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Case study: Developing the ‘Structure of English’ module site

Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Ellie Rye

2024: Reflections on site development and delivery in the 2023-24 academic year

2025: Reflections on adjustments made to delivery in the 2024-25 academic year

2023-24

Ellie Rye provides an overview of the design and delivery of the VLE site for the Structure of English module, a stage one introductory module taught via a one-hour lecture and a one-hour seminar each week, and assessed via an open piece of coursework between weeks four and seven along with a five hour online exam in the revision and assessment period.

Ellie provided a walkthrough of the module site, describing how it was built using the department Ultra template for consistency of structure and navigation to include:

  • key module information and assessment details provided in specific folders
  • learning modules for each week providing materials and activities related to the lectures and seminars (e.g. preparatory work before seminars and suggested answers afterwards)
  • Summaries of the essential, recommended and background reading material linked through to the module reading list (Leganto)

The discussion board tool was also used to provide an opportunity for Q&A related to each week and to the assignments. There was minimal engagement with these discissions, however, prompting the module team to review future use. Quizzes were also provided drawn from an existing pool of quiz materials. These were made available towards the end of the module for revision purposes. Ellie provided an analysis of quiz usage. Although around half the students engaged with the quizzes there was only a weak positive correlation between the number of quizzes attempted and assessment outcomes. Again this has prompted a review of their use with plans for phased release of quizzes related to the weekly contents.

Responses to the module evaluation suggested satisfaction with the VLE site and online resources.

Watch their presentation:

Structure of English (Panopto viewer) (8 mins 21 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ellie Rye. I'm from Language and Linguistic Science. I'm going to be talking about the VLE site for Structure of English, which is one of the modules offered by Language and Linguistic Science in this short presentation. Okay. Um, so first of all, a bit of background about the module. Structure of English is a Stage one module. This module provides an introduction to how English is structured in terms of its sounds, words, sentences and conversations. This year there were 61 students taking the module, and these were mainly students on our English Language and Linguistics degree, for whom the module is compulsory. Every week, students have one x two hour lecture workshop led by academic staff in the department and one x one hour seminar led by a graduate teaching assistant. And the module was assessed by two open assessments - an open piece of coursework assessed between weeks four and seven, and a five hour online exam in the revision and assessment period.

Okay, so the module is structured according to the template we received from the VLE team, um, as edited by Departmental Professional Services staff. So the top of the front page has key module information. And then below that module content is grouped according to teaching weeks. We included pictures in the section and headings and there's a banner to try and make the site look a bit more jazzy. Okay, so this is the structure of English site. We've used a banner which we've also repeated as our module information logo. And then we've got the key information at the top. And below that we've got teaching materials organised by Teaching Week which students can click on to expand. We've grouped everything to do with assessments, for example, in the assessment folder. So students will find all their assessments in this one section of the VLE. Within each week sections, students could find the pages for the weeks lecture seminar preparation, and information about the readings that week. And we also added links to resources discussed in class and a discussion board. On the slide I've shown you here, the section for week one, when students were studying the sounds of English led by Sam Hellmouth, you can see that Sam's added some links for students so they can transcribe sounds using phonetic notation. And we also added discussion boards so students could ask questions about the week's content to the lecturer leading each of the week's topics.

And this is what - so this is what another week looks like from one of the sections I was leading. You can see that we've got a very similar layout. So we've got these documents with the lectures, the readings and seminars, and a discussion board space. And we've also got a revision quiz, which I'll come on to later. Then at the document level, for example, the seminar - students could find or view seminar materials. We used these spaces to post additional materials and suggested answers after class. Okay. So here for example, is the week five seminar document. Students find a quick overview of what the seminar is going to be about. Then the seminar preparation, which students can view online or download. After the seminar we also added an answer key with suggested answers for each, um, for the task. We tried to keep the structure the same each week so that students would know where they would find, um, for example, lecture slides or the suggested answers for the seminar activities.

