 Greetings, everyone, and welcome to this mini lecture on choice in the classroom. I am Lance Eaton, the coordinator instructional design at North Shore Community College and part-time instructor. So I want to talk about choice in the classroom because I find in my own experience and many students' experiences, you know, they have to take these courses and that can sometimes leave them a little more than resistant to the actual learning. And so one thing I've really started to think about is what if students have more choice? And so when I think about the why of choice, when I think about how we can allow for students to choose in the classroom, some of the reasons why it's useful to have choice include that it can individualize learning. Students can take their learning in directions that are important or relevant to them. And that's really important. It is their education. They'll have a special, they'll have an area that they are focused in, but then a lot of that will be personalized learning, things that are, you know, their course or their track versus what other people experience. It's also invested learning. I think when a student can choose, when they have a choice, the idea that they make a decision reinforces what they do. So it really helps them to invest in their learning by having to choose or by having the option to choose. I think there's also more student teaching opportunities, and I'll talk about this a little bit later on. But I think it's that idea that, you know, if the student is getting to choose where or what or when they get to study, there's a lot of things in which they then get to teach not just other students but also the instructor. And I think the most important thing is that we sometimes forget is that we often create our assessments, we create our, the way we conduct a course through our objectives. We have certain objectives a course can meet, but I think it's always important to realize there are multiple ways to meet objectives. And so thinking about that and integrating, what are those multiple ways? You know, you don't just have to rely on a multiple choice test or an essay for students to meet the objectives that you want them to meet in order to succeed in your class. So what do we mean by choice? What does choice look like? You can do this in a variety of ways. You can do this as what class to attend. I have developed or I've launched and piloted a hybrid flexible course. So students can attend a course entirely face to face, entirely online, or go back and forth between the two as fits their needs. And I think that's really useful because of course we've all had the student who comes to class who just isn't prepared to learn. And my thought is, you know, that student may not be prepared to learn and this may be not only a disservice to that student, but to the other students. And it also kills my energy because it's clear the student is uninterested in that time during that time and it may have to do with all sorts of things beyond what they, you know, their opinion of the subject matter. So this idea that they can choose, they can decide how they want to attend and learn in any given week I think is a very interesting avenue. But also what readings and materials to examine, you know, we all have our materials that we want students to process. But what if we gave them more choice instead of it's, you know, you read this chapter, what if you have several different types of readings or even videos that students can use. A lot of times we go to the textbook, but for some disciplines, I don't know that going to the textbook is relevant or as relevant anymore when there's an amazing amount of instructional videos out there. When I think about studying procedures and stuff like that, you know, you can spend 10 pages trying to read a procedure or you can spend 10 minutes and watch that procedure and gain a lot more by watching it than reading it. But also what homework assignments to complete. So rather than just saying this is the homework assignment you tell or you provide your students with three different options. You know, you can write a journal reflection or you can answer these questions or you can in the next class give us a five minute explanation of what you've read. So again, this idea of finding different ways for students to demonstrate their learning and their understanding. And then what assessments to complete. Here again I create what I call a menu for my students with each assignment they have certain options. You know, they can decide how they want to deal with the research in my course. They can write a biographical report on a author or they can do a contextual analysis of a reading and decide how accurate a short story represents the time in which it was read. So there's lots of different ways you can have students complete or meet those objectives. So think about or you can't think about those varying those options. And that's the how it shows. How do you go about doing this? Well, I definitely lean here on technology and of course the most primary technology that I use is Blackboard because for Blackboard that's where I'm going to store materials such as my readings. I also look at and use a lot of educational open educational resources and this allows me to find multiple pieces of content for a particular topic and allow for students to use whichever one they decide to use without having them to buy several different books. This is what I really like about open educational resources and we'll talk about this at length. But it allows me to find multiple resources. I can find some videos, some audio, some textual, really give a good mix that students can choose from. And then I use Screencast-O-Matic in YouTube and of course that's what I'm using to make this video right now to make mini lectures. So I can can content that students then could watch online to either reinforce what they saw in class or to add to or if class, you know, we have a snow day and I don't have class. Well, they now have these mini lectures that they can access and be ready for the next class. So a couple other examples for looking at or introducing choice into your course. You can create, you know, what I've done before which is you have one common reading and one find and report reading. That is one reading everybody does and then one reading students have to go out and find either from a pre-range of selections that you've already identified or they just go off on their own and, you know, they find something that's relevant to the course. You can let students start to design some of their assessments. Obviously with some reservations that have students decide what it is or to what level they are going to prove their learning, prove that they meet the course objectives. As I mentioned before, you can have a menu of assignments where you have three to four assignments that meets each objective and that can be really powerful because, again, different students have different interests or different passions and so one might really love to get up and do a presentation or a close reading of a short story while another one would rather prefer, you know, would quite prefer to write that paper and not have to stand up in front of everybody. And then you can also allow students to vote. Vote on the types of assessments, penalties for improper behavior, vote on readings and how best to use time. So there's a lot of ways you can introduce choice and by introducing choice really emphasize the students' investment in their learning. You know, when they have to make a decision it becomes something different than when they're told they have to do something and that's true for a lot of us. So finally, what other examples can you think of that add choice into the classroom? Hopefully you'll have some ideas, you can put them in the comments below here in the YouTube video, you can email them or you can have them in discussions of your own. So thank you very much for watching and I hope you've learned something, you found something useful and I will see you online. Thank you.