Logistics: Technology & Scheduling

There are a few logistical choices you'll need to make as you start using Just-in-Time Teaching. These include what kind of technology you'll use to post questions and collect student responses, in which course or courses you'll implement JiTT, and when to schedule JiTT exercises in your course. Read about the options, including the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches, below.

Technology

Your technological choices are many, with the differences being in how hard they are to set up and how hard they are to use once they're set up.

• Easiest: Use JiTTDL's Hosting Service

  The JiTT Digital Library (more info) website includes a hosting service. Once you've set up an account, you can use it to post JiTT questions and retrieve student responses for your course. This service is available for the first year you use JiTT in your courses, so that you can focus on other aspects of using JiTT during that time.

• Easiest: Course Management Software

  If your institution has a course management software system, such as WebCT, Blackboard, or ANGEL, you'll probably want to use it. This software makes it relatively easy to set up a quiz or survey to receive student responses. You can also use the software to respond to students with a grade and/or comments. You'll probably find yourself writing similar comments on many student responses. By developing a bank of those comments (from which you can copy and paste) you can cut down on your grading time significantly. The IT staff at your institution may offer tutorials on how to do these things, or may even be able to work with you one-on-one as you learn to use the system.

• Harder to Set Up, Easy in the Long Run: Devise Your Own

  If your institution does not have a course management system, you can create your own web-based forms. For example, Laura Guertin at Penn State Delaware County used Macromedia Dreamweaver to design a web-based form that writes to a Microsoft Access database. She has also designed a web page that can bring up student responses question-by-question in the classroom to engage the students in discussion.

• Hardest: Email

  Finally, there is also a low-tech option: you can simply provide students the questions in class or on a static webpage and have students email their responses to you by a deadline. This is recommended as a last-resort option, however; it takes much more time to read individual email responses and prepare answers to show the class.

In Which Course(s) Will You Use JiTT?

While you may want to implement JiTT in multiple courses, we recommend that you choose just one to start with. Which one is really up to you....

• If you use JiTT in a large lecture class, it has the potential to change the atmosphere in that class from passive to active. Yet you will need to read all of the student responses to the questions. As with anything you do, this takes more time the first time you do it than it will in subsequent semesters.
• If you use JiTT in a medium-sized or smaller class, it will require less reading on your part, but the payoff for your input of time and energy may be less. You want to aim for a balance that will work for you, where you feel that student engagement is worth the amount of set-up time.

When and How Often to Schedule JiTT Exercises

Ultimately, you may want to use JiTT exercises every week, or possibly even more often. But when you are first implementing JiTT in a course, you may wish to build exercises in gradually. You can begin with a few JiTT exercises in one semester and add more each time you teach the course. In time, as you add more JiTT exercises in, you will see reduced course preparation work, the ability to grade more efficiently, and the positive impact JiTT has on student learning.

If you are only using a few JiTT exercises during the semester, you may want to schedule them strategically. For example, you might schedule them to be due

• one week before each exam, or perhaps half-way between exams, to offer students feedback on their learning at regular intervals throughout the class.
• as required pre-lab assignments, so that entrance to the lab room (for some lab exercises) is dependent on having turned in the JiTT assignment.

The Role of JiTT in Your Course

While you are thinking about how many JiTT exercises to incorporate in your course, you may also want to consider how much they will count. While 10% seems to be a fairly standard approach, Laura Guertin has 30% of her students' final grades come from their performance on her weekly JiTT questions. Laura found that her students simply didn't do the exercises when they counted less. Of course, the percentage of the final grade that comes from JiTT exercises should be proportional to the number of them that you use.