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Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19

You are here: Home / Archives for Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19

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 anyone has experience being a single parent and working from home with small children, please consider writing up a guest post.

Please contact WaterGirl if you would like to contribute a guest post.  Contact information is under Contact Us.

Oh, and here’s an inspirational song from a teacher:

I Will Survive, Coronavirus Version (for teachers going online)

UNC hit by a clue by four

by David Anderson|  August 18, 20208:00 am| 79 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19

The University of North Carolina (UNC) wanted to have Fall 2020 look mostly like a normal fall semester with students on campus, kids in classes and the football team playing.  Sure, there might be a few modifications as everyone would be encouraged to wear masks, and parties would be strongly discouraged, but things would look 85% normal-ish.

Undergraduates moved in about 10 days ago. Dorms were open and at nearly regular capacity. Everyone was finger-wagged on good behavior. There was no entry testing to establish a baseline of community infectivity nor isolate random individuals who were infected and potentially infectious before they could come in close contact with other, susceptible people.

Classes started last Monday. Everyone was asked to report symptoms (although by the time symptoms are differentiable from a hangover, there have been several days of plausible infectivity). Everyone was asked to be socially distanced and there were some huge parties and also the normal day to day interactions of campus and dorm life.

Reality hit on Monday:

UNC hit by a clue by four

Case count in the UNC community went from 11 for the week August 3-10, to 135 for the current week. Four major residential facility clusters had been announced since last Friday. The case count is likely to be low as this dashboard only reports individuals tested in the UNC health system. Individuals who got tested off-campus are not included. There are also likely to be many individuals who are currently non-symptomatic but either in the early part of their infectious period or entering their infectious period who have either not been tested, or are waiting for test results to be returned.

 

BREAKING: One week into the semester, UNC-Chapel Hill announces that it is transitioning all undergraduate classes to fully online instruction, effective Wednesday.

Story to come. Check this thread soon.

— The Daily Tar Heel (@dailytarheel) August 17, 2020


Last night, UNC decided to stop getting beat by a clue by four.

As long as we have broad, unconstrained community spread, we don’t get to go back to 85% of normal.

My big worry right now is are we creating a dispersed, super spreading event. I am assuming that there are a large number of individuals currently on UNC’s campus that are undiagnosed but infected. If they were infected over the weekend or late last week when the clusters were first being identified, they are entering peak infectious period just as many may be  leaving Chapel Hill to return home.

There are few good options to manage this self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. Locking down all on-campus residential facilities for several days in order to do community wide screening testing is a possibility.  That might allow for the safe return of dorm residents who have negative results while the university could isolate and quarantine any potentially positive individual for the serial period. However, it does nothing about the off-campus residents and the community spread risk that they pose.  Some may stay, some may go.  I think if Orange County and Chapel Hill go back to late March regulations, local spread may be contained, but again, state and national spread is likely as people disperse from campuses.

UNC is getting hit by a clue by four early.  However it is not the only university that is convinced that it could resume operations at 85% of normal. Duke has students on campus.  Duke has a far more aggressive testing plan but higher density residential situations for more students who live off-campus.  Notre Dame is seeing high positivity rates of 11.5% of diagnostic (not general re-entry screening) testing since August 3.  Positivity rates above 5% is a very strong indicator that a population is not testing anywhere near enough and targeted measures such as tracing and isolating potentially infected individuals are logistically challenging if not impossible.

UNC is the first major university to try to resume business as mostly normal and failing miserably.  It will not be the last.

 

 

UNC hit by a clue by fourPost + Comments (79)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Fairchild

by WaterGirl|  March 19, 20208:00 pm| 54 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Information As Power

This is our sixth Guest Post related to the impact of school and university closings that are catapulting schools into distance teaching on the fly!

Guest Post from Fairchild

My name is Kevin Fairchild, and I am an Instructional Technology Coordinator for a public K-12 district in California.

Watergirl asked me to write a bit about Google Classroom. I’ve been using G Suite tools for a decade now, and teaching teachers how to use them for 9 years, some as a Teacher on Special Assignment, and now as Instructional Technology Coordinator for a public K-12 district in California.

Opinions: Distance Teaching and COVID-19 (a lurker)

Google Classroom is an increasing popular tool for teachers in K-12 schools. This is partly because of its minimalistic design and ease of use, but also because it’s included at no cost if the school or district uses the rest of G Suite (Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Meet, etc.). Google Drive was designed for businesses, not schools. It works best when a few people are sharing files with a few others. For a high school teacher trying to share documents with 150 students, Drive is impractical. Hence the development of Google Classroom.

Classroom began with a very sparse feature set, but has grown over the last few years to be a nearly complete Learning Management System. Originally, Classroom was little more than a management system for Drive, making it easy for teachers to share files with students and receive work back in return. They have since added a gradebook, co-teachers, conversation forums, organization tools, quizzes, grading rubrics, plagiarism checking, and integration with other systems.

