Welcome to Episode 153 of the Think UDL podcast: Designing For Success in Online Learning with Nicole Messier. Nicole Messier is the Associate Director of Instructional Design @ University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where she leads the instructional design team, manages course development and instructional design projects, facilitates equity-focused workshops, consults with UIC instructors, and collaborates with UIC stakeholders on projects, initiatives, and committee work. Nicole brings her passion for curriculum development and education reform to every course, project, and training including the reason for today’s conversation, a presentation called Designing for Success: Integrating Executive Function Supports and UDL in Online Learning. In today’s episode, we will discuss how small design choices make a big impact on student success. We will explore how to support learners by tapping into the power of executive functioning skills like time management, organization, planning, and self-regulation, and apply Universal Design for Learning (UDL) strategies that foster autonomy, reflection, and engagement. We’ll discuss practical, easy-to-implement techniques that help students stay on track, feel empowered, and thrive in online learning environments. Whether you’re refreshing an existing course or building something new, you’ll leave with actionable ideas to make your design more inclusive, supportive, and success-oriented. You’ll find the resources mentioned in this conversation in the resource section just before the transcript on ThinkUDL.org.
Resources
Designing For Success: Integrating Executive Function Supports and UDL in Online Learning (PDF of Presentation Slides by Nicole Messier)
UIC The Studio’s Impact Report
Perusall for Social Annotation
Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone
Activity Time Resources
- Penn State. (2021). Hours of Instructional Activity Equivalents (HIA) for Undergraduate Courses.
- Rice University. (n.d.) Course Workload Estimator.
Transcript
59:39
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal Design for Learning, executive functions, online learning, time management, cognitive flexibility, working memory, instructional design, student engagement, UIC, online courses, learning strategies, student success, course design, student retention, faculty training.
SPEAKERS
Nicole Messier, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:02
Lillian, welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 153 of the think UDL podcast, designing for success in online learning with Nicole Messier. Nicole Messier is the Associate Director of Instructional Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago, UIC, where she leads the instructional design team manages course development and instructional design projects, facilitates equity focused workshops and consults with UIC instructors and collaborates with UIC stakeholders on projects and initiatives and committee work. Nicole brings her passion for curriculum development and education reform to every course, every project and training, including the reason for today’s conversation, a presentation called Designing for success, integrating executive function supports and UDL in online learning. I thank my good friend and former boss, Martha McCaughey, who saw this presentation and sent it my way, and Nicole was so gracious to talk to me about it. In today’s episode, we will discuss how small design choices make a big impact on student success. We will explore how to support learners by tapping into the power of executive functioning skills like time management, organization, planning and self regulation, and apply universal design for learning strategies that foster autonomy, reflection and engagement. We’ll discuss practical, easy to implement techniques that help students stay on track, feel empowered and thrive in online learning environments, whether you’re refreshing an existing course or building something new, you’ll leave with some actionable ideas to make your design more inclusive, more supportive and success oriented. You’ll find the resources mentioned in this conversation in the resource section just above the transcript on think udl.org, our podcast website, as always, thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. Well, I’d like to welcome to the podcast Nicole Messier, and I want to thank you so much for being here. Thanks. I’m excited to be here as well. I was really glad to hear about what you’re doing from a colleague of mine who saw your work very much interested in executive functions, because I really think UDL is a big proponent of designing for these issues for our students, and you had some really good ideas about how to do this in online courses. So let me start with my first question, which is, what makes you a different kind of learner.
Nicole Messier 03:24
So this was, this is kind of a challenging question, I think, in some ways, because I think we’re all, we all learn the same way, right by, you know, practice and repetition. But I think for me, and it’s taken me a lot of years to identify my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning, and for me, ironically, audio processing is a challenge. I lose focus when listening, and that is the only vehicle to get that information. So if it is an audio book, I lose it after a few pages, and then I have to rewind. And I try every year, but I’m not very successful. I do enjoy podcasts, because you can read the transcript and listen, and I like the dual there, but that has always been a challenge of mine. I’m definitely enjoy reading material. And then I’m very bodily, kinesthetic. I like doing things, so if you want to teach me how to do something, I want to practice as I’m learning, and that’s really, I think, what makes me a different type of type of learner, and maybe a slow learner, because it’s taken me a lot of years to figure out really where my strengths and weaknesses are and how to challenge myself to Be able to focus more on that audio part.
Lillian Nave 04:43
You know, every single think UDL podcast has a transcript, so we want to make sure everybody knows that. And you bring up an interesting point to me, which is that if we think about how college has been for decades, so. So much of it has been just listening to a lecture. You know, if we think back 30 years ago, there were no slides except for an art history right? I That was the one place where I had some video visuals next to listening to a lecture. But so much of my college was just audio processing. There were not slides in my, you know, college experience to like, double layer that.
Nicole Messier 05:28
Yeah, and I think that’s where online learning meets the needs of so many diverse learners, because it isn’t just audio processing. There’s so much more that can be done in an online learning environment.
