Online resources in an inverted course

Kris Shaffer

Inverted courses tend to make significant use of digital course materials and online resource sharing. Of course, an inverted course can use a textbook and paper-based assignments just like any other, and traditional lecture and lab-based courses can incorporate substantial online materials. However, the increased possibilities afforded by digital technology support the goals of an inverted course well. In what follows, I offer some guidance for those who want to take full advantage of these technological opportunities in an inverted course, particularly for those who want to customize a solution for their specific courses.

Hacking information transfer

In an inverted class, information transfer largely takes place outside of class. This means that the means of transferring that information needs to be clear, accessible, and place as few hurdles in front of the students as possible. A so-called “Learning Management System” (LMS) can certainly deliver content, but a “hacked” solution can potentially offer greater ease of student use and increased customizability.

For giving information to my students, I have found that a blog website works very well. Websites are easy to build, can be hosted for free in many places, and are familiar territory for students. They also allow for easy incorporation of text, audio, and video in a single page. Further, web hosts that allow cloning of existing sites make it easy to build sites for multiple courses from a single template, as well as for re-using materials in future iterations of a course. Blogs add the additional benefit of combining static pages (syllabus, policies, schedule, etc.) with posts that appear in order by date (assignments and announcements), and can incorporate threaded comments for each post where students can post questions about the materials shared.

One easy to use tool for building course websites is Wordpress. Wordpress is free, open-source blogging/web design software that can be installed easily on any web host (and comes pre-installed on many), and comes with many customizable themes and plugins, as well as native support for comments. Wordpress websites can be easily archived and cloned, and posts can be made invisible—for example, assignments from previous semesters can be set to invisible until the appropriate time in the current iteration of the course. Sites and posts can also be made private and password protected, if necessary. Further, Wordpress.com offers a free hosting platform for blog-based sites. Though it is supported by ads and allows only a subset of the themes and plugins of the full software platform, it can fit the needs of many courses well. Since Wordpress is a fully featured blogging platform, and it is very easy to use (as easy as webmail), it makes an ideal solution for many course websites. I have used it for multiple courses with great success, and my students almost universally preferred it to university LMSes, like BlackBoard.

Another, more technologically advanced solution is GitHub Pages. This is my current course website solution. Though it requires crossing more of a technical threshold than WordPress, once that threshold is crossed, site management is easier and faster, especially when it comes time to clone a site. In fact, GitHub Pages makes it possible to clone other people’s websites, making content and assignment sharing between instructors smooth, even across institutional boundaries. I have written several articles and blog posts about using GitHub Pages for websites, online textbooks, and academic publishing: “Open-Source Scholarship,” “Push, Pull, Fork: GitHub for Academics,” and “Publishing with GitHub Pages”. For examples, see one of my current course websites and my online “textbook.”

Hacking distribution of private or copyrighted material

Anything protected by FERPA obviously cannot be posted on a public website. Likewise, even copyrighted material that can be distributed in class under fair use often cannot be shared on the open web legally. For sharing of private material, I have found Google Drive to be the best solution. Google Drive is officially supported by many universities, it is FERPA-compliant, and most students already have Google accounts.

For copyrighted material, I create a private folder in Google Drive for each course, share it with registered students and TAs only, and periodically add new materials. Links to these resources can be added to the course website, and only logged-in users with whom the folder has been shared can access them.

For FERPA-protected materials, such as grades, assessment reports, assignment submission, and the like, I put those private resources in Google Drive and share those specific files only with the students they concern, or I ask students to create those resources and share them with me. Again, this is a FERPA-compliant way to share that information, and it is easy to create and easy for students to access. It has the added benefit of allowing students to comment on assessment reports and reply to feedback on assignments, so all feedback and grades can be part of an instructor-student discussion. Phil Duker has even created a set of Google Drive scripts for standards-based grading that will take students’ scores from a master instructor spreadsheet and use them to populate private reports for individual students in their Google Drive account.

Information transfer, of course, is not the focus of an inverted course. Rather, the focus is on the active work that students do, particularly in collaboration with each other and/or the instructor. Thus, discussion and collaboration tools can be very helpful to support active learning in an inverted course.