A typical workflow goes something like this. A teacher can create a classroom, and is given a “join code” that they can give to students. Students sign in, enter the code, and they’re in the class. The teacher can then create an assignment, with as many file attachments or links as necessary. Classroom can then create a copy of each document for each student, so they are working on their own, and each student’s document is automatically named for them. (No more receiving 150 emails with files all titled “My Paper”.) Students do whatever work they need to do, using whichever Google App, and click “Turn In” at the top of the page. The teacher can then grade, comment, and return the work. There are other options, but this is the prototype.

In my district, we have been teaching Google Classroom to teachers for five years. We’ve seen the most uptake at the elementary grades. Our secondary teachers tend to prefer using our full-scale LMS, with its additional features, and additional learning curve. But as Google has added feature after feature to Classroom over the years, we have seen much more usage at all grade levels.

Teachers who have been using Classroom already are well prepared for our sudden-onset distance learning. In the past few days, I’ve been working (remotely) with dozens of other teachers who want to get started using Classroom and other Google tools. There are some excellent videos and tutorials out there for learning how to use Classroom, but always be sure to look at how old the resource is. Even when they’re not adding features, Google loves to redesign and move buttons around, so anything older than a year or so is just as likely to confuse a novice user as to help them.

Note from WaterGirl:

For sharing, and for future reference for yourself, you might want to bookmark the whole series.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/category/health-care/covid-19/distance-teaching-coronavirus/

You can also find it under Featuring in the sidebar (it’s in the menu bar / hamburger on mobile).

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: FairchildPost + Comments (54)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Martin (Assessment)

by WaterGirl|  March 18, 20208:05 pm| 81 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Guest Posts, Healthcare, Information As Power

This is our fifth Guest Post related to the impact of school and university closings that are catapulting schools into distance teaching on the fly!

It’s our second post from Martin.  (Thanks, Martin!)

Opinions: Distance Teaching and COVID-19 (a lurker) Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Martin 2

With all the great information we’ve had so far in these posts, I am wondering whether we’re still in the “dog” phase, or if some of you might at least be approaching the “cat” phase.  Perhaps that’s too hopeful – what with this being the first week of Distance Teaching for some – but we’ll get there.

For now, we’ll consider the cat as aspirational.

Take it away, Martin!

Online Teaching in the Trenches – Assessment

Pushing your presence out to students is one thing. You probably have Canvas or Blackboard to help you with this. You can publish lectures on YouTube or your campus’ video hosting platform of choice, you can do live lectures or discussions on Zoom. But maybe you’re accustomed to collecting student work on paper and returning it that way, and you’re almost certainly accustomed to doing exams on paper.

Formative Assessment

This is a bit easier to handle becuase you can often forgo any serious grade  consequences here. If you have a standard textbook, see if the publisher has an LMS service like WileyPLUS. I’m generally not a fan of these for a variety of reasons – I don’t like the publisher lock-in, their software is almost universally terrible, and students usually hate it. That said, it does usually work, and you get the benefit of large problem libraries and automated grading. But if you need to get something going quickly, it succeeds nicely at that. We’re after ‘good enough’ solutions here.

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If you have Canvas, use its built-in quiz tool. It can do automated grading, or you can grade manually. It’s pretty good. Students like it because its right there in the course space. The downside is that it’s not a great fit for most STEM courses. If you need to do multiple choice, or even short typed answers, anything from Google Forms to Canvas can work very nicely.

For traditional STEM courses where problem solving is the goal, you’ll need to do a bit more work. One of the simplest solution is to have students take a photo with their phone, convert it to a PDF and then upload it through your LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) Recommend one of the free apps that make this easy. I really like Scannable for iOS – it adjusts contrast, perspective and cropping automatically, and automatically stitches multiple pages into a single document. There are similar apps for Android. In fact, I’ve stopped using my big office copier/scanner because my phone and the app was faster and gave me similar quality.

Jupyter notebooks are also quite good for this as well, particularly if you’re replacing a lab assignment. Students take photos of their work and add them to the notebook, provide their formal report, and can do data analysis and the like in the notebook if they has experience with python, etc. Or just have them assemble them in their tool of choice (Office, Google Docs, etc.) and send you a PDF.

One of the bigger challenges with large classes is simply organizing the work that comes in for ease of grading and returning it to students. That’s really what your LMS helps most with, but if you don’t have one, and need to rely on emailed assignments, etc. make sure you give them some hard rules on file naming and such. One of the big challenges at my institution is each student has two IDs – their numerical student ID and the first part of their campus email. Different systems sort on different IDs. Do yourself a favor and have them name the file [ID]-[Assignment Number] so that you can easily organize the assignments into different folders and sort them on your computer to match your gradebook. If you have TAs, that can help divide up the work if you normally work with paper assignments.  Consider a file sharing tool like DropBox that allows you to do file requests so their emailed files will all drop into a folder for you: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/create-file-request#filerequest Students don’t need a DropBox account. You can put a deadline on the request and submit to multiple people so you can dump your whole roster in there.