Lillian Nave 05:39
Yes, there are so many positives, and so I’m really glad to get into this, especially because I am now teaching again, a fully online class after being in person for about two semesters. So I’m excited to learn too. So I saw your presentation on how to help executive functions using UDL design. And I wanted to ask, what made you put together this presentation? Was it an online class in particular or some sort of personal experience, or did you see this need through working with faculty teaching online courses or some combination of those?
Nicole Messier 06:18
It was definitely a combination. And I would say it’s it’s personal. My youngest has ADHD in a ton of ADHD, as well as an audio processing disorder wasn’t diagnosed until in high school, unfortunately and so. And that’s how I actually identified my
Lillian Nave 06:42
own that is a similar story I hear.
Nicole Messier 06:45
And so that is part of it, and advocating for my child, who I wasn’t asking for huge demands, but at the same time, it seemed unrealistic to the public school system to accommodate simple requests, yeah, and so that was a struggle as a parent, but then when I moved into higher ed, there was just this wall that came up when I would talk to faculty about Universal Design for Learning, and there was this assumption that that we were watering down the curriculum, that we were weakening the learners. And so my previous university, we read the book. We had a book club, and we read, reach everyone, teach everyone by Tobin and bailing, fantastic book. It is a fantastic book, and it really it made me realize how much we all have to be part of that cultural change to go from compliance to culture. And I really wanted to strengthen that within my own university, but I also think it’s important for my own team and then other new instructional designers to have that voice and to be able to advocate and to be able to explain why we’re asking faculty to do these things that they don’t have the foundational knowledge for, right? They are subject matter experts in their field, but not necessarily in the field of learning. And so I think it’s our role as instructional designers to help support that and to encourage UDL design, because what we find is that everyone succeeds. And so this was kind of a culmination of a few different things, and so I ended up doing a little workshop for at UIC at my own university as well this past fall. And yeah, I think giving both faculty and instructional designers, you know, those outlets and the verbiage to empower them to be advocates as well, is really important. So all of the above. But as a mom, I think I always think about my son when I’m designing a course, and I think about if we could change one little thing and it would make a difference in a student’s success, then let’s do it.
Lillian Nave 08:54
Yeah, that’s great. I like that you started it. It’s kind of like the movie line this time. It’s personal, right? And that’s when it’s really meaningful, yeah?
Nicole Messier 09:06
And I think when you when you recognize that, and you can recognize it in yourself as well, I think it makes sense to others. We can create more buy in and reduce those barriers. So let’s
Lillian Nave 09:20
start out with what is executive function and what are executive function skills?
Nicole Messier 09:26
Sure, my team and I actually, were actually talking about this, and we were coming up with different analogies on how to explain, like, the mental skills. This is basically what executive functioning is. And so we were talking about, like, air traffic controllers and how, you know you have to land all these planes and do all these things, and if, if everything’s not going according to plan, then you’ve got, you know, airplane crashes and you know, things that we don’t want to have. We have delays. We have all this things happening. And then in the presentation I just did, you know, I use the, I use the analogy of like an. Orchestra and the conductor. And so you’ve got this conductor that’s kind of the foundation most skill, that’s directing everything, but everyone has to do their part to make that Symphony come together. And if, if we haven’t developed that executive functioning skill yet, then the harmony isn’t there, right? There’s something. There’s note off. And so really thinking about all the different skills that make up our mental capacity to learn and to function, both in work and school and just in life in general, you know, today, we’re inundated with so much more information than we ever were. And so to process all that information, you know, it helps everybody by supporting new skills.
Lillian Nave 10:42
Yeah, and we don’t realize, as you said, faculty are subject matter experts, and they haven’t really been trained in the science of learning. Some have, but not very much, right? And so we don’t know about those things like a working memory or task initiation, like, when do you stop one thing to start something else, like
Nicole Messier 11:02
the planning and organizing of information, you know, thinking about ways to, you know, we want students to be able to problem solve, but we’re not really fostering cognitive flexibility. And so if we’re only teaching with one example that limits that. And so, yeah, there’s so many different ways that we can help foster those executive functioning skills.
Lillian Nave 11:22
Yeah, and I’ve noticed too that there’s such a big change between high school learning and college learning that the college faculty member is the one that needs to be providing all these multiple different ways to understand that learning, and it’s just not the case that they come in with
Nicole Messier 11:44
that well. And there’s an assumption made that students, at some point, know how to learn. And the reality is, no one ever taught. Most students are not taught how to learn properly or how to study properly. And so that’s also part of, you know, setting students up for success and building in these UDL strategies is really teaching them how to be better learners.
