We had an opportunity to sit down and pick the brains of two amazing ThinkSpace supporters who are currently facilitating Iowa State University’s (ISU) Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. At ISU, the PFF efforts are directed by Holly Bender and coordinated by Karen Bovenmyer. The duo comes together to bring unique insight to the program that stems from their vastly different backgrounds. By trade, Holly is a Clinical Veterinary Pathologist and Karen comes from the magical world of creative writing.

The Preparing Future Faculty program is split across four courses that are aimed at helping students preparing to start their careers. The courses provide an overview of the variety of faculty jobs available, exemplify effective pedagogy, help to prepare high stakes job materials, and engage the students with teaching and project practicums. At the end, the goal is simple: provide a foundation for the students to get their dream job.

When asked about how they use ThinkSpace in the program, Karen told us “It’s been really fun to learn with Holly how ThinkSpace can make writing easier for these highly advanced students who are capable of amazing things. It’s just that we’re using ThinkSpace as a key to help them unlock the door to find the best way to word things.”

“[Thinkspace is] just so much faster. They only need a couple of days lead time to go in and do their thing. It’s just faster.”

To help their students in the pursuit of finding the best text for the task, ThinkSpace allows Holly and Karen to break down a writing assignment into little bits. Karen told us that “... [ThinkSpace] helps them focus on [that little bit] instead of the immensity of the task of writing a cover letter...” Breaking a larger body of work into increments helped the students and “... produced much higher quality learning about how to create these documents for themselves later.”

ThinkSpace helped Karen and Holly’s course implement a more responsive, iterative process for student writing. In her experience with creative writing, doing multiple drafts of a story took a lot of time and paper. Students would bring multiple copies of their work to pass amongst their team members, who would then review and comment on the story outside of class for discussion in the future. Using ThinkSpace to support writing in PFF, Karen finds the process is “... just so much faster. They only need a couple of days lead time to go in and do their thing. It’s just faster.”

Holly and Karen weren’t the only ones finding value in ThinkSpace. Holly recalls a student interaction the week prior to the interview:

“Well, just last Tuesday I had a group of students, you know, pretty excited about it and wanting to know if they’re going to still have access to [ThinkSpace]. And I said ‘Yes, and you can actually use it for your teaching and their eyes got really big.’” The students said “Wow, [ThinkSpace] really helps you think.”

All in all, ThinkSpace allows Holly and Karen’s course to scale more efficiently to allow for better instruction each step of the way. ThinkSpace streamlines the process of peer feedback, allowing for increased capacity for student to student learning.

In the next issue of the ThinkSpace Newsletter, Phase 2 of this Faculty Spotlight will take you into ThinkSpace to show you exactly how Karen and Holly use it in their PFF program.

The Case Builder is an integral part of the ThinkSpace ecosystem. We’ve always envisioned it as a tool to help new instructors get started, while giving veterans of ThinkSpace the control they need to create effective cases. To fulfill this role, we set out to make the Case Builder more intuitive, consistent, and robust.

More Visual

One of the main goals in redesigning the case builder was to increase the amount of visual context to help facilitate decision making and improve the experience of creating a case. We’ve transformed the Case Builder from a completely text-based wizard to a more visual and interactive process starting from the template gallery to the phase editor.

Template Gallery

Templates can be a great way to speed up your process by giving you a head start on building a case. So we focused on giving you more information about each template to help you make the right decision.

Now when choosing a template, you can see an example of each one to help you choose the right one. Click on a template to get a description and an overview of what’s within the case before making a decision.

Phase Editor

Creating and editing a phase takes up a majority of the time spent building cases. We wanted to improve efficiency by keeping you from having to jump back and forth between the builder and the actual case to edit content and settings.

Now you can edit both content and settings without having to leave the Case Builder. Your content is displayed within the phase editor to reflect what it will look like outside the builder. Interact with each individual component on on your phase by clicking Edit Content to enter edit mode or Settings to see all the different options available.