Writing assignments are always challenging. Consider a service that can help with peer grading for formative work. Some LMSs have this built-in, Turnitin offers it as a service and there are 3rd party services such as www.peergrade.io. Find the ones that work best for you. Peer grading can help reduce the amount of review that you need to provide. There are a number of studies that show that peer grading does a servicable job at giving students feedback. In fact, you can shift your approach a little bit and use the quality of peer feedback the student gives as part of the grade, just to ensure they take it seriously.

My instructors really like Canvas Speedgrader once they get it all set up. It’s a bit of work to get set up, and required them to change their approach a little bit, but the payoff was worth it. Students upload their assignments as PDFs, my instructors use an iPad Pro with Pencil to load the assignment, mark it up just like a paper assignment, submit the grade, and return the work to the student. It removes a lot of the administrative overhead of grading, and works very well for both writing and for traditional STEM problem solving assignments. It also works well for take-home exams.  You really do want a tablet with decent pen input though – iPad Pro, Surface Pro, some Samsung tablets, some convertible laptops all work well. Not a cheap setup, but we’ve been able to reduce the number of graders and readers doing this becuase a surprising amount of their workload is actually just taking a stack of paper assignments and sorting them, etc. and here the computer does all of that adminsitrative stuff for you and allows everyone to focus on assessment and grading.

Summative Assessment

Here’s where things get hard. Test taking services like ProctorU are appealing and do work pretty well in most situations, but have a few drawbacks you should consider. These services work by having students install a piece of software on their Mac or PC that takes control of the computer, preventing students from switching into other apps. It also take over their microphone and camera so that a person at a workstation can monitor the student, just as you do when proctoring an exam. The student needs to show the proctor they have no study aids around, that there is nobody else in the room with them and the proctor enforces a time limit on the exam. The exam is in a web browser and students submit their answers online, which you get in electronic form. The caveats:

1) I do not think they can scale to the current situation. Unlike Zoom which is a matter of spinning up new servers, ProctorU and similar services need to have a person monitoring students – they usually monitor roughly a dozen students at time. I’m skeptical they can staff up and add workstations for the current situation given that almost everyone holds exams in the same few weeks. I would do extra effort to ensure they can handle your course.

2) It works well for multiple choice, short answer, essay – things that can either be easily typed or run through a scantron. It does not work well for problem solving, equations, sketching a diagram, etc. We have worked around that by having the student type in the final answer to each problem, and then taking a picture of their work product with their phone as I describe above and upload that with the exam. They have to do this within 15 minutes of completing the exam. It works, but we’ve never tried it a scale more than a few dozen students, and you don’t get the benefit of easy organization of work materials that your LMS offers.

3) It costs $15-$30 per exam. This is a serious issue at my institution where we have a tremendous number of low income students and being a public, we don’t spring unexpected costs on them. Putting out up to $120 for a set of four finals is something we don’t ask students to do.

We’re advising switching to a paper/project final if you’re about to start a new quarter. If you can make the quiz tool in Canvas work for your final, that’s another good option. Otherwise we’re advising designing an open-book final that students upload through the LMS as a PDF. You may still want a timed final during your scheduled final exam window, and for our instructors they can still do that, but we ask them to give students some leeway on time due to problem with uploading, etc. For project courses we’re adapting an existing strategy that we use. Our project teams normally make a weekly 2 minute presentation on the status of their project, what they did in the last week, and what they are working on in the next week, and noting any new problems that developed. It’s designed to be short so they’ll have to actually put effort into it since they can’t just ramble, and the instructor has a few minutes to ask questions. It’s our way of keeping projects on track. We’re expanding that concept to the final project – students will either put together a video showing their project, addressing specific requirements as part of the course, or doing an interactive Zoom presentation where the instructor can ask questions. The former for larger courses, the latter for smaller ones. Basically, an oral exam. My son is currently doing an animation in Blender illustrating how his project works. You’ll be shocked at the skills your students have if you give them room to be creative.

There’s a lot of other cool ideas and services out there, but they require a lot more prepration and rethinking of how a course is taught. Continuous assessment is the future in a lot of areas, and I’m a big fan, but that’s for another day.

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Martin (Assessment)Post + Comments (81)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Continue On or Stop Here?

by WaterGirl|  March 17, 20207:25 pm| 39 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Healthcare, Information As Power

We started this series on Thursday, March 12, which almost feels like a month ago.

With all the new developments this week (can it really be only Tuesday?) some have had immediate concerns more pressing than teaching.  I know distance teaching/distance learning must still be an issue.  I know this because I called my niece today and they were having fits at their house related to distance learning, technical difficulties with a printer cartridge, no ability to go out and get another cartridge, unrealistic instructor deadlines and expectations.

We do have one more post in the can, from Martin, on Assessments.  And we were planning on separate guest posts on individual technologies: one on Zoom and one on Slack, and likely others.

We had lots of ideas in 2020 BL (Before Lockdowns)  The question is, do you want us to pursue them, or has life “provided” higher priorities? Is distance teaching still a priority for any of you?

Opinions: Distance Teaching and COVID-19 (a lurker)

Here’s what we had planned lo that long ago… on Monday!  Take a look, and share your thoughts in the comments, please.  It’s up to you.  Should we stay or should we go?