Lillian Nave 12:07
Yes, and because we want them to be expert learners or have learner agency, which is the new nomenclature from the most recent guidelines. And these are fantastic ways that you are thinking about using UDL to design for these executive functions. So let me go right into one question. What are some of the UDL strategies to support working memory? And can you give some examples? Yeah, so
Nicole Messier 12:37
I mean, when we think about working memory, this is like holding that information and being able to manipulate it and use it. And so when we think about designing online courses, or courses in general, you know, we have a course, and we have these prerequisites, right? We have this prerequisite that’s required before you take this course. So there’s an assumption made that there’s they’ve learned that material and that prerequisite. And so thinking about designing in an online course a pre assessment before students start the course. This will help trigger, hopefully, that that learning, that they have learned, that information they have gained from long term memory and bringing it back into working memory. If they haven’t learned it, then this is a signaling point where we can add in additional resources to ensure that they have that foundational knowledge. So thinking like, you know, a college algebra course, where do they know what a variable and a constant is? And so if they don’t have that foundational knowledge in some of that terminology, are they going to be successful that first few weeks of course? Are they going to be struggling as they move through that course, and so really thinking about ways to trigger that working memory right from the very beginning, even asking students to do an online discussion where they’re sharing what they already know about the subject that you’re going to be teaching, just kind of triggering that memory and working memory, but then also adding in formative practice. Again, we learn through practice and repetition. So asking students to recall information, this is retrieval practice. So this could be as simple as, hey, we’re reading this, this information, and now I’m going to ask you to retrieve this into a one minute reflection on that and write down as much as you can, you know, one minute paper, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And this can be done online, asynchronously, you know, in a text box where students are just typing and retrieving everything that they’ve learned. It can also be a video where they watch a three minute video and then they answer a series of questions about that, that story, that case study, whatever was in the video and process. And then really thinking about other learning strategies when it comes to space practice and interleaving. And so instead of having like unit one, we do the whole unit. And. And then we move on having that interspersed, so that we are constantly practicing and interleaving those skills, so that students are retaining that information and eventually get stored in long term memory as we move forward. I think those are all really important when it comes to working memory,
Lillian Nave 15:19
and when you were talking about activating that, like previous knowledge, and you know, kind of having a baseline, you have to have a baseline about those constants and variables. Like having a glossary available is so great for an online course. So I just love that there’s so many ways we could fortify a course, especially a fully online course that you might not have in a like in person lecture that you can’t necessarily toggle over at the same time. Yeah, so Okay, what about cognitive flexibility? What are some UDL strategies to support that. And if you can give us a quick definition, that would be helpful.
Nicole Messier 16:05
Yeah. So this is the the idea of being able to, you know, manipulate information in order to problem solve and, you know, and process that information in different ways. And so a lot of times, I feel like this gets done really well by faculty in person courses, you know, when they’re sharing a story or sharing an example or an analogy in an online course, this could be in a video or in written text as well. So thinking about, you know, we designed some graduate courses in finance and also in like public health financing. So thinking about telling the story of like you’re driving, and how you drive depends on how much insurance you have, is that principle of moral hazard, right? So the more insured people tend to drive a little bit more erratic. And so that resonates with students, right? Connecting those stories. And so that principle becomes something that is is livable and applicable to students experience their lived experiences. So, you know, then they’re out in the world and they’re driving around and they’re like, oh, I can see that they have better insurance because they’re driving crazy, you know, moral hazard. Okay, I get it. It sinks. You know, the idea of compound principles. We did an animation where we had compounding interest, where you’ve got, like, the snowball rolling down the hill, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so you’re creating this story that really resonates with students. And so they can see it, they can apply it, and I feel like that really helps when it comes to that cognitive flexibility, but also the idea of examples in multiple examples to illustrate. And so when we think about whether it’s a math course or if it is a case study for a theory, we want to give lots of examples, and then we also want to give non examples. So we just designed some nursing courses. And so when you think about like this, there’s these theories of caring, right? We want to give examples of what that looks like. And here’s a scenario and a situation, but then here is some non examples of that, yeah, and they can be subtle, and they don’t have to be in your face. So we want to give lots of examples so that students understand the parameters of that theory and they can apply it, and they can see it. And then also having students engage in cognitive flexibility in an online, asynchronous course. This can be done in a lot of brainstorming ways. There’s lots of tools out there that faculty use and engage students with. So in Canvas, we use lucid but there’s Padlet, there’s other types of spider mapping, kind of activities that can be done where students become part of the learning community and they have their own experiences that they can share about that theory. And so we’re not just giving students that information, but we’re having them generate, you know, that information and those examples, other examples, you know, when you think about teaching students a process, or having students develop their own process, you know, creating examples with flow charts or hierarchy maps or system maps, depending on your subject matter, but then also asking students to create those or In an activity, creating some errors in those and having students identify the errors in that system map or the flow flow chart, or having them identify the gaps of information. So again, thinking about ways to support students in that problem solving. Because what we find is students are always anxious and they. Want to know what the answer is. But sometimes there isn’t an answer. Sometimes it’s giving them that ambiguity to kind of work through it and identify, you know, where are there gaps in information here? What can we do to improve this system map? Or, if we’re talking about urban planning, and we’re giving them the city map, you know, what are some things that could be improved instead of there’s just one right answer, yeah.