So I'll finish up by talking about a few of the optional tools we used. Discussion boards and quizzes. So discussion boards weren't generally very well used. I've shown here the number of student posts each week. So you can see that only a handful of students used them each week. And no students posted anything on the discussion boards after week three. Because of this, we didn't include any discussion boards for the final two weeks. Similarly, there was, uh, quite limited engagement with the assessment focussed discussion boards. But this did continue a bit after week three. Um, so the module team will discuss whether we include discussion boards for next year's version of the module, and possibly we'll include them and see where the students engage with them. And then make a decision about what to do in future years.

So we also added some quizzes covering some of the module content. The reasons for only including quizzes for some of the module content were partly to do with the way the teaching and assessment was structured on the module and partly historical. In terms of module and assessment structure, we were able to offer formative covering the first four weeks of the module which covered sounds and how they combine. However, we didn't have time to provide a second formative on the second and third parts of the module, which are one word and sentence structure and then conversation structure. But we did have many quiz questions that have been developed for a discontinued module on word and sentence structure. So we used these existing quiz questions to let students practice analysing word and sentence structure and receive feedback on their answers. Now in 2023-24, because of time pressure, we only released these quizzes at the end of the autumn teaching period. So they were basically available as a revision tool, but only made available in the final week of term.

So here's how one of these quizzes works. In this quiz, we've got 21 questions drawn from a question bank. Students have questions in a variety of formats. So we've got some where there are true or false answers. We've got some where the students have to select the correct answer from a list of possible responses, and some where they have to select the correct answer from a dropdown box. Once students have submitted the quiz, they can view the correct answers and some feedback. Now students seem to have made quite good use of the quizzes, so about half of the students completed some or all of the quizzes for each week's content, and some students made multiple attempts at each quiz. However, they might not actually been very effective as a revision tool. There was a positive correlation between the number of quizzes attempted and the mark on the second assessment, but this was very weak. We'll make some changes next year. We'll release the quizzes in the week they're relevant to, and we'll also review how well the quiz content fits with the module content as we review module content anyway. We'll consider development of quizzes for other sections of the module, but this will depend on whether staff have time to develop new quizzes.

So in summary, we follow the template we were given to ensure consistency of site structure with and between courses. And we thought this would make it easy for students to find material they needed. Overall, as far as we can tell, students were happy with the VLE and other online resources. So 11 students completed the module feedback form, and these 11 students all agreed that the IT resources and facilities, e.g. the VLE, supported their learning. We made use of a couple of optional tools. Use of discussion boards was limited. We'll continue to use these in future as a different cohort may use them more, but we'll keep their use under review. There was better engagement with quizzes, though these might not have helped students with their revision as effectively as hoped. We'll certainly release quizzes earlier in the module next year, and we'll review other aspects of the quizzes, too. Okay. Thank you for watching.

2024-25

Ellie Rye provides an update on the delivery of the module in the 2024-25 academic year when two key changes were made:

  1. Students were given the option of responding anonymously to the weekly Q&A discussion boards.
  2. Rather than releasing the quizzes towards the end of the module as a revision resource, quizzes related to weekly content were released on a weekly basis and kept available for reuse throughout.

Ellie reported that the opportunity to post questions anonymously increased engagement with the discussion boards. Students asked a greater number of questions as the module progressed and the quality of the questions was good. Engagement with the quizzes was largely in line with the 2023-24 academic year with quizzes accessed by around half of the students on average. For many, there seems to have been a tendency to access the quizzes during the week of release and not to revisit them at later points such as during the revision and assessment period. Acknowledging the difficulties of measuring impact on learning and assessment, Ellie reported that there was a weaker correlation between test completion and exam marks suggesting that they were less useful as a revision aid this year. To address this, the module team intends to advise students to do the test more than once and at spaced intervals in future iterations of the module.

