All over the country, schools and universities are suddenly moving to distance teaching, at least for the short term, with little or no preparation because of the pandemic. If you are working in education in any teaching capacity, and this image captures how you are feeling, this may be the series for you.
More than one Jackal has stepped forward and has offered to share what they know about distance teaching. Mr. Robert’s mom always said “Look for the helpers.” Well, we have a lot of those on Balloon Juice, and we’re gonna see if we can harness some of that expertise.
This will be an informal ad-hoc series where folks can chime in with their expertise, their recommendations, opinions and tricks of the trade. “This is what we’re doing.” “This is what worked for me.” “Brainstorming.” “I ran a distance teaching program.” “I’m supposed to start teaching remotely on Monday, and I have no idea what I’m doing”.
Some of the posts will be formal, some informal. Nothing has to be perfect, or perfectly written. (Though you won’t be penalized if your guest post is.)
The first post, that I will put up in a little while, is from a lurker who contacted me. Imm contacted a few of us, and Cheryl will be putting up his guest post within a day or two. Martin, if you would be willing to do a guest post and you haven’t already contacted a front pager, come on down! Anyone else with experience or expertise, please let us know in the comments, or contact the front pager of your choice.
We have a new category just for this, and a link under Featuring, so the posts will be easy to find. If you guys have resources you would like to share, we can collect all of those in one place and add a link for that.
In the meantime, we’ll likely make the post titles consistent so they are recognizable as part of the series
Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Person’s name.
Baud
I can’t believe Cole doesn’t pay you.
With all the ads, he must be making tens of dollars.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Raking in the Zergshit bucks.
Martin
I had a number of comments on this a few days ago, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to find them. Anyone willing to repost them here?
NotMax
Just be blunt and call it Long Distance Learning Tips.
As noted downstairs, how to handle kids without the hardware and/or no internet at home, or without a fixed abode at all?
mrmoshpotato
I got nothing, but Holy shit, that fuckin’ dog!
ROFLMAO! Thank you!
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: They say the dog picks you, not the other way around. The dog spoke to me and begged to be used for this series.
Aleta
@WaterGirl: “ACTing …”
(Obv. a pro.)
Spanky
Who the hell is Mr. Roberts, and why is he wearing that cardigan?
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Or this:
Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Person’s name.
Spanky
@Spanky: And where’s Ensign Pulver?
Spanky
Our national treasure, Alexandra Petri:
FlyingToaster
We’re about to be dumped into this for music school; Saturday is the last day in-building. Everything is going remote starting Monday.
For individual lessons, and music theory, I don’t see a problem. But I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make group violin work. Given today’s lagging Internet (first day of significant work-at-home for our neighborhood, at least half of the adults were home today), I see a presumptive failure mode due to latency.
All of our weekend committments for the rest of March have been cancelled, except for this Saturday’s music classes. No Science Olympiad, no Suzuki Festival, no violin graduation, no Playathon, no tour group rehearsal.
I’m waiting to see if they have to close school next week (nearby, all but Watertown and Cambridge public have already announced a 2-week closure). It’s a tiny private school, but without testing available, I’m expecting we’ll see a live case pretty damn soon. At which point they go remote, and cancel the Spring Play (dammit!) and Track&Field. Pfeh!
Walker
I run the game design program at Cornell. Game design is a super-high touch course with 8 person project teams. We are gearing up for online right now. We spent today talking to the students about best practices for working remotely (a lot of people are so worried about educators making the adjustment, they forget that this is a big adjustment for students too).
Most of the campus is using Zoom, but that solution is simply not going to work for us. A Zoom meeting has to be created by a host, only lives as long as the host remains active, and break-out room creation is primitive. We are moving the discussions to Discord (naturally) because we need screen sharing more than we need people faces. However, we are planning on using a hybrid of online solutions as no one piece of software really does everything we need.
Spanky
Somebody needs to go to jail: (via WaPo)
Darkrose
I’d be happy to share what I know about teaching online using Zoom. I used it to train my fellow SJSU MLIS students for two semesters; it’s a great tool for both synchronous and asynchronous instruction, and if your school uses Canvas, it’s easy to integrate.