Lillian Nave 20:25
I love that part about some of the online courses I’ve been in and taught before is there are great mechanisms that you can use online, like a Q and A forum, so if somebody’s giving their own example, they don’t see the other examples right before they’ve already written theirs, and then they can see everyone else’s, so they’re not biased by somebody else. Yeah, and I find that’s also where I get a lot of cultural diversity. So somebody’s own way of seeing that situation. I’m thinking like a nursing situation and different family dynamics or ideas about who makes decisions. Is it a we decision or an i decision, depending on how close the bonds are for a culture, and if you come from an individualistic family or culture, then seeing the way a collectivist or a much more closely bonded kind of tribe idea is, and think I would never make a decision that way. But then you realize there are lots of different ways to make a decision well,
Nicole Messier 21:37
and I think that’s where online learning can also really help students see the diversity of thought, not just the faculty’s perspective, but their peers perspectives as well. And I think that also helps with cognitive flexibility and understanding others perspectives. I think we live in a world where people don’t know how to disagree and engage. And I think having that cognitive flexibility in a course, and allowing for safe spaces for students to share is really important today, now more than ever, probably,
Lillian Nave 22:09
yeah, and there is a different power dynamic. I mean, you can really shape up higher power dynamic in an online course or an in person course, but there’s so much of a chance for more voices and more perspectives in how you set up an online class, because if it’s synchronous and in person, only one person can really talk at a time for everyone to hear. And I think we’ve got so many options in that online space.
Nicole Messier 22:39
Yeah, I agree, I agree. And I also think that it, it gives the flexibility for students to have that voice. There are students that would never engage in an in person course that will, you know, keep their eyes down. I was one of those students, and then I moved to online learning, and I loved the chat. I loved having those asynchronous conversations, because I could process the information at my own speed. And a lot of times in an on person, in person class, or online async or online synchronous class, where you have a synchronous session, yeah, it’s usually the person that can process the fastest that is ends up answering the question and not necessarily the students. You know, not every student’s voice is heard in those situations.
Lillian Nave 23:29
Oh, this is great. So it just makes me think of all the different ways we can plan and design for our different students and how every person learns differently, focus and attention strategies are another part of this executive function skills. So how can we help our students in online classes with focus and attention strategies?
Nicole Messier 23:56
I think this is probably one of my favorite only because I know this is a personal This is personal for me as well. But I think, you know, when you think about, you know, helping students focus, which is really attending to a specific task for an extended period of time, right? So thinking about that, you know, and we have, you know, what is traditional learning is somewhere, you know, between a 30 minute to a 45 minute lecture. And so for translating that into an online learning environment, we have so many more options to design learning and to design instructional materials. And so thinking about ways to create learning paths for reading, for listening, for watching, and so having multimodal learning available and so things like having a reading but having social annotation tool like perusal, so that students can read, they can annotate and they can. Engage with other learners, if they’re more of a social learner, and so that really helps with the focus and attention. Here at the studio at UIC, we develop what’s considered micro learning lessons, and so three to eight minute videos and courses, typically, we try to strive for that kind of zone so that students can attend to the video for a short amount of time, and then having those kind of retrieval practice activities after video or after reading, if there’s no social annotation, and then also thinking about the designing your LMS as well, so thinking about removing that extraneous load and having clean pages of information and materials. We use a lot of headings and subheadings to break up content. We use imagery purposely so we only want to have images in the course that really support what is the content that is there and not something that is just extra. And then one thing that I talk to faculty a lot about is, you know, we want to draw attention to certain things and to key details and so forth, but we also don’t want to over bold or over highlight things, because that can cause confusion and disorientation as well. So really thinking about those, those headings and subheadings, making sure they’re short so two to three words, we don’t want to lose students in a sentence. If we want to ask them a question, put it in the content. And so really thinking about the design of the course itself to really help students focus on what they need to do at that moment, I think is really important.
Lillian Nave 26:45
Yeah, Organization is key. If our students are confused when they open up that LMS or learning management system, whether it’s Moodle canvas, D to L whatever, and they see, well, first of all, they’ve got probably four or five courses, maybe six. And if every different professor has, all right, well, assignments you’ll find over here. And then if you want to check out the week to week, it’s on this part and that there’s a lot of cognitive load there, so it’s really hard to focus on what they have to do. So I appreciate those really simple suggestions about how to make it readable. Yeah, I
Nicole Messier 27:25
mean, I think it’s, I think it’s really important for consistency. So when we design a program, we have certain design elements that are consistent for the entire program that we’re working with the faculty. And then obviously, faculty can adjust, you know, all of the pages based upon, you know, their preferences and so forth. So there’s still that that nuance and their expertise and their personality comes through in their course as well. But there are just certain design elements that we like to keep and maintain so that students know this is where I’m going to find the syllabus. This this is where my assessments are. We do a weekly structure, so every week, everything is organized together in that week, and so students know exactly what they have to accomplish and focus on for that week without having to jump to multiple sections in a course to find the quiz or to find the formative practice or to find the main summative assessment.
Lillian Nave 28:22
Yeah, that’s huge, and that is not something that faculty are trained on. So we need instructional designers and some practice ourselves and how to make our course readable, because we have it. It’s all up in our minds, right? And we know exactly where this is going. We know exactly what the order is, but the students have no clue, and we need to help them understand. Help them focus. Know where to pay attention at certain points, and there are some easy design things for us to do. Okay? Another big thing is planning, organization and processing, those are big executive function skills. So can you give some examples of how to support students in planning organization and processing?
