New resources for teaching about ERPs (especially for remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic)

Will you be teaching a course about ERPs (or a broader course with significant ERP content) this year? Will you need to be teaching remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you concerned that you and your students will suffer from Zoom fatigue if you try to replace all your in-person classes with synchronous Zoom meetings? If so, we have some resources that might help!

We’ve created a free, fully online “Introduction to ERPs” course. It’s designed for people who want to be able to read and evaluate ERP studies or who need to get a basic background prior to learning to conduct ERP research. It can be accessed at https://courses.erpinfo.org/courses/Intro-to-ERPs.

The main goal of this blog post is to let you know that you can use any or all of the individual materials for this course in the courses you teach. These materials should be particularly helpful if you’re teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic (but I think you’ll find them useful even after the pandemic). You can access the materials at https://erpinfo.org/intro-to-erps-course-materials.

All of the course materials have been released with a Creative Commons license so that you can use them in any way you want. You just need to provide an attribution (“by Steven J. Luck, https://erpinfo.org/”).

The course consists primarily of a series of 5-minute lecture videos hosted on YouTube (including closed captioning for ADA compliance). You can preview the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXKXgcv8muTKKSReNVWsOUBiIOvinSIrD

The videos are organized into “chapters,” each of which contains 4-8 videos. You can use any or all of them. If you’re going to use more than a few, we recommend that you keep them in their current order. You can see a table of contents here.

The first five chapters focus on what ERPs are and how they’re used, and the last three chapters focus on the methodological information that students need to learn so that they can read, understand, and critically evaluate ERP papers and/or start working in an ERP lab.

Each lecture video is followed by 1-2 quiz questions (which are very important for keeping the students engaged and maximizing their understanding and retention of the materials). 

Each chapter also includes a PDF with lecture notes for that chapter. 

We can provide you with links to the videos, the lecture notes (in PDF or PowerPoint format), files containing the quiz questions, transcripts of the videos, etc. If you use the Canvas learning management system, we can also provide the materials in a format that you can import with a few keystrokes.

We’ve also provided a special version of the first lecture video designed for undergrad courses at other colleges and universities. If you’d like, we can work with you to provide a custom introductory video to make it seem even more natural that your course includes lecture videos provided by a professor from a different university.

Most of the materials are available for download at https://erpinfo.org/intro-to-erps-course-materials. Some of the course materials (e.g., the quiz questions and answers) are on a password-protected web site so that your students won’t find them. We can give you access to this site.

Questions and requests for materials can be directed to Steve Luck (sjluck@ucdavis.edu). I really want people to take advantage of these materials, so don’t hesitate to contact me!

I’m planning to use these videos myself in an undergraduate-level ERP course that I’ll be developing next year. By having the students watch these lecture videos outside of class, I’ll be able to focus the class meetings on discussing journal articles and on teaching students to analyze ERP data (using the ERP CORE data). The lecture videos are designed to give the students the background knowledge necessary to read and critically evaluate ERP papers. One of the chapters goes through the methods section of an actual ERP paper, explaining every typical step of recording and analysis. And the final chapter goes through 10 common problems in ERP studies so that the students will know what to look for when they’re critically evaluating a paper. Toward the end of the term, I’ll have students find ERP papers on topics that they find interesting and write reviews of them as if they were journal submissions. This is something I’d ordinarily reserve for a grad course, but I’m pretty sure that my UC Davis juniors and seniors will be able to handle this after watching these videos and going through several papers in class.