I’m BIG into online teaching. It can serve our students well and do imaginative and important things that aren’t so easily done in the classroom. After a decade of pushing the envelope, I can share my thoughts and approach. 🧵
Online teaching allows students with jobs, kids, disabilities, or caring for aging parents a way to be in my classroom. It’s about inclusion. If you care about equity, online should be part of your teaching portfolio regardless of COVID-19
It takes about 160 hours for an experienced teacher to design a full class from scratch. Important to understand as you set expectations. You can’t make a great class in a week. But you can set up a super discussion board and an interesting assignment.
Like many people I use a module approach, one per week. I set it up as a very clear linear progression of what students should do in order. Watch this, read this, try this, now answer this. Clarity is everything. It must be really clear what students need to do.
About 25 percent of the module is lectures by me, 7-10 minute voice-over PowerPoints of key concepts and examples using screen capture. Gotta keep them short and pithy and focused and fun. No videos of people just lecturing. So tedious.
Then there are links to an array readings, blogs, videos that round out the learning. I have given up on using textbooks in online. There’s so much material out there, and it makes the modules more of a discovery quest.
I always include a discussion board, but also an activity that is personalized in some way for students. Often these are linked, like completing a self-assessment then discussing with others.
An exit quiz on each module is designed to capture the overall learning. I don’t use multi-guess, but rather binary grading 1/0 of 1-3 open ended questions. Criteria: does the student show evidence of grappling with the module materials? You can see the students improve!
Students embrace discussion boards if you ask them questions they care about. I select prompts that integrate their own experiences into the topic in some way. One post per module and two responses to others. They are so much fun to read. The prompts take a LOT of thought though.
Now my biggest tip. Any new platform has many bugs (wrong dates, bad links, etc ). For a new class, I give 1 extra point to the first student who identifies each bug. They get so happy when they find something that doesn’t work!
When I started teaching online I also added exit questions about each module to get immediate feedback on what didn’t work and what did.
The large assignments run parallel to the modules, informed by them but somewhat separate. A lot require students to talk to someone or go somewhere. Observation, interviewing, or other research skills are useful here to structure the assignments.
On Monday I start teaching “Food and Culture” to 600 students all over the world. I love the challenge of making the huge online classroom feel intimate and personal. Yes, 600. First class I ever did was 800. I survived.
If I had to start teaching online immediately next week due to COVID-19, I would find a way to co-create the online classroom with the students, making the mess of unexpected transition a shared adventure. I would grade generously and reward all contributions to the group.
Good luck to all being thrown into the grand world of online. Maybe it will prove to be the best thing that has happened to your teaching in years. Was for me.