Watch their presentation:

Structure of English - Update (Panopto viewer) (7 mins 20 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So, as Rob's just said, I'm going to be giving a bit of a follow up. I'm talking about a module called Structure of English which is a stage one semester one module in language and linguistic science. And it's divided into three sections taught by different members of staff. So with different subject expertise. Sorry I'm just playing with my screen a bit as well. There we are. So the first four weeks of the module look at the sounds of English and how they combine, the next five weeks look at the structure of words and sentences in English, and the final two weeks look at the structure of conversations.

There's now only one summative assessment on the module, which is an online exam in the revision and assessment period. Students do have a formative on the first four weeks of the module content. And they also have, um, but we wanted to give them something else covering the rest of the module. So they also have weekly practice quizzes on weeks 1 to 9. I think I demoed these quizzes last year. I'm not going to demo them today for reasons of time, but if you want to have a look at those you can look at the video from last year.

So that's - I'm mainly going to talk about the quizzes, but I did just want to talk about discussion. Um, I will talk about discussion boards a bit as well, which I talked about last year. So we've made some changes this year. Last year we only had discussion boards where students were identifiable when they posted questions. This year they had the option to be anonymous when they posted too. That's one change we made. And the other changes were to the quizzes. So last year we only had them for weeks 5 to 9 of the module, and that was partly to do with workload and partly to do with the existence of questions we could re-use. And we only made - last year We only made them available at the end of the module. So they were available as kind of revision quizzes in week 11. This year, besides allowing students to post anonymously, we also added more quizzes which covered content from weeks 1 to 9. And we released them on a weekly basis. So in the week the content of which they related to. So, they were released kind of with a bit of a lag in the first week because of other stuff. But released in weeks 2 to 9. And for the rest of this short talk, I'll talk about how engagement with these tools compares over the two years.

So first of all, the discussion boards and I think allowing anonymous posting has, basically really improved student engagement with these discussion boards. Last year we only had seven student posts in total, and no one posted anything after week three. We weren't sure we would continue with these. This year we had a lot more posts. I think 33 in total. So not huge numbers each week. But students did engage with them throughout the module. And then the quizzes. So this is the number of students who completed quizzes last year. So about half the students on the module completed the quiz for each week's content. There's a slight drop off as you go through the different quizzes. Um, but, um, oops. There we go. Um, they - Doing more quizzes does seem to correlate with, um, a better exam mark - there's a kind of moderate positive correlation between the number of the quizzes that were attempted and students marks on the exam. So they appear to have been relatively effective as a revision tool when they were released at the end of the kind of taught content of the module.

This year, as I said, we added more quizzes, though, um, and generally the number of students who did them was also around the 50% mark in total. So not, um, apart from kind of some initial keenness, I guess, not much difference there. And again, there was a bit of a decline in the number of students completing quizzes each week. I had a quick look at when students did the quizzes. There were some students, quite a lot of students, who just do them once in the week that the quiz was released. There are some students who just do them in the revision and assessment periods, and then there are some students who do them in both periods. But, unlike last year, there actually wasn't such a strong, um. Uh, there was a weaker correlation, I suppose, between, um, the number of quizzes they did and their exam mark. And I think this is probably actually, um, doing the quizzes didn't really help students very - We've got no evidence it really help the students to be honest. And I suspect this might have something to do with when the students were doing the quizzes. So a lot of those completions are done in the week of the content and never again. So basically, it might have been a bit more effective to do it later on in the module, in terms of revision in any case.

We don't have a brilliant understanding of what students thought of these tools, though we did have one positive comment in module feedback about the discussion boards. So one of the students included a comment saying that the open question portal made it easy to ask questions and access support. So, a bit of positive feedback, but very limited.

So where are we after this year teaching? So I think the discussion boards, we can be quite positive about, and say that if we allow anonymous posting, they are helpful for some students who make use of them. And we had good questions on them about the module content. There was still good engagement with quizzes overall. But they don't seem to have helped students prepare for the exam as effectively as last year. I kind of suspect this is partly due to when students are doing them. I suppose ideally we would be like students do them multiple times at spaced intervals, Rather than just once in one of the two periods they tended to do them. So this is something we can suggest students do next year. And we can see where they take our advice or not.