Nicole Messier 29:12
Sure, and some of those are we just talked about is, yeah, so, but you know, some key ones is, you know, in every weekly module, we put an overview page, and so we, you know, faculty will typically either do a video or they’ll do a little writing, you know, like, Hey, this is what’s going to happen this week, kind of, you know, prompting them, you know, for that experience. But then we also have, like, an organized list of everything, so we chunk it and organize it. So here’s your instructional materials. These are all the things that we’re asking you to engage with to help support you in these assessments, you know, in the course. And then we also do, you know, have kind of tie ins on each page, as far as prompts like. Please engage with these materials before you start this assessment. So there’s kind of those transition sentences in the course to prompt students as well to plan and organize. And then as far as processing speed, you know, this is really an important skill for students to be able to process the information. And this goes back to removing that extraneous load and being able to process the information that is there. And so thinking about things like, if we’re creating a video, we want to have, you know, at the studio, we want to have the faculty be the star of the show. You know, the students want to learn from that faculty member, and so we want them on camera, but we also recognize that we don’t want to have too many competing things for the students to process. And so if we have a visual or in an animation that needs to come in to complement what is happening in the in the story that the faculty is telling, then we’ll remove that faculty member so they can process that information, so that they’re only using tool two channels for processing, so they’re not reading information, listening to information, and also looking at the video at the same time. And so we think about dual coding. We either want written or spoken and a visual. We don’t want written spoken and a visual in a video. And this can really help with processing speed, also ensuring I’m a fast talker. So if I create a video, I need to make sure I’ve drank a lot of water, I haven’t had too much coffee, and then I’m breathing in between. And so thinking about our speed, you know, our pronunciation, also thinking about just really simple things, if we’re using abbreviations, that we’re making sure that we use the expanded form of the abbreviation. I always tell the story to faculty members where I was in a psych course my freshman year. It was one of those, like, huge lecture courses, and the faculty member used a lot of abbreviations, and I remember panicking because I didn’t know what they were talking about. And I’m going through my notes, and now I’ve missed 15 minutes of notes, and so just giving that expanded form of abbreviation at least once, every time you’re either writing something to students or in a video or in a lecture video, they can process that information. They know what that abbreviation is, and they can keep up with that information. So those are just small little things that can really help larger things to think about when it comes to planning and organizing, giving students some support. So this could be a checklist that is designed. This can be a rubric that is a checklist. Hey, for example, in Canvas LMS, you can do self evaluations, so students can actually go in use that same checklist to review their assignment before they submit it, and make sure that they’ve got all the pieces that they’re supposed to have, or providing graphic organizers. So if there’s some learning material, you know, students can take those notes as they’re engaging with an article or a case study or so forth. So really prompting them to get the key pieces out of that material,
Lillian Nave 33:22
I love all these suggestions. I especially love that you talked about abbreviations, too, and I think it’s so useful to whenever you’re talking to anybody, even not just students, but like when we have new faculty, or somebody’s new to your university, the acronyms, so many acronyms and then have no idea. Okay, what is this? What’s C, O, B, what is this? I don’t know what POS means. I thought I knew what POS, but I don’t think I know that what it means in this context, right?
Nicole Messier 33:52
Yeah, it happens all the time. UIC has a ton of abbreviations. I’m going on year four, and sometimes I’m in conversations and I’m like, I think I know what we’re talking about, but I’m not sure we have no idea, right, but, and so as a student, how that could feel, yes, and then also being consistent with terminology as well. So if we call it a framework, we want to call it a framework every time, if we change it and say it’s a theory. Now you know, just that little change can make a huge difference in students being able to process that information and make those connections to what what is happening.
Lillian Nave 34:28
Yeah, very true. So we have to think about how consistent we are in throughout the course so students aren’t getting lost too I think the biggest problem I’ve had in teaching online courses for my students has been time management, and that is a huge executive function skill and something that I also have a problem with. And so what are some ways that I can help my students with their. Or time management in an online course, sure.
Nicole Messier 35:03
I mean one of them We already touched on, which is that overview, you know, kind of saying, hey, here are all the things that have to get done this week. But then also thinking about adding an activity time. This is something we do at the studio at UIC with faculty, and it’s a huge lift for faculty. And I recognize that there are some great resources out there. I wish we had one at UIC maybe sometime soon, but Penn State has a great activity time calculator, as well as Rice University. And so there’s is pretty interactive, but the idea behind it is to give students an estimation of how long everything is going to take during that week. When we think about online learners, they want the flexibility of learning. They might have competing priorities, and so providing them with kind of an estimation, and we need to find that in our courses. So we have a Getting Started section that has kind of the all about the course information. This is where the course welcome is. This is where all that information is, and we let students know. Hey, this estimated activity time is just an estimate. You might be a fast reader, so it may not take you five minutes per page to read, but this is an average. Or you might take more time because you’re taking more notes, but this really helps to support student success. So we do this and the overview pages, and then, depending on the program and the programs, you know, preferences, we will do it on every single page. So we’ll give them reading times for the assignments. We’ll let them know an estimation of how long we think this assignment will take them so that they can plan accordingly. And then for projects, for any kind of large summative project, we make an overview page. We also try to encourage the breaking down of large projects into smaller deliverables. This really helps with time management as well, so that we’re not waiting until the very end of the course to submit it, and we’re also building in more practice and hopefully more feedback, so to support student
Lillian Nave 37:10
success, yeah, anytime we can chunk some things I think is really helpful for our students, right? Yes, and I will make sure we I put that Penn State and Rice University activity time calculator on the resources for the podcast, along with you mentioned perusall as a social annotation tool. Some people might not have heard of that, so I’ll put a link to that as well, as well as the reach everyone teach everyone book,
Nicole Messier 37:36
yeah, and, I mean, I would say every course that we design that has a project in it, we always provide an overview so you know what is due each week. When there’s weeks when there’s those projects are not due, and that overview page really helps students. And then if you know if we’re adding in that large project, but then we’re adding in that other dynamic, which I know everyone groans about, but group work, right? Yes, you know, no one likes it. But the reality is, students need it. We all work together. No one works in a silo for the most part. And so those sorts of activities can be even more challenging. So providing those scaffolding for that time management and those prompts along the way is really important. Like, hey, at this point your group should be doing this, you know? Or, hey, here’s a group check in. How are things going? And that can be either done like a non graded activity, or it can be actual graded activity where we have check ins privately with a journal tool or an adapted journal tool, if you’re if your LMS doesn’t have a journal tool, there’s lots of workarounds there, and that can really help the faculty member kind of gage where that project is going, where the group project is going as well, so that it doesn’t just implode the last two weeks of the course. And we find out no one’s been working together.