Several people have stepped forward and shared what they know about distance teaching.  If you indicated last week that you might write something up, please don’t be shy.  Just do it!

·  Do you have experience being a single parent and working from home with small children?   Please consider writing up a guest post.

·  Is there some aspect of distance teaching, not yet covered, that would be helpful?  Please mention it in the comments below.

·  Are you particularly experienced with one of the major distance teaching tools?  Please consider writing up a guest post on that one tool.

·  If you think this series has run its course, please let us know that, too, in the comments.

Upcoming Posts:
· ZOOM – Immanentize
· Slack – Martin

Any interest in a post on these:
·  Blackboard
·  Canvas
·  Google Classrooms

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Continue On or Stop Here?Post + Comments (39)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Pika

by WaterGirl|  March 14, 20209:00 am| 40 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Guest Posts, Healthcare, Information As Power

This is our fourth Guest Post related to the impact of school and university closings that are catapulting schools into distance teaching on the fly!

This guest post is from commenter Pika, who wrote this in the earlier guest post from A Lurker:  (Thanks, Pika!)

Most of what I’m hearing from the students–especially as Lurker put it, the graduating seniors–is grief.

I asked Pika if she might be willing to write up a few things about connecting with students emotionally as so many feel adrift, ripped from friends, communities, and their physical connection to an institution about which some have complained bitterly but yet still find themselves mourning the loss of.

Take it away, Pika!

*****

Beth A. McCoy
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor
Department of English

I’m an English professor at a public liberal arts school in Western New York. Technology is something with which I’m pretty comfortable, but like so many others I was not prepared to go all-remote for the rest of the semester.

I really appreciated A Lurker’s counsel about the perils of perfectionism, about counting what we are doing in this crisis as real LABOR, about being transparent with students, and most of all about being kind and not leaving students in “radio silence.”

show full post on front page

As it turns out, I’ve been sick and isolating at home since Monday, and so I had to transition to remote even before students left campus.  I’ve thus had a few intense days of immediate immersion in online teaching. I’ve been reminding myself both to choose my words carefully and emphasizing building and creating right now and for after this crisis resolves. I’ve asked them to think about what world they want to build and create going forward. I’ve tried to remind them that regardless of discipline, they all have a stealth major: learning to deal with complicated institutions, for with very few exceptions, they’ll be involved with such institutions long after they leave campus. And even as I’ve shared explainers about ‘flattening the curve,’ I’ve tried hard to remain in my disciplinary lane.

My campus uses Canvas, and so for the first time I’m trying to take advantage of the discussion forums and chat function. The chat I’ve used just for students to tell each other where they are, what their physical surroundings are (e.g., cat, no cat), and what they’re thinking and feeling.

It’s been kind of funny, dashing virtually from the chat function to a discussion forum and then back to chat so that we can bookend the academic work in the discussion forum with the feeling work in the chat.

But the bookending with emotion is important no matter the discipline: biochemistry, business, sociology. Students have just lost their peer group. Some fear for themselves, their families, their towns, and their countries. And so if you are in this situation, I guess my best counsel is to decide what emotional marks you want to hit and then hit them often. Remind them that whether in an accounting, dance, or history course, they are in this together, and they’ll get through it together.

Here are some concrete examples:

I offered the following Canvas questionnaire:

Can you please tell me a little bit about what/how you’re feeling right now? Knowing this will help me bend the course around you.

Can you tell me a little bit about the internet access in the place you stay when you’re not on campus? Do you think you’ll be able to access Canvas and Google documents, for instance? Feel free to tell me about any other tech concerns you might have, including laptop/device access.

Is there anything else you think I should know, anything else you’d like to express?

And in one of my classes, I offered this discussion prompt:

Please read this article reflecting upon Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture and listen to the speech (audio embedded in the article).

“How lovely it is, this thing we have done — together.”

As the world as it is has prevented us from meeting face to face to reflect on the last collaborative process, we have to adjust to our new circumstances. I ask that you take some time to craft a careful, thoughtful response to the following:

Did you learn anything about yourself through the process of contributing to the first collaborative essay? What will the challenges be as you embark on the next collaborative process amid circumstances that have radically changed in practical, technological, and emotional terms? What steps do you commit to taking to explore what is possible and offer hope during a challenging time?

Please use class time to write your own response and post it.

Over break, please read your peers’ responses and write back meaningfully to them. Make each other feel heard and seen. This is a way to maintain the fabric between you so that when you return to take up the threads of the next collaborative essay, you won’t be strangers.

Carefully crafted words that flower in the fullest, best parts of humanity can be packed up and taken with you wherever you go. Work your magic.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

*****

Note from WaterGirl:

For sharing, and for future reference for yourself, you might want to bookmark the whole series.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/category/health-care/covid-19/distance-teaching-coronavirus/

You can also find it under Featuring in the sidebar (it’s in the menu bar / hamburger on mobile).

 

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: PikaPost + Comments (40)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Martin

by WaterGirl|  March 13, 20209:59 pm| 28 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Guest Posts, Healthcare, Information As Power

This is our third Guest Post related to the impact of school and university closings that are catapulting schools into distance teaching on the fly!