I’ll be working tomorrow and probably over the weekend to try to convert my upcoming library instruction sessions to Zoom.
Nicole
I’ll look forward to reading these. My 4th grader is on remote learning this week from Wed-Fri, and while his teachers have done a dandy job setting up 3 days of work, it’s been a heck of an adjustment to do this much work from home (further complicated by the kid having to tag along for my last 5 days of radiation therapy, which I had not planned for). The kid HATES distance learning, because he misses his friends. They all have school email accounts and are chatting together, which helps some, but he’s lonely, for sure.
Most everything is being done via Google Drive, with lots of use of outside educational websites and assignments to turn in via the Drive. Including physical ed!
Brachiator
I’ve done distance teaching of tax related courses using Go to Meeting.
We would make a download of course materials or a PowerPoint available as a PDF file available before the session.
The PowerPoint never simply regurgitated the text of the session but highlighted the main points.
I would flip between the PowerPoint display and a display of a computer screen showing input and calculation.
We often had a second person who would monitor a channel that allowed people to ask questions. That person would also answer those questions. The primary instructor would include selected questions and answers that related to the topic being covered.
Because of class size, we would mute attendees.
Class sessions were typically an hour, but occasionally longer, with 15 minute breaks.
We used the standard KISS system. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Standard format. Clearly preview what was going to be taught, teach it, and summarize what was taught.
Because people were paying for this, we started on time, and rarely delayed the start of the session for more than a minute or two.
A video of selected sessions was available for later download.
WaterGirl
@Darkrose: That sounds great! Are you up for writing something up and sending it to me? Or to your preferred front pager?
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Was it in a thread Cheryl put up?Maybe Monday or Tuesday in an Anne Laurie thread?
Scout211
My husband is now retired but he taught at a private university for 40+ years. A few years before he retired, they changed to remote teaching for all summer sessions. The university did have training sessions for the professors but the software that the university was using was not that hard to learn.
A few random things he learned: most of the students liked to watch videos that illustrated concepts he was teaching (he taught psychology) so he found lots of short videos and even assigned documentaries and movies. They did not like to watch him lecture. He changed the process to a more multi-media teaching process and that was more well received
The video chats that replaced face-to-face meetings in his office were not that popular either. He first had “office” hours for that but quickly went to appointments.
Tests were interesting because students tried to take tests together in groups but the software automatically makes the questions random and the tests are timed for each individual student, so that doesn’t really work. I’ll try to ask him if he has any other tips and information about teaching lab courses from his fellow professors.
Catherine D.
@Walker:
I work two jobs at Cornell, and it’s hell trying to figure out how to support hands-on lab work remotely.
Darkrose
@WaterGirl: I can definitely write something up. I’ll be in touch!
Immanentize
I have written my first thing. It is introductory and I know people here have a wide range of amazing experiences.
I am trying to go from “this is a football” (for parents and others) to detailed advice. Trying. Hope to see you all soon in the funny papers!!
(I will also be sending in a bunch of maybe useful to some outlines, PowerPoints, word lists, assessment structures, etc.)
WaterGirl
@Darkrose: Great, thanks!
Martin
@WaterGirl: Shit, I don’t know. I’ve been in damn near every thread. I’ve been trying to advanced google search to it, without luck. Keywords I mentioned across a few posts in that thread:
zoom, physics girl, electrical engineering
Walker
@Catherine D.:
We are actually in a good spot. The teams are quite savy and professional (I work with Engineering Communications) with Slack channels and Trello boards long set up. They will be fine working siloed. The problem is the in-class activities where groups critique each other and get paired up dynamically. That is what we are working to replicate now.
LightCastle
I write for a company that does online training for corporations and is connected to a polytechnical academic institution/network. Theoretically we should be good at this but the parent company aggressively wants its courses to be online without teachers – not taught online. (Our game design course is almost certainly not up to Walker’s standard.)