Lillian Nave 38:54
Oh yeah, they never answered my emails, and yeah, they never showed up all that. Okay, that is huge, organization and time management have consistently been the top two things that my students have told me about how they struggle in an online course. But another thing I think that goes along with that time management is when to start or stop and move to something else, because we really give the students a lot of flexibility, but then also a lot of pressure, or, you know, autonomy in figuring when are they going to start something in that whole week that they have to do it, you know, that task initiation, which is another executive function skill. How do we support students who struggle with that task initiation, and I know many of the things you just mentioned are really helpful about so they know how long it takes because all of these overlap.
Nicole Messier 39:51
But I think there’s, there’s even more things that you can do. And I know this sounds like a lot, but they’re really just small changes. Okay, so thinking about that’s. Student who doesn’t understand who that doesn’t know what what you want, is a faculty member, right? There’s a lot of students that want to give faculty exactly what they want. They want that a they want to do the right thing. They want to be high performers, but they don’t know how to start. Maybe they’ve never written a paper before. There’s a lot of assumptions that are made that whatever you’re asking students to perform or to do in this assessment that they have done before, that they have that experience. And so one thing you can think about is adding an exemplar. This can be something that a faculty member creates, or you can ask a former student, if this is a course you’ve taught before, ask this student to you know if you can share their paper or their project as an exemplar. I did this years ago. We did a it was a public health paper, and we took an exemplar, we took it apart, and I worked with a faculty member, and we labeled each of the sections of this public health paper and we mapped it to the grading criteria in the rubric. And so students could see, hey, this is an example of this grading criteria here. And so it was very clear to students. And so at first the faculty were like, I don’t know if, if I want to do this in my course. Am I giving away the answers? Am I going to get? Is it going to be boring to grade all of these. Are they all going to look the same? And so what I said, you know, my response to that was, you know, does it really matter if they all look the same? If a student has anxiety about giving you what you want to get the grade that they want, and they they use the same format as the exemplar? Is that so bad? Is it really, you know, important that they use a different style or a different flare. You know, if you’re not looking for creativity, and you didn’t teach them to be creative in this process, what is your goal? What is your goal here? Is it really about them demonstrating their knowledge of this public health issue and the research that they’ve done? And so what ended up happening was, after this course ran, the faculty were like, wow. Students really knew what to do. They knew what was expected. There was less questions. Imagine that I got less emails. In fact, students were really happy because they didn’t go in worrying that they were going to do it wrong. And so providing that exemplar and connecting it with your grading criteria. We use rubrics a lot, and I know there’s lots of controversy about rubrics and grading, and I still think that grading, it grading and providing feedback. And this is not a you this is not a podcast on, you know, ungrading and then, but I, but I would love to talk about that.
Lillian Nave 42:43
We do have some ungrading podcasts on, think UDL, so I’m a big happy to talk about it.
Nicole Messier 42:49
Yes, I don’t want to go off, go off topic here, but I think when we think about learning and we think about providing feedback and so forth, there are ways to build in that communication of expectations to students, and still use rubrics to help support student success, and so providing that clear evaluation of what you’re going to give feedback on if you’re going to score. And so I think of grading as two parts, right. There’s the feedback, and then there’s the scoring. So if you’re going to score you should tell students what you’re going to score their work on. Yeah, but rubrics could be used for just feedback. You don’t actually have to assign points. You could use complete ungrading and still use a rubric to provide feedback for students whether they met that criterion or not. And I feel like for students with anxiety, which we are, have so much more now today than ever before, providing students with a way to get started and to understand what those expectations are is just so important in assignments. You know, having the the five paragraphs of information that is the assignment, or when you have to scroll through an assignment, and you keep scrolling, and you keep scrolling, and you keep scrolling, students get lost. And so how do I start this task when it already feels so overwhelming, and so thinking about chunking those instructions? So maybe you want to provide a lot of resources to your students, maybe have a resource separate page, and so you guide students to those resources so that it’s not all in this assignment. And assignment keeps getting bigger and bigger and more overwhelming, right? Having those clear headings in the assignments, this can help with planning as well as task initiation. So like, I want to tell the students some background information, great. Put it in an overview section, but then the specific elements of the assignment have that in the instructions and have it very concise. You know, my team works a lot with faculty and making those instructions really clear. Like, what do you really want from the students as a subject matter expert? You know what you mean by your words, but students don’t always, and that’s the great part of working with instructional designers, is because we’re not subject matter experts, so we view those instructions like a student would, because we don’t know the hidden meaning behind those instructions, right?