Opinions: Distance Teaching and COVID-19 (a lurker)

Here’s Part 1 from Martin – Online Teaching in the Trenches  (Thanks, Martin!)

Online Teaching In The Trenches

So, my credentials here are different. I do have some teaching experience but my main experience is with curriculum development and implmentation with a heavy dose of technical expertise and focus on assessment. I’ve chaired statewide initiatives and worked as an advisor for a number of K-12 districts. My main experience is with STEM instruction, including writing instruction at the university level. I’ve developed and led online learning initiative with varying degrees of success. There are valid individual objections to online instruction, but  now we have no choice, so let’s make the best of this.

There’s a right way to do this which can produce better outcomes than traditional in-class instruction, but they take a lot of time to set up. We don’t have that, so we’re going to have to MacGuyver this shit and accept a lesser outcome.  I’m assuming an environment where you have access to your campus, but where  work-from-home policies or quarantine may be in place leaving you with minimal  technical support. Assuming here you’re pretty much on your own.

Your first decision is whether to do live instruction or recorded. Live takes less work since you’re mostly just doing what you do in class, but technology problems are more critical at a time when your IT support is at its worst, and  students may not always be able to make that time work. Some may have to share computers, some may be dealing with other realities of a pandemic. Recorded affords you time to sort through some of these issues and is more flexible on both ends, but takes more work to do. The upshot is that you will always haveyour recorded content so if we are still doing this in the fall, your fall offering is now mostly set up. My instructors typically do both – recorded lectures, with live discussion sessions and office hours. Effectively a flipped classroom model. It preserves some of that direct interaction without relying on it working for everyone. When we do have live lecture instruction, I typically insist we have a tech support staffer in the room simply due to the frequency something goes wrong.

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Live Instruction

Zoom is the go-to standard for live instruction. Most institutions have licenses.  Students are often familiar with it. It runs on all platforms, and Zoom Rooms allow you to schedule your Zoom session just like a course. It can scale to 100 participants for a standard license or 300 for an institutional one. Do some practice ahead of time to learn how to deal with muting, getting the interface the way you need it, making sure your screen sharing works, etc.

Zoom can also record your session so you can use it as a poor-mans recorded lecture tool. It works both as a tool for simulating a discussion session, as well as for something like office hours with students dropping in.

If you have a TA or some other assistant, having that person able to monitor a chat  space where questions can be posted and feeding them to you to answer makes the whole thing go massively better. They can also triage questions and if they feel it only applies to that student, they can just answer it in chat.

I’ve heard some questions about whether Zoom can ramp up to handling every unviersity course in the the country overnight, and I think the answer is yes. They built out on AWS and then moved into their own cloud stack, but have retained the ability to do surge capacity on AWS, so yeah, I think they can scale just fine. They may have some outages as they work out what the real demand will be, but I think they’ll move in front of that quite quickly. They have a  good team.

Also, in my experience, Zoom works better on mobile devices than computers. So if you aren’t doing screen sharing, just run it on your phone. It’ll probably be easier, better quality, and more reliable. If you miss your white board and you have an iPad Pro with Pencil or a Surface or a Galaxy tablet with pen, then you can do screen capture on those devices and work out problems for the class. These can vary a lot in terms of quality. A standard iPad with a 3rd party stylus isn’t very good. I have a 12″ iPad Pro with 2nd generation Pencil and it’s amazing.

Recorded Instruction

The worst outcomes result from taking your traditional 50 minute or 80 minute  class, recording it, and putting it online. That may be where you have to start, but try and change that as soon as you have time. We have to break down some basic conceptions here. The 50 or 80 minute lecture is not the product of some grand pedagogical consensus. It’s an administrative construct designed to operate schools efficiently, particularly in an era before computers. It’s the factory model.

Armed with that set of constraints by administrators, instructors have developed  means to make that work relatively well. There is something to be said for physical presence, subtle non-verbal interactions, reading a room, etc. But we can shed that administrative constraint here and adopt better approaches for students. You likely have an intuitive sense of the pacing of your course by week, but the students don’t particularly care about that. That’s your time management need, not necessarily theirs. As we go thorugh this, the pacing may shift relative to where you want to do assessment. And that’s okay as long as it doesn’t get too out of hand. Online courses generally give students some flexiblity to adapt the pacing to their needs.

So, start by thinking about how you choose to learn. It’s generally in short  bursts allowing for time to review and apply it, reinforce whether you  understand it, and then tackling the next concept. If you are recording your lectures consider taking your normal 50 or 80 minute lesson and break it up into conceptual elements  that are 5-10 minutes long. They should be a complete concept, they should look back slightly to remind students what this module will build on, and they should look forward to the next module. This helps anchor the concept in the larger  context. As a result, your 50 minute lecture may not fit in 50 minutes of  recording. That’s okay. The other benefit of smaller modules is easier maintenance in that if you need to revise or re-record a module, you just need to do 5-10 minutes.