Nonetheless, there are some lessons learned.
As Scout211 says, lecturing online doesn’t work so well. Q&A and review sessions of things they have already reviewed tends to be stronger. (The famed “flipped classroom” approach does seem to work better for this set up.)
The more “hands on” the course (labs, etc) the less it works well online.
Figuring out how you are going to handle tests is a problem that is heavily constrained by the software used. Moving to essays or projects that can be submitted and assessed may be time consuming but tends to avoid that problem.
Dagaetch
This spreadsheet is being curated with links to many schools online resources about remote teaching;
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VT9oiNYPyiEsGHBoDKlwLlWAsWP58sGV7A3oIuEUG3k/htmlview?ouid=115284349797056538063&usp=sheets_home&ths=true&sle=true
Lots of very good sites in there – much of the information is repetitive, of course, but still worth a poke around.
Immanentize
@Catherine D.: Lab work is a really unique problem. But “lab work” covers all sorts of stuff these days. From timed chemical reactions to computer modelling. The basic science lab course is going to suffer, although some disciplines (chemistry is one!) have created usable online lab courses. And, a review of some of the basic undergraduate texts (which I participated in my Uni.) revealed that many text book lab ideas really sucked and were trapped in 1960s thinking.
At research uni.s, most of the labs and upper level lab work continues. They are creating special social distancing protocols for students involved in such lab work. That said, the resistance to online is very strong. But we need good teachers to solve these problems.
Mathguy
@Darkrose: How to integrate Zoom with Canvas would be useful to know. Must read up on it. Thanks for the tip!
Walker
@LightCastle:
We have had a good track-record of placing in festivals. The viral break-out Family Style was made in class last year. But it is only because we do so much actively in the classroom. This year was looking even stronger, so we are doing what we can to preserve that dynamic.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Try this one?
https://balloon-juice.com/2020/03/10/universities-face-covid-19-quarantines/
found you at #47 with a long comment, and there were more.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Thank you!
Immanentize
There is always a huge amount of anxiety about — OMG! STUDENTS MIGHT CHEAT!!!11!
People need to care a whole lot less about that, throw out their ancient, yellowed exams, and create assessments that are harder to cheat. Or think of assessments that involve two or more students. Nothing in my life work experience is about personal knowledge, but rather it has been about shared and team-based effort. Work toward that being one of your learning objectives.
Who said life was fair? We as individual teachers are poor gatekeepers of individual merit.
Immanentize
@Mathguy: Zoom is a particular tech that will require tech support. It should not necessarily be your first go-to design tech. You use Canvas. I really like Canvas, although my Uni. is a Blackboard institution. Step one — tech wise — know all of your LMS (Canvas in your case) capabilities. Then, let’s design.
WaterGirl
@Dagaetch: thanks! i’ll start pulling together a document with links tomorrow.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: are your resources links or actual documents?
Immanentize
Sadly, gotta serve din din to the kiddo. Hasta la Vista!
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: both
Links (easy) and documents or, like we call them, artifacts.
Martin
@WaterGirl: That’s it, thanks. I’ll try and pull something together.
A Ghost to Most
I predict that that there will be a crush on the servers involved. Network load, web load, and backend load will create unforseen and untested scenarios. I do not envy the IT folks.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: So you have both kinds of documents, or you have every document in both formats? Links is simplest, but if you don’t have links, I can figure it out.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Great! thank you. and if you want to be around when that guest post goes up, let me know times that are good.
Immanentize
@A Ghost to Most: I mentioned this before — or this is the IT department’s clever full employment plan.
I hate the thought that people I work with in IT and otherwise might not see the backside of this shit
tobie
I did my first virtual class on Zoom, and didn’t like it, though I’ve had productive meetings with 5-7 people on the platform in the past. I’ll need to figure out how to perk my class up. Visuals and videos would likely help. I teach another class tomorrow on Zoom, where the 15 students have always been very talkative, and the one problem I anticipate is that we won’t be face to face. I hate the new normal but what to do. I also worry not only about students who may not have the proper equipment but those who are going through a tough time. They will feel isolated, and they won’t have (easy) access to campus counseling. Foreign students with visa issues are also under enormous strain.
