Virtually Autumn: Format flexibility

This one is short and sweet. Today, format flexibility is not about accessibility (although that is important!) but is about given students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge in the way that they prefer.

So, as with many posts in this series, the main drawback to the instructor is: it takes more time. And, the main benefit to the instructor is: it helps engage and retain students.

The concept is simple: if you develop an assignment, then providing options in how students produce and deliver their response gives them flexibility - the hottest commodity of the year decade …well, just a great practice in general!

Examples

In my own practice, I reserve this for major assignments. For quizzes and small assessments, I do still rely on true/false, multiple-choice, and some short answer responses. They're easy to score, and come nicely packaged within in my LMS or as a spreadsheet. But, for the big ones, I'm happy to let students be creative, especially when creativity is the goal:

• Do you have students write essays? Then (unless the purpose of the essay is to evaluate spelling and punctuation) also let them video or audio record them speaking their essay.
• Do you have an exam question where a student has to understand how to perform a calculation to find the answer? Instead of writing a multiple-choice question with fixed responses, ask the student to record video of themselves solving the question on paper (or on the whiteboard in Zoom).
• Do you have students type reports about historical events and the connections between them? Sure, a typed report is good; maybe a web-based interactive annotated world map would be equally good - if not better?

I hasten to add that flexible format responses tend to provide built-in cheat-proofing, because students are creating their own materials as part of the process!

Cons

Yes, it can be more time-consuming to score multiple types of student responses to the same prompt, because it can take additional mental overhead for the instructor to consider how to evaluate different forms of expression. This is a great reason to develop rubrics, but that's not the topic for today!

Pros

However, I hope you will find that the extra effort it takes to adapt grading to potentially multiple forms of expression is more than compensated by the ease of watching a student video. Now, I fully admit that this is my own proclivity, and I know that at least one person who will read this post will rather read the essay than watch/listen to it. However, for many students (and even for some teachers), it is much faster to record and post a video than it is to type a response. I'm keenly aware of this because of the time I've spent manually transcribing videos to produce captions. It sometimes takes me three to four minutes to transcribe one minute of the spoken word.

Tangent: do stenographers make good money? If so, I encourage you to consider that as a profession! If you want your mind to be blown, check out the Wikipedia article that describes a bit about how stenography works using a chorded keyboard). Live captioning in modern videoconferencing leverages stenographers, and I imagine this will be a booming profession.

I'm also aware of colleagues who teach composition and who equally appreciate the format flexibility that they gain when they embrace students submitting work in various formats. As in the above example, imagine how much more quickly the teacher can provide feedback to a student by recording their audio explanation instead of typing it. Plus, the student benefits not just from the content (if written) but also hearing the tone and inflections of your voice.

Taking action

One piece of advice for writing instructions that solicit an assignment that has a flexible format: do actually provide some limitations! First, "flexible" doesn't mean "any." You might offer that students can submit written or video responses, but it might be appropriate to specify what video format, especially if it matters to your LMS or your computer. You might want .mp4 or .mov video files but not .mpg, for example. More likely, you'll also want to specific a file size and/or length limit. No videos longer than two minutes or file sizes greater than 200 MB!

Ultimately, as you write the instructions for the assignment, please pause and review them before you post them. Ask yourself whether you've added descriptions or mechanisms that restrict the format; if you have, remediate your instructions to provide a bit more latitude to your learners.