If you take a 45 hour of instruction class and break it  up into 5-10 modules, you’re looking at maybe 300-400 videos. You want to be able to create one of these, maybe do a little bit of editing – add a title screen, trim a bit from the start and end and push it out to your campuses system fairly efficiently. Our faculty generally prefer Youtube hosting with embedding the link in a Canvas lesson.  That also makes it a bit easier if you need to re-offer the course and you can copy  everything over to the new course space and just edit it. With so many videos, you’ll need to do some extra effort to make the listing/directory easily navigable with clear titles. If you number your videos, don’t put them in the title of the video.  Often times instructors want to add a new video and that throws off the numbering. Number them in Canvas and break them up in a chapter/video manner so that if you do need to renumber, you won’t have to renumber all of them.

And a course is rarely actually linear. Typically you’ll build off of something you introduced several weeks ago, and here you have an opportunity to point students to review a set of concepts as an introduction to something new. ‘Go review videos 3-4, 3-5, 4-2, and 4-3 before starting 7-1’. That’s something you can’t easily do in a traditional class, but is trivial to do here.

Don’t go crazy with technology. You want solid, reliable over flashy.  If your institution has a service or software such as Replay, you may be best off sticking with something that your institution will provide support for, even if it’s not the best for your use case. Most faculty just want to go through a Powerpoint presentation with a voice-over.  Using a camera is better as students are more engaged looking at you than just listening to you. If you feel a bit more technically capable, I’m a fan of Filmora  for recording. It does a good job of screen capture (your Powerpoint) as well as  your video camera and microphone in an overlay window and giving you good editing  tools. It’s a nice bit of software that runs on Mac or Windows. Not terribly expensive. But if your school has Replay and support for it, I’d just stick with  that to start.

Supplemental Instruction

This does afford you the chance for supplemental instruction. Don’t be afraid to point students to other content. Professional YouTubers are very good at this, they have full editing gear and experience, and they know how to do the ‘performance’ of engaging teaching, and making things interesting. That doesn’t come naturally to many instructors, particularly when you are just speaking to a camera. You don’t need to replace your own instruction with this content, but students may find a lesson that came with a week of planning, professional

editing, and  animations to be more illustrative. Especially here in the beginning when you’re  scrambling to get something working, leveraging the work of others can take some  pressure off. EEVBlog, Physics Girl, Wootube, etc. Every discipline has someone passionate about that discipline out there creating content. This will work better  for lower-division than upper-division instruction, but you’ll be surprised at how much advanced content is out there.

If you’ve lost your labs, you’ll have to move to demonstrations since presumablycyour institution is still open and you can simulate the lab. Again, record thesecrather than trying to do them live – it will never go well. You may be able to pull the demonstration off perfectly, but having to do the cinematography at the same time will break you.

If you have more time or you have TAs who can help with this, a really good model I’ve seen work is to take a problem or a demonstration and record it 3 times. Do a 1 minute solution (advanced), a 3 minute solution (typical), and a 5 minute solution.  Students that feel like they have this down, they can do the 1 minute video. Most  will do the 3 minute, but those that are stuck might need the 5 minute – which may be more detailed, cover some remedial material, walk through the math in more detail, give a 2nd or 3rd explanation, etc. This will obviously take longer, but may help reduce the amount of live explanations if students get stuck.

You may be surprised at how much experience your TAs have with video or audio recording and editing. It’s not that uncommon.

Tools of the Trade

Most people can get by very well with Zoom and either Replay or something like Filmora.  If you can afford a bit of gear, take lessons from pro YouTubers. They’ve driven the cost of much of this stuff down, so you can really up the quality of your instruction for not much money. Your laptop camera and mic will certainly work fine to start, but a separate camera and mic will make your results much better.

1) Lighting – Get a softbox lighting setup: https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Boxes/b?ie=UTF8&node=14014901 These provide diffuse lighting from a non-point source, so they knock down shadows. You need more light than you realize. $40 and up.

2) Camera – Logitech StreamCam. $150. This probably also takes care of your microphone needs. It’s not as good as a dedicated mic, but it pretty good. You may need to add a stand for  flexibility.

3) Microphone:  The best reviews of these, IMO, including audio samples:https://marco.org/podcasting-microphonesRecommend the Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB. $100. This assumes you’re sitting and  presenting, not standing. If you have a decent camera like the StreamCam, you can  probably skip this. But get a USB mic so you don’t need to deal with other hardware.

If you’re doing demonstrations, the camera with stand and lighting will be key.  Alternatively, your phone can do a servicable job here – especially a recent flagship Galaxy or iPhone. There’s software for using an iPhone as an external camera such as iWebcam. Depending on what you’re doing you can step up even to a DJI Osmo Mobile 3 Gimbal – $120. Really amazing bit of hardware for stabilizing  video, even does motion tracking, etc.

If you do have access to your campus, see if your department can set up a few classrooms or conference room as studios. Or set your office up as one. Mount a camera, lighting, etc. so you can present in front of your white board or at your desk.

And many disciplines really benefit from recording their lessons out in the world. An iPhone and gimbal setup and you can give an urban planning lecture in a setting that illustrates your topic. Or from a museum or what have you. The change in venue is engaging for students, and you may enjoy the opportunity to get away from things a little.

