The Learning Experience: The Assignments
We interact with so much technology nowadays. We do our shopping, communication, and, most importantly, learning all through the power of technology. As a software developer instructor, I tell students that it's important to build an optimized application and application that's easy to understand and use. I assume that a lot of us have had at least one experience with an application where we went, "Did anybody test this?" Common user experience issues on websites are how colors contrast with each other, making it hard to read, too much scrolling when navigating a page's content, and needing help to navigate back to the top quickly. One I experience way more often than not is websites capitalizing your email for you which makes it so it sends messages to a capitalized version of your email, and not your actual address. As I quote James Rolfe from the Angry Video Game Nerd series, "What were they thinking?"
Who is James Rolfe?
If you don’t know the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN), some cite him as the originator of YouTube Comedy skits, dating back to 2006. James Rolfe became famous for making parodies of old video games and how “bad” they were. Whats interesting in relation to this write up, is James highlights a lot of bad user experience these games had due to their infancy in the gaming industry. While video games aren’t courses, its still important to know some of his funniest moments are actually valid critiques on how to make the gaming experiences better. Games have come a long way, so has the development of courses. Maybe games and education share more than we think?
“What were they thinking?” is something I know a student has said while going through a course assignment. In today's write-up, we'll discuss the instructional design of creating a good assignment from beginning to end, as well as a thought I encourage more instructors to try out and see how you can approach "the feel" of the assignment.
Turning It In
The first thing to think about with an assignment is the process of turning it in. Sounds simple. Actually, it can be much more complex than you may realize, especially in the days of using Canvas as a learning management system (LMS). Students will always need clarification about how to turn in an assignment, so your job is to make it extremely clear how students should turn it in. Here are some quick tips I have done to help out the process:
Make what students turn in the same style of project throughout the course.
Being a software engineering instructor, this is an easy addition. Make it so every assignment has the same type of deliverable. If it is a hosted website, have each assignment be a hosted website, including the final! If it is more challenging than one type of deliverable based on the learning goals, keep the maximum number of types of deliverables for your assignments to 3. There is a rule in board game development about the rule of 3s and 5s, which I can save for another article, but for turning in projects. A great example of this was a speech class I took in college. We had 3 types of deliverables: speeches, digital quiz assessments, and group speeches. That was perfect and not overwhelming, even with different types of assignments
Be consistent with due dates and late policies
Everyone approaches how long they allow students to work on a project in different ways. Students already have an overwhelming number of variables in their day-to-day life. Creating a consistent variable in their life actually makes coming to class and doing their assignments seem like a relaxing activity. Sure, it is no beach, but relieving the stress of students understanding when something should be completed helps relieve anxiety towards your course. This also applies to late policies. People may be harsher about these policies, but I have a tip for instructors out there to make this work better in your favor.
Require your students to turn something in of effort by the due date. The project could be half complete, showing gaps in understanding. In the next class, take questions on the homework, and then give the students the same amount of time you gave them to complete the assignment to make changes! It gives the student less stress to actually attempt to complete the assignment to 100% and gives them a chance to spark curiosity in gaps in their knowledge coming into the next class. Requiring still to attempt work of some level of quality also keeps them accountable.
Just Do It
One of the biggest points when it comes to creating assignments in your course is how a student should feel doing the work. When I work on building apps, I put myself in the mind of a consumer, understanding what I think a user would want to do on my website. Those decisions influence critical features and major points of development to get the app deployed for production. You have to think about when putting together a website. What struggles do you want the student to go through? How long do you want someone to work on the assignment? What do you expect them to get out of the assignment?
I suggest many different learning theories to apply to this topic. The reality, though, is you will only understand what a student should get out of the experience if you actually do the experience yourself. Yes, that's right. You need to do the assignment you assigned to the students. Do you want them to write a 10-page paper? Write it and see how you feel afterward.
Calculate the time
I did this with the web development classes I taught throughout my career, and this experience gave me incredible insight on how to improve assignments, as well as time gauges for a student to complete them. The assignments I created usually took me less than 30 minutes to complete, but I can't assume students will finish them in that time. I typically gauged 3-4 times as long as I would take to complete it for first-time learners of the subject matter. Doing that calculation ensured me a project should take a manageable amount of time to complete. You have to factor in the other courses a student is taking and the assignments with those, as well as a student's outside life.
