Innovative Learning & Teaching

Communicating

Introduction & Relevance

Why the dickens wouldn't you want to communicate great expectations? The sixth principle stresses the importance of communicating high expectations. Consider three very important points in this principle:

• Communication
• High Expectations
• Efforts
  

Communication is a key component of all seven principles, and like Kristine mentions in her discussion on active learning, communication is also a "two-way street." Make a point to find out student expectations as well as establishing your own at the beginning of a course. Include expectations about the technology to be used in class and discuss the delivery method of the course. Technology can help you establish and model high expectations throughout your course by employing a variety of tools, such as the syllabus, calendar, and assignment tools found in course management systems.

High expectations means setting high standards and academic goals. This also means setting realistic expectations, for yourself, your students, and the use of technology. For example, having an expectation of student participation in online discussion, but not expecting all-the-time, everywhere involvement.

It takes effort by both faculty and students to attain high academic standards. If you are using a course management system, you will need to learn how the various tools work, and which tools can be used to best communicate or model high expectations. Students must make an effort to be especially disciplined in an online environment.

Remember, establishing high expectations at the beginning of a course can lead learners down the path to academic excellence!

Principle in Practice

To see this principle in practice, let's first go visit a class with adjunct professor Henri Goulet. Officially the class is known as Greek I, but he calls it "My Big Fat Summer Greek Class." Let's start with the syllabus. Along with the usual sections, there are three and a quarter pages of motivational points and fear relievers; for example, he says "We are all in this together and we do not intend to leave anyone behind!" and "You already know one of the world's most difficult languages, English! Hence, do not fall prey to the negative maxim 'it's all Greek to me!'.

To encourage academic excellence and emphasize expectations, Henri asks his students "what kind of doctor would you want to examine, diagnose, and treat you?" He asks if students would want a doctor that missed classes or labs, hadn't read chapters in their medical textbooks, or had watched someone give a shot in class but had never given one themselves. He has found this gets students motivated to work hard from the outset of a course.

Don't overlook the wording of objectives in your syllabus and assignments. What do students expect if you say you must "master" this word processing software to pass the course? You could end up with needlessly anxious students trying to figure out which features of the software they need to learn. Why not say you expect students to know how to set margins, format paragraphs, use headers and footers, and set line spacing?

Consider discussing the file formats you expect students to use for assignments. You may have students using software from a variety of vendors and computer manufacturers that don't bundle the same packages with their computers as in the past.

Course Management System Ideas for Application:

• Use the calendar tool in your course management system to provide students with deadlines.
• Provide a sample discussion thread of the quality you expect, either as a document students can view, or even better, as a post already in the discussion board.
• Use the announcement tool to provide reminders when assignments are due, or to indicate that you've updated content. For a course management system like WebCT, you can use an Upper Textblock on any organizer page for announcements, or you can create a topic (forum) for Announcements, then lock it after each announcement you post.
• Provide self-test quizzes, and use the feedback feature found in the quiz/assessment tool to encourage students to do better. You can provide chapter or page numbers for students to re-read materials you expect them to know.
• Provide goals and/or objectives at the start of each module or week.
• Expect the unexpected when it comes to technology. While true, we don't want a new high tech "my dog ate it" excuse, we do need to recognize that our anytime, anywhere ideas may not be entirely accurate. Servers need maintenance, software needs patching, ISPs do experience outages, etc. Here are some tips for students in an online article from Syllabus magazine.
• Provide challenging assignments. I asked a colleague to share his experience with two online courses for which he had high expectations from a student perspective. He mentioned he had one bad and one good experience.

"The bad one had a short 'lecturette' for each assignment (approx. one per week). There was no textbook involved. The course was about survey design and there were a few questions to be answered from the 'lecture' and posted to the message board. We were also to comment on someone else's responses. We also had to draft survey questions of various types. The idiodic part was that everyone had essentially the same answers to the questions since they were objective and taken directly from the text. How can you make a meaningful or even interesting comment about someone's answers that are identical to yours? The problem was thin content and poor instructional design."

"The good one was in library research. We had to pick a topic to research related to our other course work or dissertation work. Each week we had to use a variety of electronic sources, and each week the sources were more complex. We had to find several source articles on the topic and then submit them in good APA format. The professor returned them the next day with detailed critique of the citations and the form of the citations. She was a bear and analyzed them with a fine tooth comb. I felt like I learned a lot. She was also available to answer any quesitons I had about a resource or about a citation. She even made suggestions for further resources. I thought she did a wonderful job."

• Make the effort to ask that a guest student account be created for each of your e-learning courses, then use that account to log in and see your course(s) from a student perspective. Faculty that have gone into a course management system with a guest student account have found it very helpful. By seeing a course from a student's perspective first, often times they avoided unexpected problems.
  

Resources

Designing Online Courses to Discourage Dishonesty (Adobe PDF) by Barbara Christie, in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, discusses online course design strategies that promote academic excellence. Be sure you read the section on "Syllabus Design," mindful that you're communicating to your students through it. Though common sense, proofread your syllabus and check your objectives, grade points, rubrics, and schedules. Your students' expectations may not be what you hoped for if they find typos, miscalculated grade points, invalid dates, etc. To help with typos, set the spell check to work on uppercase words. This could prevent misspelled titles from slipping into your course syllabus or content.

The TLT Group has built a library of ideas for implementing the Seven Principles of Good Practice:

• TLT site for member institutions only
• TLT Public draft site

Ted Panitz maintains a list of implementation ideas as well, and you'll find a list for principle #6.

Thomas Berner has some interesting points in his article titled "The Benefits of Bulletin Board Discussion in a Literature of Journalism Course." Note Exhibit 2 and his point about nothing being implicit in a distance course.

Promoting Reasonable Expectations: Aligning Student and Institutional Views of The College Experience - this new book from Jossey-Bass addresses student expectations contrasted with their actual experiences, (due out in February 2005).

Here's an article from Judith V. Boettcher, who has great expectations for well-structured content.

Assessing the Benefits

Clearly one can see the importance of communicating expectations. There are several organizations interested in sharing their research or tools in assessing academic achievement, and helping you and your students meet or exceed high expectations.

The TLT Group offers their award winning Flashlight Program to help institutions assess and improve educational uses of technology. Visit the Flashlight Program at the TLT Group website and check out the tools section. (Note: some of tools available from the TLT Group are available to member institutions only.)

The Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University offers a report in which four courses were evaluated based on the seven principles. (Report is an Adobe PDF file.) You may find some of the points rather helpful in designing and assessing your own courses.

Also from Indiana University, the College Student Experiences Questionnaire Research Program offers insight into student achievement and determining to what extent student and institutional expectations are met. The CSEQ assesses both new student experiences and expectations.

Looking Ahead

As technological advances increase, there will undoubtedly be more ways to communicate and model expectations and academic excellence. Here are some interesting articles on the future of technology and what we may want to start thinking about from the Educause Review.

Here are some articles on student expectations
From your colleagues Down Under at the Center for the Study of Higher Education comes the article Students' changing expectations of higher education and the consequences of mismatch with reality by Richard James, University of Melbourne (Adobe PDF)

The Ohio Learning Network would like to thank Content Specialist Tom Goulet for thoughtfully gathering and organizing the content about this Principle.