Ripley
I work in IT in a small rural hospital and there’s already talk about TeleMedicine (it was brought up before COVID-19, to be fair)
Are we ready for it? No. Will we be ready for it? Yes, in 2030. Maybe.
I work with cowards and squishes.
Feathers
I’ve taken a lot of online classes and also worked as a faculty assistant creating the online course platform for traditional courses taught in the case method style. I made several comments in the earlier thread. Let me know if you need any input from me. I’ll read the others and comment.
WaterGirl
@Feathers: If you’re willing and it wouldn’t be too much trouble, maybe you could copy your previous comments into an email or a word file and send them on to me?
PenAndKey
I’ll admit, I’m a gamer/amateur content creator when I’m not at my day job. I’m definitely not a distance education guy. The closest I come is being good with Discord and OBS Studio for streaming and screen capture video recording for Youtube & Udemy for gaming, game coding, design tutorials. So if anyone wants good streaming setup advice I might have a tip or two, but I do not envy anyone having to rapid develop an actual remote classroom right now.
A Ghost to Most
@Immanentize: Yep. Getting a complex web server farm to sing requires attention to all its parts.
I’m glad I’m out. There are going to be a lot of 70 hour work weeks.
Immanentize
@A Ghost to Most: and a lot of jerky pampered faculty who cannot figure out why IT is not delivering full life sized Holo student images to ignore
Mathguy
@Immanentize: I see Zoom as possible backup tool for the things I will be doing. I have a pretty good feel for Canvas already. Just didn’t realize that Zoom functionality could be added.
Erin in Flagstaff
I work in ITS with supporting faculty on our Learning Management System (LMS). We use Blackboard Learn. We have licenses for Kaltura (video recording and streaming) and Collaborate Ultra (web conferencing within the classes).
The question on what to use for us is to think about the end product. Are you just recording your lecture? Use Kaltura to record it. Are you recording your lecture but need a whiteboard? Use Collaborate and record your lecture. Do you want a live synchronous session? Then Collaborate is the way to go. BUT, there are some things to think about:
1. How interactive is the session? You can’t expect a quality session of 150 students. Maybe recording the lecture would be better and offer some short quizzes and discussion questions to round out the lecture.
2. If you still want to go synchronous, understand that not all students will have the technology or location to attend. Record it and be understanding.
3. No matter what you do, it won’t be perfect. Maybe have a live session but make it a practice one worth extra credit. Get everyone used to the software and technology.
4. If you want to use Zoom, be aware that students don’t know it, and it won’t be as fully supported by our team as Collaborate would be.
It’s been an interesting few days here at my university. We just got the announcement today that students will not be coming back after spring break (next week), for at least two weeks.
I’m going to embed a tweet from one of our instructors of a Chronicle article that she wrote. Never embedded a tweet before, so let’s see if I do this right.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Look for the helpers. I am so proud of my <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/onlinelearning?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#onlinelearning</a> and <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/instructionalcontinuity?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#instructionalcontinuity</a> community for their incredibly hard and thoughtful work on behalf of our students right now. <a href=”https://t.co/U4KqXgXykV”>https://t.co/U4KqXgXykV</a></p>— Michelle Miller (@MDMillerPHD) <a href=”https://twitter.com/MDMillerPHD/status/1237106626751901697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>March 9, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
Erin in Flagstaff
@Erin in Flagstaff: Yikes, I tried editing that. Here’s the article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Going-Online-in-a-Hurry-What/248207
CCL
Saw the post title and jumped in – similar to Feathers – I have done/designed/facilitated online training for industries for years. I have often managed learners/participants online live across the globe in different time zones, which might not be all that applicable here.
I am just repeating what everyone else is saying, but:
Don’t lecture – or at least break it into smaller segments 10 minutes or so – and then have an activity or some sort of interchange with the learners.
