Thread by @stacyfarina

When I learned I would be teaching Comparative Anatomy online, I took the opportunity to revamp the whole thing. My "6 quizzes, 3 exams" approach seemed ineffective for online, and maybe ineffective in general.

Here's what I did instead. 🧵

[side note: I spent over an hour rolling this out as one beautiful thread, but it all got deleted because of a glitch when trying to add alt text to an image. So you this is going to take me a while. If I get pulled away, I will come back to it.]

I wanted to encourage repeated exposure to and interaction with the material, rather than memorization, so I broke the content into 10 modules (+9 modules for lab), each with a quiz on basic terminology and definitions that could be taken over and over.

I then wanted to encourage students to apply their knowledge, which I would normally do with short answer exam questions. Instead, I created "Challenges" in which students revisited the material by applying it with complex questions like Matching and Check All That Apply.

"Writing to learn" is really important to me, so I also created "Synthetic Assignments," which were mostly essays that spanned multiple modules.

How did these assessments fit together? Meet the "Progress Embryo." Quizzes unlocked related Challenges, and Challenges unlocked Synthetic Assignments. For final grades, students received a C for completing the outer ring, a B for the middle ring, or an A for the inner ring.

Completing any assessment meant getting an 80% or higher. But students had infinite attempts on quizzes and challenges. Many students made their first attempts before lectures, to test prior knowledge. Passing the these took persistence, not memorization.

Art by @sylviaduckworth

Synthetic assignments were the only assessments without unlimited attempts (only 2 attempts). But I encouraged students to get feedback from me before the first attempt (which most did), and the second attempt usually wasn't necessary.

Synthetic assignments (SAs) were also the only ones with deadlines, usually two weeks after we finished the lectures for all relevant modules. Quizzes and Challenges were needed to unlock the SAs, so some planning was needed. But otherwise, everything was work-at-your-own-pace.

Philosophies:
(1) Completion: Each assessment needed to be completed, not perfect. 80% was considered complete. For final grades, all of the quizzes needed to be completed for at least a C. No "dropping" quizzes. Every module mattered. Completing the course material was the goal.

(2) Repeated exposure to material: Memorizing for tests now seems so inefficient. That is not how we learn. Quizzes and challenges were designed to be taken over and over, with large randomized question banks. Each attempt brought students closer to mastery.

(3) Adaptive Learning: Quizzes (terms/facts) needed to be mastered before Challenges (understanding and applying) could be attempted. Challenges needed to be completed before the Synthetic Assignments (analyzing). This allowed students to advance only once they were prepared.

(4) Flexibility and Low Stress: It's a pandemic. High-stakes, timed assessments and rigid deadlines do not promote learning. Stress and trauma are not good conditions for learning. Even the few deadlines were more akin to suggestions for staying on track.

Practical considerations:
Grading was a lot easier (I used auto-grading for most assessments), but the large question pools took a LOT of time to write. But at least I have them for next time.

An LMS that allows you to lock assessments based on grades of other assessments is key

Student response (based on anonymous survey):
When asked to compare with other upper-level Bio courses, students reported learning a more and spending more time interacting with the material.
Overall, feedback was very positive.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. If you want a more detailed breakdown, please see this figure. Perhaps the biggest problem I faced was communicating this new and perhaps overly complex system to students. But after the first Synthetic Assignment, everyone had the hang out it

If anyone wants to see how I've implemented this for my Organismal Biomechanics CURE, here it is. It's much simpler, because the course is focused around doing research projects more so than the content.