Course Redesign ePortfolio Showcase

PSY 304 research methods is a Lecture+Lab core course in the psychology major. As the lab is held in a room with 25 computers, there are a limited number of spots per quarter. Consequently, many students delay taking the course, impeding their ability to do well in higher-level courses. Additionally, performance on the course has a bimodal distribution and only a few students consistently demonstrate all learning outcomes. The goals of the project were to enhance student learning and increase the number of students enrolled, while ensuring that the grading workload was manageable. For the redesign project, lecture will still be offered face-to-face, but the lab will be online. Moodle will be used: (1) to communicate instructions for all laboratory activities, including reading assignments, active learning exercises, and progress checks for the research project (2) to upload taped lectures about developing a research project and writing a APA-style paper (3) to submit all assignments and receive prompt feedback.

This project sought to reduce the proportion of repeatable grades (D, W, F) in an upper-division Theme 3 course. I am redesigning social psychology online to improve the universal design components in the course. I will incorporate auditory and visual instructional strategies via short videos. I am in the process of filming the videos to highlight course material and theories.

This project aims to integrate content from a General Psychology MOOC course (hosted by Udacity and offered via SJSUPlus) and other open source materials into the SJSU Learning Management System (LMS), Canvas. Previous offerings of this course required students to access multiple websites (3) to obtain all course material. In SOTE ratings and message boards, students expressed confusion and frustration over this and they specifically asked and/or suggested that all material be available through Canvas. Requiring students to visit multiple websites lead to frustration, which may have decreased student motivation and increased unnecessary technological effort, thereby increasing the potential for sub satisfactory performance and a negative online learning experience. To that end, this purpose of this project is to provide all course content via SJSU's LMS to increase student accessibility and engagement, decrease unnecessary effort by visiting multiple websites, and evaluate student's engagement and self-regulation to determine the effectiveness of this project.

The project is a redesign of our basic Introduction to Sociology course. This is a common GE course, as well as the gateway to the major. We have redesigned it to emphasize "systematic empirical inquiry" -- which both exemplifies social scientific reasoning and processes, and provides majors with a solid foundation for subsequent coursework. The design takes advantage of online delivery of materials and technologies that facilitate supplementary materials.

Psy 150 course is part of the General Education Curriculum with over 2400 students enrolled each year. Historically, this course has been a bottleneck course with a high D/F/W rate. The redesigned course (a large lecture) seeks to utilize: a) in-class clicker questions, and b) an online learning platform--Cafe Learn--to create a blended, outcome-based learning experience.

In this project, a GE Psychology course (Psychology of Emotion and Motivation) was redesigned around three aspects: hybrid, modified flipped instruction, skills-based approach. Given that the course is a frequently taught GE course with a large yearly enrollment, the goal was to address bottleneck issues while also engaging the students in the learning process in a large-lecture format. The objective was to utilize innovative pedagogical approaches with technology to create more interactive and deeper learning of the material. The pedagogical focus was on how knowledge and skills go hand-in-hand in creating a powerful learning environment that promotes long-term ability to understand and use the concepts learned in class after the class is over.

The primary goal of the redesign is to use a lower-cost textbook. A secondary goal is to pilot test an online outcomes based course platform. A final goal is to use the online course platform to facilitate course activities using the flipped classroom model.

This project was developed to increase access to online courses in sociology. Additionally, the course goal included decreasing repeatable grades and improving online course design through aligning student learning outcomes (SLOs). We found the redesign was successful in regard access to online courses (increase course caps by 40%, decreasing repeatable and providing highly engaging course materials and technologies.

course (Critical Thinking) was taught for the first time in Spring 2015. It is taught completly online. After taking a QOLT class, several planned changes to the course were conceived. The intention of the redesign is to make the course more personal, increase the presence of the instructor, with the goal increasing the accountability and performance of the students who enroll in the class. In order to accomplish this a number of best practices that were covered in the QOLT class need to be implimented. These changes include such things as increasing the presence of the instructor in the chatrooms, more of a video and web chat presence, and reducing the lag between assignment deadlines and return of grades. Other changes will be detailed in the course redesign materials below.

In summer 2014, I flipped my Social Psychology class using Team-Based Learning model (TBL) as a guide in order to encourage students to read before the class and interact more with other students in class. TBL is a unique collaborative learning method in which students become active rather than passive learners, while a teacher becomes a guide rather than a performer on stage (Sweet and Michaelsen 2012). In this course redesign project, I transform the flipped Social Psychology class into a hybrid one, posting the lectures and videos online, while spending even more in-class time for team and class discussion. By adopting a hybrid structure, this class offers the benefits of both the traditional face-to-face class and online class.

Five video tutorials focused on core concepts and theories in Psychology were added to the redesigned course. There was a modest gain in final grades when comparing students in the redesigned course and the original course. However, less than 5% of students in the redesigned course consistently watched the video tuturials, so the modest gain in success is unlikely due to the video tutorials. The redesigned course was substantially smaller than the original course, which may have attributed to increased student success.

All four faculty who teach the course (Cynthia Selby, Scott Lewis, Adelaide Kreamer, and Brian Oppy) were involved in developing this proposal, and all will adopt the redesigned model. The participating faculty will build a collective set of course resources (mini-videos, learning exercises, and other materials to be developed in the course of the redesign). These resources will be shared on a departmental folder on the university server so that all teaching faculty can access them. The department has agreed to a set of student learning objectives (SLOs) that are consistent with the American Psychological Association. Those will be revisited and revised at the start of this project.