Lillian Nave 45:17
And you can say, What do you mean by this? I don’t understand this, and then you’re helping the faculty member know that your students aren’t going to understand it either.
Nicole Messier 45:26
And then having, you know, other clear subheadings, you know, submission requirements, what are they actually submitting? Is it a two page paper, a three page paper? What format Do you want it in? All of those sorts of things grouped together, so it’s very clear to students, the due date, the grading criteria, you know, or if you’re not using a rubric like these are the things that I’m looking for in this piece of work. Can all make a difference to help students say, Oh, this is not so scary. I can do this, right?
Lillian Nave 45:55
That is a huge thing for our students today, because they procrastinate. I procrastinate. We all procrastinate for good reason, and so if we can design it better, then we can really help with that specific executive function issue. The last thing is a huge thing in UDL, which is the engagement column. The big green column on the left side of the UDL guidelines is all about engagement. So how do we recruit interest in an online course and sustain effort and persistence throughout maybe 15 weeks of online learning? That’s sometimes a really big problem.
Nicole Messier 46:38
Yeah, yes, yes. I mean, there is that exhaustion. You know, we design online, asynchronous, eight week courses, and so we have that like week four, week six. Everyone’s tired, right? Yeah. And so there’s lots of different things that we can do. I think one that’s really important and maybe overlooked sometimes, is, why are we asking students to do this thing that they don’t necessarily know the importance of? And this can be as simple as explaining the the objectives. Like, you know, what are the real rule skills like, why do I need to do this activity? What am I going to get out of this? How is this going to help me in my career? And so really explaining that why upfront, we do this in overviews and assessments and letting them know, like, hey, here are some transferable skills thinking about workforce readiness skills. Yes, you may not like group work, but here are some things that you can do you know, to really help you in your future career as a nursing leader or, as you know, an urban planning if I’m going to talk to stakeholders, why am I doing this presentation and you’re asking me to do this audio recording or video recording? Well, you’re going to eventually have to present. And so having these skills in getting this feedback, I’m a huge proponent of authentic assessments. So really making those connections to real world. And so if this is a course that is outside of the program, thinking about ways to allow students to make those connections and have choice, and picking topics to picking an issue to research, student choice can make a huge difference in getting students to engage and sustain. If it’s something that I’m passionate about, not something that was assigned to me, there’s more chance that I’m going to want to engage with this material, and then also allowing students to share that passion with each other. I think that builds that community as well. So thinking about ways to, not only, and again, this goes back to the idea of learning as a process, right? And we want to give as much feedback as we can, but we all struggle with time management because there’s only so much time in the day, yeah. And so as faculty, there’s this, you know, there’s this push and pull of I want to give more feedback, but there’s only I’m only one person. I can only do so much. And so when we think about removing some of that responsibility and putting that back on our students and letting them own their learning and also be responsible for their peers learning, we’re all in this together. And so if we frame our online courses as more of a community, then it’s not just what you’re going to teach me as the faculty member, but it’s what I’m going to bring to this this course. And so if we have a project where I get to select what I’m interested in and do this project and at their certain times in the course, where we can have an online discussion where students share where they’re at in their project and what they’ve learned so far, then we’re part of a community, and we bring value to learning as well. I think that also helps to sustain interest and persistence. This one is a little bit of a hot topic. Sometimes, but the idea of flexibility in higher ed a lot of times, we want students to learn at our pace, and so we set up our course, and we want them to do this assignment during this week, week one or week four. But the reality is, when students come to online learning, they’re really looking for that flexibility. And so thinking about having all the course materials open and having all the assessments open so that students maybe they have, and I see this quite often, you know, week four, week six, there’s some huge projects that are all due, so all the courses have the same, you know, big projects, midterm exams, final exams, whatever the case might be. And so when we allow that flexibility of choice, then students can work ahead on, you know, in one course, and that can really help sustain their efforts and keep them engaged, because they know I can this course has more flexibility in it, so I can move ahead, or I can, I can turn it a little bit later because there isn’t that penalty. And I’ve seen this done in large enrollment courses, not, not, I haven’t done it at my university, but I’ve looked at other research studies where they’ve had like, you know, 250 300 students in a course, and they kind of have like the preferred student due date, yeah, and then they have like a staggered due date, like the first half of the course. You have to turn in all those materials by midterm or so forth, or maybe it’s two weeks out, and then having them staggered again for the end, that way you’re not getting like everything for the whole course by the final right. No one can sustain that as a faculty member grading, and what research showed is that, like only a third of the students opted for that optional. Most students turn it in around the due date. In that case, so, you know, having even some due date flexibility, another thing you know, depending on the amount of students and the amount of feedback you want to give. You know, having multiple attempts to submit an assignment, this can help with students just feeling like again. I’m going to go back to my, my, my personal experience, but I also know this is first time learners that the students that fail first tend to not sustain effort because they feel like they’ve already failed and they can never really successfully move past that. And so sometimes allowing either multiple attempts. And then I, I will just mention this, but the idea of not giving zeros, and so allowing students to do that work, and I always advocate we design these assessments, because we want students to learn from them, right? They want them to demonstrate this knowledge, and if they don’t turn it in, and we don’t give them that opportunity to turn it in and to do that work, then they’re not going to learn that information. They’re not going to have that opportunity to demonstrate. And so that zero really doesn’t mean anything to their learning and doesn’t help them later on as well. But yeah, those are just a few.