I’ll do a separate post on assignments and testing.

*****

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For sharing, and for future reference for yourself, you might want to bookmark the whole series.

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Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: MartinPost + Comments (28)

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: Immanentize

by Cheryl Rofer|  March 13, 20205:00 pm| 31 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19, Guest Posts, Healthcare, Information As Power

From valued commenter Immanentize –

You’re saying I must now teach On-Line?

Opinions: Distance Teaching and COVID-19 (a lurker)

It seems that there are a number in this community who are having the immediate surprise of having to convert their teaching to all-online.  It has been crazy!  And there is so much information that seems contradictory out there.  And how do I decide what to teach?  How to do it?  How do I keep my students engaged?  And, how do I test/assess online?

All worthy questions and the speed with which teachers are being asked to switch what, in many cases, has been a career of successful teaching methodology has just been tossed out the window.  I think (almost) every teacher understands the need for this switch at this moment in our national Thunderdome, but it sure feels like punishment.

Well, many of us are hoping to help you through some of this transition.  There are so many commenters who are experienced and eager.

show full post on front page

My creds – I am a law professor who, for three and a half years during massive institutional upheaval, acted as the Vice Provost for Faculty and Curriculum at my “Mid-Size Comprehensive University” (about 6000 undergrads and another 3000 grad students including law).  I was inter alia, responsible for our Center for Teaching Excellence and was also put in charge of our school’s creation and expansion of online offerings, Hybrid classes, and MOOC productions.  We also prepared a proposal for creating an in-house online production unit with the goal of starting a non-degree university extension program (certificates and specialty areas).  Well, the Higher Ed. Crash of 2013-ish put most of those projects on ice, but I still learned a lot!

And I am hoping to share some of what I learned with you.  In this first post, the plan is to start off with some basic definitions, then offer some ideas about where to start your new design.  I also will briefly mention online assessments.  We really will need another full thread focused on tech – but even now get to know your institution’s Learning Management System (LMS)!

First, so we can all be on the same page in this discussion, let’s discuss some terms.  I know many institutions use variations on these, but I will use the following terms:

F2F – Face to face, in person, teaching.  What we all currently think of as how education happens.  There are all sorts of different methods that can be employed in such a class – lecture, Socratic method, image-based learning (remember the old art-history course slide decks?), Team-Based Learning (not to be confused with group projects), discussion leaders, etc.  There are a LOT of F2F pedagogies, and every teacher has their favorite or blend of favorites in the classes.

Hybrid – This is also often referred to as a “flipped” classroom.  In a hybrid course, the idea is to take a great deal of the knowledge learning out of the classroom (minimal lecturing) forcing students to do their learning work before any F2F meeting.  In the Hybrid model, the idea is to have fewer F2F meetings, but maintain the same learning level among students.  There was a large double-blind Carnegie study regarding statistics that demonstrated that Hybrid methods improved learning outcomes.  Institutions liked it because it meant you might be able to double faculty class sizes without them having to increase teaching loads.

Online Synchronous – This is what most people think of when they first think of online teaching.  And it may be the way, in some cases, to go.  A professor teaches a course, often to a live audience, while a further audience is ‘attending’ the course via the internet at the same time.  This is the Harvard Extension School model of online education.  Now, however, the same thing might be done without any live audience – just people webbing in to watch a lecture or demonstration.

Online Asynchronous – This is the Kahn Academy model of online teaching – lectures about topics, or even whole courses, that can be viewed or heard at any time by the learner either on the intertubes or after download.  There are obvious convenience advantages for the learners, but the relationship between the teacher and the student may be limited, or non-existent.  Imagine if you could still take a course from Dr. Carl Sagan! Well, you can, but he doesn’t have office hours….

MOOC – “Massive Open Online Course.” The MOOC was pitched as a democratic solution to some education ideas.  And it can work, BUT – really good MOOCs are expensive to produce and really only suited to evergreen topics (more on this later).   Luckily, MIT and Harvard started a joint project around the promise of MOOCs called EdX.  Their business model wasn’t great – but their course research and data are phenomenal, and their baseline conclusions can be very useful for you as you get ready to go online.

Assessments – OK, tests.  But not all tests need be graded, at least not by the teacher.  There are formative assessments – that solidify learning; and there are summative assessments that are intended to rate the learning.  I am putting up a PowerPoint I once did about assessment on the vertical (how are students doing in the course) and on the horizontal (how does my course fit into the overall learning objectives of the program in which I am teaching).  In both axis both formative and summative assessments can be designed to help your students and help you make a better course.

[Now, if this was an actual online course, I would make you do a formative assessment right now to make the above ‘sticky’ in your head.  But I’m not gonna.]

