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>>The one that we have been warned about in the OL2000 class was taking too much time responding
to individual assignments.
And I fell into that trap very early because I happen to believe that if the students pay
for a course, I need to give them more than just a grade.
I want to give them some constructive feedback.
I look at the substance of their responses to assignments as well as the grammar and what not
because grammar is a big thing for me and so I want to help them be able
to present themselves better in their written communications in the future.
And so I was taking a long time on some of these assignments.
So the concept is nothing novel but I came up with, for each assignment I read
through a couple of the homework assignments very quickly and look at some
of the common threads that I was seeing and then develop some canned responses.
And depending upon where the student went
in a particular paper I would develop additional ones.
And so as I went through each of the assignments I could then apply,
just cut and paste those particular things that were pertinent
to a particular students responses and then personalize it, of course, with their name
or talking about comparing how they express this idea now versus in an earlier one.
And that significantly cut down on my time involvement.
>>Then I've also heard people who used that strategy say that they improved,
over time they improved that response so they get a better consistency and better quality
of their response because you have time to reflect on it.
Have you found that as well?
>>Exactly, yes and it's not, I need to make adjustments from student to student oftentimes
but I learned how to better communicate what it was I was trying to teach
in that moment as I refined the response.
And it also then becomes an important teaching tool for me because now as I look
to teach the course again, I can go back to that body of responses
and see what common threads there were and is there a way I tweet the textual material,
the way I ask the assignment to avoid those issues before.
So hopefully the delivery now will be a little better as well.
>>What I really like about that though is you're using real student input and feedback in order
to improve the way you're doing your instructions.
You go back and tweet the content, did I miss this point?
Do I need to reinforce it?
>>Exactly, in fact there were a couple of student responses, I am going to contact them
and ask for permission because they said it a lot better [background laughter] than I could.