Even if you have only a web presentation tool such as WebEx or GotoMeeting, there’s a lot you can do to keep it interactive and the learners engaged. WebEx, of course, has its education version – which gives you more functionality such as break out rooms where you can let small groups collaborate on a problem/project/activity and then bring them back to the main room to share. There’s polling – not my favorite tool, I just have them write on the whiteboard or raise their hands, but there are other instruction friendly tools.
I am tool agnostic but there are other design tips about using the tools such as pointers as such to keep the learners attention.
If you have an LMS (Learning Management System) – you can have the learners post projects (such as recordings of their violin piece).
Although I now work with adult learners, I did my time in the trenches years ago as a prof at a community college and an adjunct at a couple of 4-year universities.
Okay, too much scattershot thoughts. I will go back up and read the other comments!
If any of my experience might helpful, I am happy to share more – though I am really lurker by nature.
A Ghost to Most
Darkrose
@Immanentize: There’s a very easy way to avoid cheating in Canvas that I discovered when I took my programming class last year. The instructor drew the questions from problem sets available online, so you could in theory look up the answers…but it was timed. Every minute you–okay, I–spent Googling was less time I had to complete the exam, and sure enough, I almost ran out of time. I didn’t make that mistake on the second and third exams.
WaterGirl
@Erin in Flagstaff: I can post your tweet for you if you supply the URL. You have to be in text mode (not visual) when you paste the tweet in.
FelonyGovt
I’m not a teacher, but an arbitrator. I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to conduct a 5-day arbitration hearing scheduled for the end of April remotely. Parties, counsel, witnesses and me. One of the law firms is a rather large one, and I’m thinking they may have an enterprise license for Zoom.
Darkrose
@Mathguy: It depends on your school, and if they have a Zoom license. All of the CA community colleges have access to CCCConferZoom, which gives you the full functionality, including no time limit on meetings and Canvas integration. The SJSU version had that, and I think the other CSUs do as well.
The one big reason I prefer Zoom to Collaborate is that it’s multi-platform and students can connect via tablet and phone.
Zanamu
First – I live in an asynchronous world that runs in weekly modules, except for doctoral advising. I have taught at the University of Nebraska (f2f & online) and now have an adjuncting gig at a private university that provides me with exactly the right amount of classroom time and is a nice break from my day job.
Consider incorporating transcripts as well as using videos, especially if you don’t have subtitles. (I usually write the script, then do the video – less organic, but I hate transcribing and its more organized.) Not all people are auditory learners, and there is also the population that may have hearing impairments, so you could have an accessibility issue. If you teach non-traditional students – 60% of higher ed these days, text remains a way for digital non-natives; I don’t much enjoy watching videos either, and preferred to have a transcript. The more avenues of learning available, the better your class outcomes. It doesn’t do to have too many students drop, especially at this late date! It costs money and is painful – doesn’t look good on the university books, either.
If you keep up your regular meetings in real time, that is great, but you should always have a plan for WHEN technology fails, as it will. I very seldom teach in this format, but Zoom is useful.
Create small (4-5 people ) discussion groups -this is fairly easy on Blackboard & Canvas. However, keep them organic. You will always have early birds, and then you will have people who come late to the mix. Best for everyone’s mental health if you can keep the groups separate, so Joe doesn’t jump into a topic everyone addressed thoroughly 4 days ago, or Jennifer is languishing in limbo waiting for everyone else to show up. I usually just put the first 4, the next 4, etc. That way if someone has an off week, they are still pulling their weight in their own time. This happens often in online classes.
Be prepared to do a lot of emails & other online communication. I don’t know how you feel about personal contact, but all of my students can text me & schedule a conversation, and my doc students can call 24-7. If I have a particularly good (or persistent) question, I just post an announcement & shoot the email to the entire class.
The nature of the online learner is, a lot of work may wind up happening on weekends, so be quick about responses.
Instructional designers tell me that the more students have to show up online, the more they learn. There may be resistance to this.
