Working on ARQ (Asking the Right Questions)

"Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) is a set of brief hybrid workshop materials for faculty. The goal: figure out how to improve online discussion, or your lecture slides, or your use of clickers, or your online assignments -- some kind of teaching and learning with technology in your course -- by asking your students some pointed questions about that activity.

Each workshop module is only 5-15 minutes long, short enough to insert in a faculty meeting or brownbag lunch, or to use in a brief online workshop. The ARQ workshops can be led by faculty development or IT support staff, or by faculty who have been through the workshop previously, tried what they learned, and liked the results.

A group of us (join us!) are developing and testing these materials, and the collection grows and changes almost every week. Frank Parker tells me that ARQ materials have been tried out at Johnson C. Smith University. Meanwhile I've been tweaking the materials for improving online discussions.

I'm also using Flashlight Online 2.0 to develop new survey templates (and a new ARQ workshop) on improving the use of clickers, and another ARQ workshop (with Flashlight Online 2.0 materials) for getting more out of your use of electronic portfolios. I'm working with IUPUI on the eportfolio materials; if you like this ARQ approach and want to join in that work please let me know. I don't yet have any partners for work on the clicker workshop materials. Interested?

I'm also thinking that it's time to go after some grant money to speed up the development and testing process, and to evaluate the materials: can this approach really engage more faculty and help build a culture of evidence? Maybe an institution with an accreditation a few years off, or a consortium or association, would like to go after such a grant, and use us as a contractor to help?

Personal notes: After traveling every week since late September, I'm off the road until January. Arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder coming up, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. No heroic athletic injury involved: just a bone spur that's been making me increasingly sore. The surgery should clean that up.

Before that, however, Leslie and I are headed for New York City to celebrate Thanksgiving. Chris (our son) and Monique have invited us and also her parents to dinner. This is our first opportunity to meet Monique's parents. We're all pretty excited about this particular holiday.

Asking the Right Questions (cont'd)

We ran our first subscriber and member workshop on "Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) last week. As you may know, ARQ is a growing collection of materials for brief hybrid workshops, all aimed to show instructors new ways to gather information from their own students in order to improve teaching and learning with technology in their courses.

Last Tuesday's ARQ workshop focused on how to gather evidence that could be used to improve participation in online discussion. The workshop teaches faculty how to frame their own questions, and also how to adapt Flashlight Online model surveys to collect evidence from their own students. The workshop materials also include an eClip to help run the session, handouts, and feedback forms.

We went through the workshop and then critiqued it; the version you can see online today is the result of that critique. I'm sure it will continue to change as we get more experience with the materials. Everyone on Tuesday said they were considering offering the workshop at their home institutions.

This coming Tuesday (Oct. 16 at 3 PM ET) we'll try a workshop on personal response systems (e.g, clickers). Here too we're going to look into how asking students the right questions can show instructors and institutions how to get more value from the PRS itself. The ARQ materials include sample Flashlight Online surveys: one to do a needs assessment of faculty, and the other for faculty to adapt for use with their own students. (If you're interested in Flashlight Online 2.0, take a look -- I used the beta test version to write these surveys.)

If you're at a TLT Group subscriber institutions or are yourself a TLT Group member, I hope you can join us! Maybe you'll get interested enough to help us develop more ARQ materials. Click the link for our calendar; the ARQ workshop is at the top - click to register. It's only open for our subscribers and members but for them (you, I hope), it's free.