Slack in the Classroom

Slack provides a reliable, easy-to-use, platform-agnostic chat and instant messaging service that faculty and students have many locations, including Luddy, have readily adopted. The articles below examine the different ways faculty have repurposed Slack to meet their pedagogical and administrative needs. Examples include using Slack as an email replacement; as well as for academic and social discussions; increasing engagement; interviews with experts, polling; and file storage. They also detail how well features such as external app integration with YouTube, Microsoft OneDrive and Azure work for them in Slack. Additionally, they explain how students can use Slack for group work, crowdsourcing notes, and creating resource repositories.

Evan Peck, Bucknell HCI discusses how he used Slack across 5 different courses in his department’s Computer Science curriculum. https://medium.com/bucknell-hci/how-i-use-slack-in-my-courses-a-3-year-reflection-888c7e742d04 A summary of the tips he shared in this article include:

• If you use Slack, throw away course email and commit to it. (Please note: Sameer Patil provided me with this information in regards to using Slack for email (thanks Sameer!):

In terms of using it for official IU purposes (especially teaching, which has FERPA implications), please note Slack is not currently an IU enterprise system.

UITS informs me that “Slack is subject to all other policies like data management, SSSP, IT-28, acceptable use agreement, etc. If someone wants to use Slack, they should fill out the SSSP and describe how they will use it, what kind of data, and audience, and then the data stewards, purchasing, and security and privacy offices will vet the request.”​

My apologies for the confusion.

• Slack can be used to increase engagement and interactivity amongst your students. Feel free to contact me for clarification on how to keep those activities FERPA compliant.

• Don’t create too many channels for critical information (homework)

• Leverage the creation of new channels for non-critical information (interesting articles, etc.)

• Use Slack outside class to create assignments that involve an interactive component between students (it’s what Slack is good at!).

• Use Slack during class as a low-barrier mechanism to share information (both from you to students as well as from the students to you).

• In project-based classes, Slack will help facilitate behind-the-scenes communication between groups.

• Posting metrics can provide additional feedback about assignments.

• Use Slack as a way to make learning more playful

Phil Simon, a lecturer at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, and author of Slack for Dummies https://www.philsimon.com/blog/trends/use-slack-inside-classroom/ explains, “I can take the temperature of the room anonymously. This makes it safe for students to address potentially controversial themes,” he says. Perhaps most importantly, it empowers students to take initiative…

Christina Paxman, an Assistant Professor of Broadcasting and Professional Communication at Minot State University shares in this paper presented at the National Communications Association https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/pages/eTools_Slack_January_2018.pdf   how she uses Slack as a file storage system, and takes advantage of Slack’s app integration features.

Engineering Lecturer Jennifer Bernstein provides current students at Johns Hopkins University https://ii.library.jhu.edu/2019/04/12/using-slack-in-the-classroom/ opportunities to interview recent grads about their experiences working in the medical field.

There are many more ways that Slack can help support your teaching, learning, and communication needs. Do you want to share how you use Slack, or a similar tool in your class?  Or, do you have questions about which tools  best support your personal teaching needs or student learning outcomes?  Drop in on the first Monday of each month, for an informal conversations around teaching and learning. Next month (02/01/2021 at 11:00 AM) we will chat about the different ways Slack, Group Me, Microsoft Teams, and other tools can be used to communicate with students:  https://iu.zoom.us/j/81576128938 . ​

Pre-Course Survey

One way to improve engagement with your students is to learn more about them. A precourse survey is one way to help develop a connection with your students, and get to know them beyond what is shared in an introduction discussion.

What do you want to know about them?

Diligent student in college with classmates, taking notes of teacher lecture.

A survey can help you conduct a needs assessment about where your students are at in terms of prior knowledge, demographics, mindset, learning preferences, goals, content confidence level, preferred feedback style, and/or access to technology.  Because this takes place “behind the scenes” and is only shared with the instructor, rather than in a public discussion forum, you may be more likely to receive candid responses.

What strategies and skills will students need and/or develop in your course?

These kinds of questions can help students flex metacognitive skills and become more aware of their learning habits. As an instructor, this can help you provide more specific feedback on student work, suggesting similar strategies and stretch goals.

• Reflection on Strategies: Metacognitive reflection questions ask how students get things done. Do you take marginal notes or highlight as you read? What conditions do you need to do your best work?

• Planning Ahead: Beyond what has worked for students in the past, you might ask about strategies they will use specifically in this class. What times each week do you have earmarked to work on this course?

• Setting Goals:You might ask them to review the learning objectives, asking what they will commit to accomplishing. And beyond the learning objectives for the course, are there other skills or competencies they plan to work on in the course? Do they have any suggestions for the instructor about strategies for helping meet those goals?

During the first week of your course

Providing students with an opportunity to quiz themselves not on the course topic but on the course itself–how to get started in the course, how to navigate the course, what the course should help students accomplish, and how the course is structured–can help instructors send fewer emails saying, “It’s in the syllabus!”

Given multiple choice or true/false question types, these kinds of pre-course surveys can be automatically scored. Don’t forget to compose feedback for incorrect responses and allow multiple attempts!

What tools are available?

IU supports the Qualtrics survey tool and Canvas includes a dashboard feature that allows instructors to create a type of quiz called ‘ungraded’ that can be used as a survey. In Canvas, once the survey, or ‘ungraded quiz,’ is published online, students can login to their Canvas course page and participate. IU also has access to Google Forms and Microsoft Teams (Microsoft Forms are Available in the Channel and Chat features) for quick survey and quiz creation.

If you’d like support implementing a pre-course survey or questionnaire in your online class, or in any other aspects of teaching and learning, please contact me at your earliest convenience with your availability.