I’m not on a tenure line – its not why I got the PhD. I hope online learning is not the future, because the classroom experience is important, but at least we can be accessible in the short term.
Brachiator
UC Irvine Medical School had a program that involved giving iPads to students. The iMed initiative. Don’t know if it is still going on. This supplemented lectures, but seemed foundational to a potential distance learning program.
Emma
Welp, just jumping in to say that I hope remote-learning will go somewhat OK, at least, because now schools in King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties in WA are closed through April 24. No one in my district knows what the heck we’re really doing tomorrow, which was supposed to be a professional learning day, and now may be either an online classes day or a plain old holiday? Are we being paid? Arrrggghhh and my poor special ed student will come back a month and a half from now and not remember what following directions means ;_;
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky: I’m fucking surprised Jones would sink that low, even though I shouldn’t be.
Catherine D.
@Immanentize:
One of my labs works with shooting DNA into cells. Not possible remotely, and some of the students’ honor theses rely on this, but they’re not allowed to stay on campus
The other lab is Fiber Science and Apparel Design. The students won’t have CAD or pattern making software or dress forms. We’re scrambling to laser cut and/or CNC forms for them to take home, but their home sewing may not include sergers, etc.
ETA: Hands on still exists. I’ve figured out how I can work at home for one job, but at a loss for the other.
Zelma
I’ve been retired since 2007, but I actually was an early adopter of online education. I did a graduate reading course with about 20 students (think great books) and it was one of the best teaching experiences I had. I do history which has to be at least partly content oriented. Discussion is fine, but it helps if the students have some basic knowledge. I gave considerable thought at the time about scaling up online instruction in history and I think some of what I concluded may be helpful. I’m talking history here, but there is stuff in other subjects.
Having to move online in just a few days is going to be a real challenge but I think it can be done. One thing that has improved considerably is the amount of online resources. I know all of us professors want to be in charge of the content we offer our students, but in these circumstances we have to let go. Many universities have online content that is open source. (I’ve “attended” some of Yale’s courses. They are impressive.). Go looking for such resources and require your students to use them. You cannot hope to develop equally good resources in a short time.
If you have a large lecture class, break up the students into smaller groups (8-10 students) and require them to discuss the reading assignments. Develop open ended questions and require at least two substantive comments per assignment per student. The questions should incorporate the online material you have assigned. If you have graduate help, you can assign them to “lead” the discussion. Make it clear that their comments will be reviewed and graded. I was surprised how effective this requirement was in encouraging student participation. These suggestions should also apply to medium size classes.
The issue of evaluation is something I did not face since I used essay exams and papers. I imagine these are ideas out there about how to do content based testing online, but I don’t have that experience.
As I said above, my online teaching was among the best I had but it was actually more work. I know this because I taught the same face to face class at the same time. That’s why I have always viewed with suspicion the claim that “going online” would somehow be cheaper. Good teaching can never be done on the cheap.
I wish all my fellow Juicers who are facing this challenge well. I’m sure they will rise to this challenge.
J R in WV
Our very rural and mountainous location means out internet connection is via sat dishes and orbital and downlink locations. SO — when heavy weather comes through the Appalachians our internet connectivity becomes spotty and hit or miss. So on-line classes would be a challenge to put it mildly.
But when I still worked, we collaborated with EPA and software developers in many other states, states where they gave a shit about what EPA was doing, or were willing to help states who needed help keeping up with new tech. Sometimes, rarely, we met to collaborate, annually in New Orleans (that was SO sad!) but mostly online. I have no recollection of the tools used, it was12 years ago.
I wish everyone working on this difficult problem the best of luck, though. If I had anything at all to contribute, I would be all over it, as we aren’t leaving our hollow again for a while now.
In fact — best of luck to all the jackals ~!!~
Rick Taylor
I teach mathematics at a community college in California. Next week, we’re going to online instruction, and I’ve been madly learning about Zoom. It seems I can attach my computer to an iPad, then project what’s appearing on the iPad to everyone else. That way, using the iPad with a pencil, I can show them a virtual whiteboard while teaching. This looks like a good solution in theory; we’ll see how it goes.