So, with some of the lingo out of the way, let’s talk about your class.  Most everyone (some lab instruction excluded) are now moving to fully online – not even the version where there is a live and online synchronous audience.  At least at my University, Professors have been told not to let students sit in the classroom while they are recording their class, even if it is a synchronous course being taught at the regular class time, in the regular classroom while being simulcast on the web.  Students just are not welcome on the campus right now if that can be avoided.  Some schools are pushing their faculty to do this and offer your online whatever only during your regularly scheduled class time.  I get the impulse.  Students are already into a regular schedule and keeping them on the same schedule is probably a good idea – but, not necessarily the best way to convey your lessons.  If you are required to produce synchronous pre-scheduled material, your challenges are different than if you can present the course in a completely asynchronous fashion of a blend of the two.

Designing an online course may feel daunting because of the technology, but let’s push that off for a moment.  The tech can follow your design.  When I was a kid, there was a Saturday morning show of international children programs. One of the foreign segments was about a boy in the Australian Outback with many wonderful animals.  But he still had to go to school!  Which was via the shortwave radio in the family room of their home.  It was question/answer and lecture.  Please don’t teach online like you are using a shortwave.  Sadly, many of my colleagues teach exactly like that.   F2F.  It will be boring for you and twice that for your students.

Backwards Design Your Course

First, go backwards.  Most teachers know this concept now – in fact, I think the younger the students you teach, the more you have been trained to course design in this fashion.

FIRST – What is/are the overarching GOAL of the course

SECOND – What are the OBJECTIVES related to each goal

THIRD – What TASKS of learning will be assigned or recommended to achieve each objective?

FOURTH – what assessments will you deploy to monitor student achievement of the tasks, objectives and goals.

You are now done designing your course! 😊  We can talk a lot more about specific online course designs later, but let’s get something ready for the next week?

Conveying Knowledge

Now how does this go online?  Your first step is to get a clear idea of the capacities in your Learning Management System (LMS).  We use Blackboard, I like Canvas, and many public schools in my area are using Schoology.  They all offer roughly the same suite of apps, with each product emphasizing this or that functionality.  In many cases, an online course could be designed entirely around the functions available in your LMS.  The most critical ones for a quick online setup will be the boards, or comment sections.  You all blog, so this should be a natural!  Every LMS has the capability of tracking responses and student engagement.  They also all have some capacity for assessments, usually including timed “check out” testing where students can take a test out but only have a limited time to complete.  Colleges use such systems for language proficiency exams now.  You could spin up a completely acceptable online course completely within your LMS – especially if it allows links to external content.  Considering the rush, I urge those who have flexibility to use the least complicated technologies as you start and save more complex tech (like Zoom) which require more tech support, set up time, etc. to take full advantage of.  So, you first step is to take your re-designed course and figure out how to get the learning to the students.

Back to the Evergreen! – In the future, which is now being catapulted by this crisis, the best courses will have all their evergreen material online.  All of it.  Evergreen material is that which does not change from class to class – like “There are nine members of the US Supreme Court.”  That may change some day, but it has been true for a very long time and will not switch anytime soon.  It is safe to consider this “knowledge” that can be put online as an evergreen fact.  It is a waste of everyone’s time to lecture about material in a roomful of students when they could learn that material outside the classroom.  This is, in theory, the first step of the Socratic method – students should learn everything they can from the assigned material and then classroom time is spent testing, challenging, and confounding that “knowledge” by the Professor.  Of course, that is not how it works, but how it should.  And it doesn’t work that way because most teachers teach like they were taught which included a very heavy amount of knowledge transfer from teacher to student in the classroom, often in lecture format.  So, first identify all the lecture material you generally deliver and put it online.  Students do not need to look at your shayna punim while you deliver this information!  In fact, it is probably better if you do NOT record yourself YouTube-style sitting in front of your computer lecturing.

My suggestion for the easiest rollout?  – make a podcast of your lecture materials. These can be heard anywhere – train, gym, bathtub – without the need for anything more than a phone.  Then, in your LMS, put up an outline or PowerPoint of that podcast lecture.  Your students will learn more and thank you for doing it. But, as mentioned by other commenters on Thursday – do not make your evergreen podcasts or viddys last longer than 15 minutes or so!  This is a very important learning reality.  The research (by EdX) suggests that the most optimal timer period for a learning module is 10-12 minutes followed by an assessment.  This creates the student learning that sticks in their brains.  15 minutes is a good target because there should be a quick preview and an overview bracketing the substance of your knowledge material.  Most teachers do this instinctively in class, mixing up knowledge transfer with other materials, anecdotes to make the material stick, other student interactions, etc.  Boredom and loss off interest is the mind killer….

Next up – we will post a more detailed something about the techniques of staying in touch (and being nice!) to your students (see the last link below).

A quick word on tech – What does your institution support?  Which technologies is your LMS most compatible with? (For example, many of my colleagues use and love Panopto (but it is more compatible with Canvas than it is with Blackboard).  So many people are discussing Zoom, but there are many other options for group meeting management.  Even Google GotoMeeting is good.  Skype also has such capacity for smaller groups.  Please do not get involved in a new technology in the middle of the semester if you or your school cannot support it

Generally, here are some nice online class primers with Zoom focus:

Stanford’s for Canvas

Suffolk’s for Blackboard

St. Mary’s of CA:  Humanizing Online Teaching

 

Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19: ImmanentizePost + Comments (31)

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