If you’re building a peer assessment you can add scales and text inputs with a press of a button. Each item you add has their own settings giving you more control over your assessment. We’ve also included a preview button that will give you an idea of what your students will see so you can make any tweaks to your case before finishing the build process.

The new Case Builder is undergoing development with an expected release date of Summer 2016.

Diagnostic Components

Diagnostic Path

The diagnostic components were some of the first features to be added to ThinkSpace. It’s time they got a facelift. We wanted to change the Diagnostic Path by introducing an easier, more intuitive design that doesn’t impede the creative flow for students. The result is the new and improved Diagnostic Path:

The new Diagnostic Path is slated to enter testing in March 2016 to be released by the summer of 2016.

Instructor Zero to Sixty

Case Builder & Preview-as-a-student

We want to support the ability for a new instructor to sign up for ThinkSpace and start creating cases right away. The new Case Builder, as highlighted in the Feature Analysis, will be one way that we’re streamlining this process. We’re also allowing instructors to preview cases in student mode, providing an intuitive, self-serve way to see how your students will be interacting with your cases:

Facilitating Support

If you do need help, we’re right here! In November, we introduced new support system to facilitate live chat with the ThinkSpace team, as well as support roles within ThinkSpace that allow us to help you without being added to your space roster. The praise for this feature has been universal, and it has proven to be very effective in our experience. In the last 3 months, 8% of active users submitted support tickets and the average response time was 15 minutes.

Team-Based Functionality

Team-based features are one of our most highly desired features, and in our eyes, one of the most important to get right. There are very few applications out there that support team-based learning, and even fewer that do it well. We think ThinkSpace could be an invaluable resource for the TBL community. We have a few ideas in mind to advance this goal in 2016.

Peer Evaluation

After talking with many educators in the TBL sphere, we plan to rename ‘Peer Assessment’ to ‘Peer Evaluation’ to be more consistent with the terminology that TBL educators are accustomed to. We want to expand and improve on this feature, particularly from the instructor’s point of view. In addition to a simplified creation process from the new Case Builder, we’re going to improve some of the instructor’s views such as the scrub-screen to be more intuitive and include more information.

Peer Review

Peer Review is a commonly used feature across many disciplines. As such, it needs to support several components within ThinkSpace, so we’ll be identifying ways we make this happen as well as enhancing the usability overall.

Markup

Markup is used heavily with peer review and allows for team members to comment and provide feedback on each other’s cases. It is a highly desired feature that we want to flesh out a bit. We want to focus on improving the usability for this feature.

We expect a Quarter 2 or Quarter 3 2016 release for these Team-Based functionality changes.

Just-in-time Support

A cool feature that comes along with our new support system is our ability to engage with users based on different events. Opening a Lab Chart for the first time, for example, will now reveal brief instructions on how to use the Lab Chart. If it’s your first time using the Case Builder, we can give you some helpful tips while building your case. This will be an ongoing implementation as we develop how-to guides, welcome messages, and other content to meaningfully engage with our users when they need it.

Other Projects

These are all projects that are on our radar, but are not yet in active development. If any of these projects are of interest to you, contact us and we’d be happy to schedule a meeting.

1. Real-time Team Collaboration
1. Add ability for team members to collaborate on phases and cases in real time
2. In-app team chat
2. Gradebook & Scoring
1. Improve the usability of the gradebook
2. Allow students to see their scores
3. CSV export of scores
3. Student Dashboard
1. Quick at-a-glance page for students to see current progress through cases, phase due dates, etc.
4. User Profile
1. Allow for name change and email change
2. Add metadata such as discipline and avatars to work with team formation
5. Resource Enhancements & Backpack
1. Expand the concept of resources, allow for them to be attached to cases or phases
2. Add ‘backpack’ for students to be able to store and manage their resources
6. Anonymous peer review
7. And many more. Let us know what you would to see next in ThinkSpace!