The biggest problem I have is figuring out how to give final exams.
mrmoshpotato
@Immanentize: Hasta la Pasta!
ETA – Oh, and Windows Vista SUUUUUCKED! :)
Mandarama
@Immanentize: This is reassuring…we just got notified that we have to go pick our kid up and move him out of the dorm! They’re going to do the whole spring quarter online. So we have been trying to figure out how he’s going to take 3 science lab courses from his bedroom in his parents’ house. (You can imagine how thrilled he is about living at home for months, too. Though he’s sensible and knows the public good is more important, he IS 18. ?)
PenAndKey
I honestly don’t have a clue how my microbiology labs could have been done any way but in person. The main point of labs in microbiology is to give students the muscle memory and physical skills to process samples, and it’s not like you can just ship culture and prep media to students to try at home. The vast majority of the materials needed for the course are restricted to educational and business purchase accounts only. You can’t buy them on the civilian market even if you wanted to. Doubly so for shipping them.
If I were in college right now I’d be panicking, because with the way my university structured degree-required courses and pre-requisites missing a semester of lab work would guarantee I had to take another year and a half of filler courses to qualify for the financial aid to finish all my classes. I imagine the drop-out rate is going to spike next spring for my old program.
Mandarama
@PenAndKey: I honestly can’t imagine it! He’s supposed to do core bio and 2 physics classes, one of them astro. (He also has a music humanities course, but since I’m a humanities teacher myself, I know that’s feasible if not ideal in distance models.)
Imm and I were saying that we are both grateful to NOT be in the classroom this semester. Just a fluke. But if I were trying to transition my own coursework AND having go pack up my kid 400 mi away on a few days’ notice, I’d be having a panic episode. (I’m kind of having one anyway.)
J R in WV
@Zelma:
What a great comment, full of meaty information and recommendations! Thanks for sharing your experience with all the teacher jackals~!!~
I am continuously amazed by the intellectual and real experience and knowledge of this small online community! From Tom Levenson to Adam Silverman and everyone in between, what a great sample of American wisdom and knowledge.
And then there’s me, and OzarkHillbilly…. heh !
Darkrose
@tobie: Remember that not only can you share your screen, you can switch between, say, a PowerPoint presentation and a website. Also, while breakout rooms may be a bit tricky to learn, they’re an excellent tool for active learning.
We had an exercise where we put students in breakout rooms and asked them to use the whiteboard feature to collaborate on drawing something (usually a dinosaur, or cats for Caturday). Then we’d come back and they’d use the screen sharing to show what each group did. That was just to demo the breakout room function, but it really got people engaged.
Darkrose
@Rick Taylor: Do you have Canvas?
currants
@NotMax: This, precisely. Two terrific posts addressed this in ways that really helped me re-focus (I’m also on unplanned virtual teaching, announced for tomorrow but abruptly changed to last night). This FB post (and I’m not on FB) from a prof at Pacific Lutheran, is a great reminder of what we’re doing, exactly: this is no time for best practices–it’s triage. The second post does a terrific job of pointing out some of the many pressures facing our students through all of this. It really helped me back off today when I was worrying about not having prepared them for their next (and biggest) project that (theoretically) begins after break. Perspective, you know? A highly useful thing, and sometimes hard to come by, especially when you can’t see their faces but you HAVE gotten the second long email from your dept chair in as many days, detailing all the “options” we have.
Darkrose
@PenAndKey: I’m really worried about our retention rate. There’s a huge dropoff already from fall to spring semester, especially for black and brown students. When going to college is already difficult, additional barriers may make students give up entirely.
At the same time, we have to keep people safe, and in a commuter school, that’s not easy.
Rick Taylor
@Darkrose:
I do have canvas, but I haven’t been using it. I’ve frantically taking classes.