Lillian Nave 53:07
Yeah, I do think it is really hard to sustain that effort, so anytime we can make it authentic and valuable, or they can share their perspective, are going to be helpful, yes?
Nicole Messier 53:19
And I mean, we’ve done that in a lot of courses where we ask students for their own personal learning goals as well. So starting off with, like, a general entry and having them set their own goals for the course. I’ve seen this in different courses where we do, like, kind of labor based grading, where they kind of select their own grade at the beginning, and sometimes it can be done at the beginning, and sometimes it can just be here. Here are the mechanisms. And so depending on my bandwidth, I may only need a C in this course, you know. And I think that’s a hard it’s a hard thing as a faculty member, because you want everyone to get an A, you want everyone to learn at an A level. But the reality is not every student needs that a or needs that a level of learning. And so being okay with that, and so having students be able to have those choices, whether it’s, you know, within a specific assignment, or in the whole organization of the course itself, that autonomy is really important.
Lillian Nave 54:21
Yeah, agreed, some students can’t have that a level pressure in my class, and my class is the first year seminar that nobody wants to take, and it’s required, and I understand that, but I really feel like I want to make it very meaningful for them, and they are going to take something they can use from the class, but I also understand that it may not be the class that they have all the time for. So they can kind of choose that if they skip these two assignments, they’ll get a C, you know? But they know that ahead of time. And they’re like, okay with that. Took me a while to be okay with that, though.
Nicole Messier 55:03
Yeah, yeah. I agree. It’s a hard thing. And I work with a lot of faculty members that are really willing to innovate and are trying new things that can be really scary, and some of that is realizing that we don’t know all the answers yet to meet the needs of the learners today, and so we’re constantly evolving as educators and designers on what is needed to help.
Lillian Nave 55:30
Yeah, so it looks like that you’ve helped a lot of faculty with these great design interventions. And so what gains have you seen in implementing these supports and online courses, whether in your own or other faculty that you’ve helped.
Nicole Messier 55:46
I think first and foremost, we’ve seen the student satisfaction scores. We’ve gotten a lot of both, Likert scale. You know, yes, this course is great, but then we’ve also gotten a lot of meaningful feedback, like I understood the expectations. The instructional materials were organized. I knew where to find things. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback there, and we know that students that are engaged and motivated are retained. And our retention rates have been really high in our online programs. And so our university has noticed that, and so that’s been really wonderful, because we know that students there that are retained will eventually graduate and they’ll go out to the workforce, and that’s wonderful for both students and for our university. And then also, we get emails all the time, and I think that’s the fun part is from faculty, is they’ll say, I got no email questions this semester. I got, like, barely questions, you know, and it was like, they’re like, wow, this really works. And I feel like that’s so reaffirming, because there’s a lot of nuances, and there’s a lot of parts to UDL, and it’s, we’re asking a lot of faculty, and the faculty that really engage with us, and then they collaborate. They’re really seeing those results, and they’re seeing that students are loving their courses as much as they love their courses. And that’s a win. It’s huge. And I really feel like that gives us our why every day of what we are, why we’re doing what we’re doing here at UIC. So I’m really proud of my team and the results that we’ve had in the online programs, and so we’re on a path to develop more online programs with faculty, and I’m really excited for what the future can bring for online learning, because I think there’s there’s a need there, and there’s a flexibility and a demand for it by our students.
Lillian Nave 57:40
It’s just growing, and that’s what I’m seeing at my university. It’s what I’m seeing everywhere. With the enrollment cliff, which is starting, there are fewer, like bright eyed 18 year olds going into college, but there are many returning students who have a job, and they’re going to want that flexibility of an online class, yes, so we need to design them for today’s learners. And it’s not just shifting an in person lecture online. It’s very, very different. And you’ve given us fantastic things to think about and some great tools. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. Nicole.
Nicole Messier 58:18
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Lillian Nave 58:21
Me too. I had a ton of fun thinking about all of this with you. Thank you for listening to this episode of The think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media, on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and blue sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website. Think u, d, l.org, the music in each episode is created by the Odyssey quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with two D’s, by the way, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast. And if you call it Appa-lay-shun, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, thanks for listening to the think UDL podcast.