Hacking student discussion

An online tool for student discussion—whether outside of class, or in-class but across work groups—is particularly helpful for the inquiry-based model of the inverted class. I have used Twitter for this purpose, with great success, as has Alex Ludwig for similar purposes. This semester, I have experimented with the online discussion platform Piazza, with mixed results. While better than many discussion forums that come natively within LMSes, and while sporting a private, FERPA-complainant, threaded forum that Twitter does not, Piazza is not ideally suited to inquiry-oriented activities. It assumes that any question asked in the forum has a single answer—provided by the instructor, or by students in collaboration. In inquiry-oriented activities, however, the messiness of Twitter is more natural. In a “basic flip” or other class environment, the single-answer approach may work. Piazza can be hacked, however, by instructing students to avoid the “students’ answer” option and instead use “followup discussion” for the entirety of the initial analysis process. Once the analysis is closing up, students can then return to the collaborative student answer to work out a more refined response together, or (my preference) use a dedicated collaborative writing tool in small groups to work out a more polished prose response to the analysis performed by the whole class.

Hacking collaborative student work

Collaborative creative work is central to the active, student-centered approach of the inverted class. In a music theory class, this could involve anything from working out contrapuntal exercises with a partner to composing a work of prose, poetry, or music in groups to taking notes collaboratively as an entire class. For some of these activities, technological aids have not yet caught up to the pedagogy. However, there are several (kinds of) helpful tools for collaborative student work, and the field of options is growing fairly quickly.

Note-taking

As I blogged last month, there is no need for each student in a class to write the same thing at the same time. Students can collaborate on taking notes during class activities, or they can take turns (within the whole class or within working groups) acting as a “scribe” for the day. Google Drive is a helpful tool for this. A single student can share their notes in Google Drive, or students can collaborate on a single document, editing simultaneously, and discussing the notes via the comments feature.

Even when the class as a whole is engaged in note-taking, there is great value in having a class backchannel—an online forum where students can post their responses to the activity publicly, and engage in dialog with each other about that activity. Twitter lends itself well to such collaboration, since individuals can be identified and engaged, posts are limited in length, and the discussion can be organized using a hashtag and archived with a tool like Storify for later review. (For more information on Twitter and “hashtags” see Ludwig’s essay.) Threaded discussion fora like Piazza can also be useful, as they can function better as a private discussion space, and once the initial discussion prompt has been created (by instructor or student), no archiving is necessary. Public fora like Twitter have the added advantage of potentially engaging individuals outside the class in an impromptu manner.

Writing

Collaborative writing can be a useful pedagogical tool in an inverted class, such as the “primer project” in which my students are currently engaged (with some different details than described in that linked blog post). The most ubiquitous tool for this is Google Drive. It includes version tracking, simultaneous editing, and discussion linked to the text. Students in a work group can create a document shared between each other and the instructor, or create a portfolio of writings in a shared folder. Those writings can then be “submitted” via Google Drive, printed from Google Drive, or downloaded in a number of standard file formats.

A number of new tools for collaborative writing have appeared in recent months, such as Authorea, Draft, and PenFlip. All three of these examples allow free sign up for their alpha or beta versions (which function rather well), though they have different plans for the future in terms of paid/free services. Since these services are built on modern version control software and are designed with Web 2.0, not Microsoft Word, as their model, they look to be potentially very valuable tools for collaborative writing going forward—both for students and for scholars.

One final option (though many other options remain unmarked in this resource) is Marca, an open-source server application for collaborative writing classes. Marca is designed to be an LMS substitute for classes that include collaborative writing, peer review, and/or portfolio-based assessment. Adventurous instructors can download, install, and maintain the free server software for their class. Others can direct students to pay $18/semester for a hosted option maintained by the software developers.

Composition

Less tools exist to facilitate collaborative (model) composition and compositional exercises than writing text. However, there are several viable options.

First, students can share music notation files with each other in a shared folder on Google Drive. Simultaneous editing and version control are not available in this configuration, but uploading and downloading files to Google Drive is an easy task for students to master. Further, all major notation applications have some level of support for MusicXML files, meaning that students can potentially collaborate on a project from different applications, albeit with limitations.

Another option is NoteFlight’s paid Crescendo service. Crescendo not only gives students access to more advanced music notation features than the free version of NoteFlight, but it allows sophisticated file sharing, including the ability for multiple people to view, comment on, and/or edit scores. NoteFlight also offers version control.

MuseScore, a free and open-source notation application that tends to be the most popular application among my students when given a choice, also allows private and public sharing of scores online, but does not allow editing of shared scores. MuseScore files can, of course, be uploaded to GoogleDrive.