Michael Cain
25 years ago I did a bunch of bleeding-edge work on protocols to do real-time multi-party multimedia communication over internet protocols. Biggest surprises were (a) the importance of a shared, sophisticated, “smart paper” medium; and (b) how quickly people relegated the little video windows to a body-language signaling channel. Most interesting part was the add-on protocols to make it useful for a meeting of equals as well as a controlled environment like teacher/students. None of what I learned about implementing it is worth a damn these days, since it all depended on IP multicast. The commercial internet still doesn’t provide multicast.
hitchhiker
I’ve taught high school math, college math, and creative writing for both teens and adults. I’ve also developed all kinds of curricula and trained adults in how to deliver it, both in person and online.
The first thing that comes to mind is that “lessons” online can be shorter than you might think. Like, classroom teachers are used to the 50 minute blocks imposed by the school day structure, but there’s no particular reason for that. It’s not a magic number.
What I do is find a chunk of information/skill that you think can be explained and demonstrated in 15 minutes, give them a practice/discussion question or two, repeat the basic stuff, and jump off with some kind of followup. This is good for my corporate clients, who like the focused, to-the-point feel of it. I haven’t used it with kids.
The second thing is, it REALLY helps online to do team teaching. If there are two of you, one can monitor a chat while the other works the material, or you can present together in a complementary way. The thing I hate about working online is that dead air … you can’t see them like IRL, so you can’t stroll over in their direction to make them at least pretend to pay attention. (Most of the time online they’re on a slack channel or reddit or something while you’re huffing and puffing.)
But at least if there are two of you, you know that you’ll get a sort of breather in those times when no one is able to ask or answer a question.
Finally, use video clips to break up the session; if I were doing this I’d assign every kid the job of coming up with a clip that is related in some way to the material. Could be anything — jokes, movie scenes, commercials, whatever. You can slide them in at random, or have a special session to review, save them for after quizzes.
Benno
@hitchhiker:
This. So this. My uni is moving online from Monday, and this was my first point to the asst. dean. But admin is requiring Carnegie unit contact. If the lecture is scheduled for 50 minutes, by god our session had better be 50 minutes! It’s going to be a crashing disaster.
Cathie from Canada
I haven’t read through the earlier replies, but I wanted to pass on this advice from my daughter, who teaches online university classes as well as in-person ones.
She told me today that faculty who were not experienced in on-line teaching were not going to be able to create instructional modules overnight to cover all of the remaining coursework they had intended to cover in the next three or four weeks of lectures in their courses. Instead, she suggested faculty pick just three or four main teaching points that they want to make sure students understand, and focus their online teaching (powerpoint slides, podcasts, whatever, etc) on just these points.
Mezz
I teach History at a community college in Mass. We had been told to develop contingency plans to move classes or lectures online, and I had a big head start because I already use online software pretty extensively. I typically use an LMS (Learning Module System? Is that it?) for giving them information, extra credit assignments, etc. A lot of the material is pre-recorded audio I have done on a variety of topics (Roman art, Romanticism, Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, etc.).
But for the fall semester, I spent the summer developing an online World History I course.
I found that a schedule or repetition of assignments really helps. When the same type of required work comes at them consistently, it’s a bit easier for them to get used to making the time to get the work done.
But within that, I found that a good bit of variety within the assignments worked well also. So within that repetition, maybe the same type of four types assignment (e.g. maps, ID people, summaries, etc.). This kept them in the fall from getting more bored than normal.
We have to be mindful of accessibility at our college, and we’re required to provide captioned recordings and video and/or transcripts, so I would urge folks here to make sure to do that, but that can be really tough. A good program built within the LMS can be a lifesaver, seriously; the auto-generated captions can be remarkably accurate mostly. Mostly. But I would guess one would have little control over that.
I recorded a message for all my groups today, since we had our classes cut short at noon today, and we go on Spring Break next week. But I have been discussing the likelihood with them for a few weeks.
I thought I had one more piece of advice, but I forget it now.
WaterGirl
For those of you who thought you might write something up, please send me email and let me know whether that’s still your plan. If you have written something up and shave sent it to someone else, please let me know that, too, just so I can get the big picture. Thanks. ~WG