach, using video for the students’s work, they were able to bring in interviews, demonstrations, outside sources into a compelling piece that mirrors a “virtual” exhibit or informational video they might be called on to produce when working in a museum.  Students were given clear guidelines and steps for producing the video and how it would be assessed.  In this video, Neece discusses how the assignment was constructed and graded.

Neece plans to continue using video assignments in the course in the future.  The assignments did have some glitches – an online video editing service she planned on using was taken down during the course and, with consulting from the CIT, came up with alternative for the students to use to complete their work.  So, she plans on being better prepared with specific software for the students to use when she teaches the course again.

Neece believes that video and multimedia are important in the student experience – the technology is allowing scholars to communicate in new ways and students need to be prepared to use this way of presenting their work and lets faculty and students bring the work of experts into the classroom.

Amaryllis Rodriguez
Lecturing Fellow, Romance Studies

Blackboard wikis (websites which allow collaborative editing) are a convenient means for students to create websites as course projects. Amaryllis Rodriguez had students in her Italian courses create wikis in Blackboard focused on topics relevant to the course content. Students created a wiki (in Italian) advertising an Italian cruise line as well as a wiki about current environmental problems. Finally, the wiki tool was used for a group project in which students were asked to design an online newspaper modeled on existing Italian newspapers. Students were able to create these projects quickly using the easy tools built into Blackboard, and all students could see each others’ work and comment on it. The instructor also found it easy to grade and comment on the students’ work.

Robert Kilpatrick
Senior Lecturing Fellow, Romance Languages

French instructor Robert Kilpatrick uses blogs in Blackboard to provide students with opportunities to practice writing French in an unstructured manner, different from the other types of more formal writing students are asked to do in the course. The Blackboard blog was chosen over a public blog to allow the students to write in a space which was private to the course, in deference to their still-developing skills with French. The blog exercises engaged students in the course, and improved their ability to spontaneously write in French compared to previous courses Kilpatrick has taught.

Sandra Valnes Quammen
Senior Lecturing Fellow, Romance Studies

Sandra Valnes Quammen has students in her French classes watch video clips relevant to the course topic and then respond orally to question prompts to improve their French speaking skills. In the past, this course assignment was accomplished primarily using Audacity for audio recording and editing, followed by upload to Blackboard. This year, Valnes Quammen used Wimba Voice Tools (online audio recording built into Blackboard) instead, which streamlined this course assignment considerably.

Angela Porcarelli
Lecturing Fellow, Romance Studies

In language learning, opportunities to practice in the target language are of primary importance. In Angela Porcarelli’s Italian courses, Wimba Voice Tools (audio recording built into Blackboard) are used to provide extra time outside the classroom for students to practice their Italian listening and speaking skills. Wimba allows the students to easily re-record their assignments before submitting to the instructor, until the student is comfortable with their response. By practicing with Wimba throughout the semester, students were more comfortable with their end-of-semester oral presentations, and produced higher-quality final assignments.

Antonio Arce, Academic Program Coordinator, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies

Project Description:

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) offers a certificate for Duke students “interested in documenting their expertise and coursework focused on the region.” CIT is providing funding and consulting to enable CLACS to design and implement a process for evaluating their program with Chalk&Wire’s ePortfolio2 assessment software. By adding papers, videos and other ‘artifacts’ (examples of their learning) to a structured portfolio, students will benefit from receiving more feedback and guidance from faculty and program staff. Arce hopes that this evaluation process will help to “re-structure the certificate offerings, track student progress, and measure the impact of our curriculum and extra-curricular events on the learning outcomes of our students.”

Project start date: 12/15/2008
Funding awarded:  $2750

Tyler Walters, Associate Professor of the Practice, Dance
Martin Brooke, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Project Description:

Currently, archiving of dance performance for study by students is done on an ad-hoc basis with limited impact.  While video has been used to some extent, a two dimensional representation of dance has limited value when multiple performers are involved or when the views recorded do not provide essential information for students to study certain types of movement.

This project will create the initial stage of a prototype archive of basic ballet vocabulary using 3-D dance recording and archiving.  RFID tags, accelerometers, infrared emitters, and stereo video are among the technologies that will be explored for recording.  The use of virtual reality environments for archive access will be investigated, along with conversion to formal dance notation.

Tyler Walters, using advanced students in Dance at Duke, will collaborate with undergraduate students of Martin Brooke in the ECE undergraduate project class ECE 51, where the students will assemble the basic technologies for capturing and generating the dance data.  The initial prototype of the archive, first using video and later 3d representations, will be used as a teaching aid for Ballet Fundamentals, Ballet I, and Ballet II.

The Center for Instructional Technology is providing funding for the project in addition to loaning four high definition hard drive camcorders that will be used in the dance data capture process.

Project start date: 1/12/2009

Funding awarded:  $6,300