1 Preparation

While we had a good response to the data intensive mini-course last year, participants still seemed to want more as far as data visualization and advocacy. In January 2023, Jill came across the book Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals. This is what our people need! Let’s do something similar to last year, but with this book! Johnna agreed.

The plan came together quickly and the first email announcement went out February 17, 2023. Applications were due on February 28th. We had eight applicants and accepted them all, with seven finishing. We had:

• 4 from last year, one from a 4-year institution and three from 2-year institutions
• 1 new person from a 2-year institution
• 1 new person from a state agency
• 1 new person from a private college

Acceptance emails went out March 22nd, with a reminder about participant expectations:

• Read the book and complete the associated assignments before the workshop starts
• Participate in all 4 sessions with camera on
• Do your homework during July (about 2 hours/week)
• Support each other
• Produce and present your final project, gathering feedback along the way

We bought the books in April to arrive in May so that people had plenty of time to read them. Some participants had access to the electronic version at their libraries, but most chose to use the print version.

The plan was again to have four live sessions via Zoom on Thursdays in July with the expectation of 2 hours per week for homework.

We kept the principles in mind from Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Responsive Teaching as we designed this mini-course. We had a module in D2L for each week plus a Start Here and a Wrap Up module.

Due to union contracts and funding, we couldn’t require some of the participants to do any prep work before July 1, but we wanted them to be prepared for our July 6th session. To add another complication, July 4th is a long holiday weekend for many people. We opened up D2L Brightspace early on June 7th and gave the participants warning about the tight timing. Some participants did voluntarily prepare in June. The ones who didn’t felt behind.

We used the same grading scheme as last year. Participants needed to meet 80% of the requirements to successfully complete the course. We did not use letter grades, but rather this scheme:

• Complete
• Resubmit
• Not Yet Complete

There were initially 12 activities to complete, but we did make some adjustments due to participants’ feelings of overwhelm.

Tools We Used:

• D2L Brightspace – this was the home for the course
• Zoom – we met live via Zoom web conferencing
• Mediaspace – we created some videos and stored them in Kaltura’s Mediaspace
• Quizizz – we used this for a final review quiz game

We had difficulty with permissions for Office 365 Whiteboard for our students outside of Minnesota State, so we changed to simple Microsoft Word documents for the reflection activity concluding each live session. Students reflected on:

• Key Points
• Favorite Thing I Learned Today
• Questions I Still Have

All of the applications, other than Quizziz, are enterprise-level and Minnesota State-supported. This allowed for some ease of use due to prior knowledge for Minnesota State participants and also caused some anxiety for our participants who had not used these tools before.