One of the problems I solved while working at Fllstack Academy was the "neverending assignment" problem. When I started, assignments were scoped to take a whole day and I also expected the assignment to be incomplete due to its length as well as its difficulty. While some folks may be okay banging their head against a wall for five or more hours, that is a very draining process and also leaves a huge unsatisfying hole in the learner for not completing the assignment. Even if they were understanding concepts, the idea of accomplishing a task is key to student satisfaction as well as helping develop their confidence in the skill they are learning. We fixed the problem at Fullstack by condensing down assignments into something accomplishable within the day, and you could definitely tell the difference in enthusiasm when students were able to complete projects in a reasonable timeframe rather than feeling like they got nothing done.
What is actually an interesting problem to solve?
Not only do you figure out the time, but you also can see what you are expecting students to get out of the assignment. Feeling the emotions a student is going through helps you justify your decision to ask a student to complete the assignment.
One of my examples of this is in my 220-level web programming course I taught; I gave out this assignment that student students about the conditional rendering of content. It was based around Transformers, where students would render character cards with character names, vehicle types, and why affiliation they were with. When I was building this up, I had a ton of conditional requirements, which I have always found fun to do, especially when a lot had to do with my love for Transformers. In a homework assignment for a first-time learner, working with 25 different conditionals is a lot, and some of it becomes tedious rather than actually a meaningful learning experience. You want it to come across differently to a student, and you'll figure that out by working through the assignment. If you have to do something again for the umpteenth time, you'll want to scale back. I ended up only choosing to do 8 of these conditionals, which definitely helped scale the project back quite a bit. I could have kept all of them, but especially for students learning this for the first time, this felt like a better approach.
Does what you do matter?
I got back to the writing papers concept because during my time as a software engineer instructor, I've heard fellow computer science instructors require students to write actual papers with projects. While writing has its time in place, trust me, I'm a doctoral student. I get it; you want to justify to a student, "Hey, you're writing an 8-page paper for X reason". As someone who has been teaching at a boot camp for a while now, the assignments we created for the students represent styles of problems that students will practically solve in the workplace, so showing a student why we learned how to call a database or authenticate a password in a particular way justifies them doing it. If I asked them to write about it, they would need more to justify the importance of writing it down as a deliverable over actually solving the problem in a real-world context.
What About Me?
Some instructors may read this and go, "That takes up a lot of time I do not have. " I then ask you, "If you do not have the time, then do you think students will make the time to take what you gave them to do seriously?" If you do not value the assignment, students should not have to either. You also have to think about how long it is going to take you to grade the assignment. We live in a world where social media grants folks instant gratification when someone likes a post. We now have to give students that same satisfaction back when it comes to receiving their grades. If you do not want to grade an assignment for hours on end, dont make the assignments unbearing on you. You also want students to be hanging out for weeks once they get a grade back. If a student has to wait more than 2 weeks on an assignment because it takes so long to grade, then you should cut down the amount that needs to be graded or find a more streamlined process to grade.
At Fullstack, assignments were using canvas rubrics that had over 50 lines of criteria to be met for assignments that were not meant to be assessments. Even an assessment shouldn't be 50 pieces of criteria to grade. I cut that down to a max of 15 per assessment when I taught because it became too unwieldy and time-consuming to check every single piece of criteria.
Another story about the grading experience was when I worked at Purdue Indianapolis; we hired many adjuncts to run online courses for us, but we were all taught asynchronously. Sometimes these instructors wouldn't be up to date on the current tech trends, so asking them to grade styles of projects outside their skillsets was a tall order, even as part-time instructors. When building out the course templates, I considered this as a factor because I do not need an instructor part-time to use their allotted time to grade. It defeats the whole purpose of being a teacher. Teachers are there to help guide and mentor students in their profession, not just graders.
Conclusion
This week's topic discussed the experience of the assignment of a course and what it means for both a student and the instructor working on them throughout their time in the course. From completion time to doing the work and even grading, the experience of building an assignment goes on a journey that you, as the instructional designer, have to be a part of from both student and instructor perspectives.
The next time you hear "What were they thinking?" when it comes to an assignment in a course, there was definitely a gap in the journey that was not assessed correctly, which creates a fun problem for us instructional designers to solve very soon.