This course contributes to attainment of the bachelor's degree in psychology and has been offered since the inception of the psychology department enrolling approximately 500 students every semester. Currently the repeatable rate in this course is approximately 16%. It is believed that the main issue for the low success rate is lack of student engagement in the course content; therefore, the redesign will focus on increasing student engagement to ensure greater success in student learning by the use of proven online technology.

Roughly four years ago, our department restructured an upper division statistics course in psychology by removing the laboratory component of the course in order to address the issue of a course bottleneck. While removal of the laboratory component helped increase course availability, it resulted in a decreased opportunity for students to grasp important conceptual foundations of statistical theory. The overall repeatable grade rate is high with roughly 20% of students in this category. The goal of this course redesign is to flip the course and incorporate laboratory-like active learning exercises back into the course structure.

The purposes of this redesign are to increase the consistency and quality of instruction for the course, to increase the exposure of our nearly 3000 Psychology majors to the tenure-track faculty in the department, and to decrease the bottleneck and make the class easier for students to access early in their career at CSUN. In this redesign, Drs. Malmberg and Fahmie are developing a set of fully-online modules that integrate cutting-edge technology with evidence-based pedagogy. We expect the redesigned course to directly impact the success of students enrolled in the course, decrease their time to graduation, and enhance their ability to attain their goals while at CSUN and after graduation.

The redesigned course will involve a flipped format in which students will watch videos demonstrating the course content outside of the class and will spend time during class working on activities. The readings and videos will be available to the students for free from a combination of sources. Links to videos and readings will be accessed via the Moodle Learning Management System.

This course has a historically high D/F/W rate and is required for the Psychology major at CSUSM. A lack of sufficient science background and needed conceptual information presents a significant obstacle for many. This course requires students to learn very complex biological (brain) mechanisms, so there is a learning curve for many Psychology students previously unfamiliar with this material. Added technology and Supplemental Instruction will provide enriched learning experiences for students, improving outcomes for all Psychology majors.

Develop a technology-enhanced Abnormal Psychology course with digitized micro-instructional videos and materials (10-minute instructor/guest lectures, TED-like talks, and clinical case examples). The online and digitized materials allows in-class sessions to focus on active, cooperative, and flipped classroom learning activities. These materials better prepare students for classroom discussions and activities.

An undergraduate Social Psychology course with 122 students was redesigned to be a "partially flipped" course. About 40% of the time traditionally devoted to lecturing was replaced with online video tutorials and in class active learning activities. Overall, there was a modest increase in repeatable final grades when comparing students in the redesigned course to students in the original course. However, a substantial number of students in the redesigned course did not consistently watch the online video tutorials. Recommendations are given to improve student engagement in online assignments.

Psyc 101 is a "Student Readiness and Curricular" bottleneck course because of its high repeatability rate. It is the 2nd in a 3-course Methods and Statistics sequence that students are required to pass in order to graduate with a BA in Psychology. Psyc 101 is also the first inferential statistics course in the 3-course sequence. First-time students compete with repeating students for a limited number of seats, which leads to increasingly greater bottleneck issues.

Redesigning this course using a flipped classroom model will reallocate passive learning to the time spent outside of the classroom, where students read assigned sections of the textbook and do simple skill-building problem sets. This will create more time in class for active learning, via the team-based learning (TBL) structure, where students work in teams to think about and solve increasingly more complex applications of the material they read.

Ji Son, the Lead for the Inferential Statistics Course Redesign, and many others have demonstrated an increase in student success in flipped classrooms. My expectation is that this TBL course redesign will lead to a similar reduction in repeatability rate among our students who also leave the semester with a deeper understanding of the topic.

This course is in high demand for our undergraduate major and minor students as it is one of our core pre-requisites and has few course offerings. In addition, upper division courses rely heavily on students understanding of the material presented. Offering this course using a flipped lesson plan design will support student success and improve their learning and application skills, thus enhancing critical thinking skills and retention of course material.

This course is an Introduction to methods of the science of psychology. It is the first class in a 3-course methods and statistics sequence to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology at CSU Sacramento. It has a high "fail" rate and a substantial achievement gap for under-represented minority students. This course challenges beginning Psychology students, who typically are interested in the discipline for the behavioral, cognitive, neuroscientific, or humanistic sub disciplines -- not for the methodology or the math/statistics. Consequently, this material is dramatically different and unfamiliar, and students struggle to achieve the learning outcomes and understand the course's alignment with the rest of the Psychology discipline.

Abnormal Psychology was redesigned from the traditional in-class format to be delivered online. In the redesign, all of my lectures that I typically give in class were recorded. I also have live sessions via BlackBoard Collaborate to highlight challenging material and field questions. Additionally, I collaborated with McGraw-Hill and incorporated their online learning tools into the course. Additionally, each student is assigned to view case studies of real people with psychological disorders and complete a quiz on each. The online design is meant to provide a more intensive learning experience, where students must read their textbooks (well in advance of exams) in order to complete the assignments.

Psychobiology (PSY 241) is a course designed to introduce students to the biological and chemical basis of behavior. Our redesign effort has involved a full needs assessment during the Fall 2013 semester across several sections that focused on examining the characteristics of students who successfully completed the course versus those who did not. Based on this assessment we implemented an initial course redesign in an oversized section of PSY 241 during the Spring 2014 semester that centered on structural and instructional course modifications designed to increase student engagement. A full assessment of these course redesign activities was conducted and a final course redesign launch will take place during the Fall 2014 semester.