My institution hasn't yet determined whether courses will be online or in person this upcoming year, but there is a chance that I will be teaching a lecture course online. I was on leave this year and missed the scramble to move courses online, so I don't have relevant experience and I'm trying to think through how to potentially adapt my course. This is a mid-level class that enrolls both majors and non-majors, and the students range from first years to seniors.
Here are a few of the issues I'm thinking about:
(1) Is synchronous or asynchronous a better format? I am leaning toward synchronous because my regular lectures are very interactive, and I don't want to lose that. My university is also likely to require students to register only for courses in which they can participate from whichever time zone they are in, so theoretically no one should have to be awake in the middle of the night to participate in this class. But I'm not sold on either idea and I'm very curious to learn from the experiences of people who have tried either way.
(2) How have people managed privacy? For several reasons, some involving a stalker-type situation, I can't have videos of me floating around online. I also want to be sensitive to my students' privacy concerns. At the same time, everything that I have been hearing about teaching this semester has emphasized the importance of having recordings available for students to watch later. One option that I've been considering is uploading videos to our course management system, which would ensure that only students who are registered in the course could see them. That seems like some sort of reasonable compromise between people who need to watch a video of the class after the class happens and people who don't want random strangers to see videos of them, though it's not a perfect solution. But that only works if people can't download the videos and then share them with others (or with the Internet at large), and I'm not sure that there's a way to prevent downloading. I'd love any advice that you have on managing privacy while teaching a large lecture course online.
(3) How have people done assessments? Most of the grade for this course normally comes from exams, but the kinds of exams I typically use wouldn't work in a non-proctored situation. I've read that some online proctoring is available but that it's very invasive, and I am more concerned with my students' privacy than I am with exams. Ideally I'd turn them into take-home exams, but I've never written one of these before. If you have, I'd love to hear your advice, especially about what kinds of questions you use. So far I've been thinking of things like "provide an example of concept X and explain how your example demonstrates the concept" and "discuss one similarity and one difference between concept X and concept Y." Are these the kinds of things that people put on take-home exams? What else do people do? I've also been thinking about having students turn in short papers at multiple points of the semester instead of exams, and I'd love any thoughts on that option as well.
(4) What else should I be thinking about? I really would value your thoughts on anything related to teaching large courses online, even if I haven't asked about that specific topic above.
Quote from: nonsensical on May 19, 2020, 04:18:45 PM
(2) How have people managed privacy? For several reasons, some involving a stalker-type situation, I can't have videos of me floating around online. I also want to be sensitive to my students' privacy concerns. At the same time, everything that I have been hearing about teaching this semester has emphasized the importance of having recordings available for students to watch later. One option that I've been considering is uploading videos to our course management system, which would ensure that only students who are registered in the course could see them. That seems like some sort of reasonable compromise between people who need to watch a video of the class after the class happens and people who don't want random strangers to see videos of them, though it's not a perfect solution. But that only works if people can't download the videos and then share them with others (or with the Internet at large), and I'm not sure that there's a way to prevent downloading. I'd love any advice that you have on managing privacy while teaching a large lecture course online.
Yeah, that's the standard approach. I didn't teach synchronous classes last semester, but I just recorded the lectures on Zoom and then uploaded them to the CMS. At least in Canvas, I'm pretty sure you can only stream the video, not download. Of course, there's no way to prevent someone from recording their own video. After all, they could just do that with their cellphone.
There is a difference between planning to teach a class online and scrambling to adapt to an unexpected situation. If you are planning to transition a class that is traditionally a face-to-face lecture class to an online format, you should give significant thought to the advantages for online (there is another thread on this) while recognizing that it should not be a duplicate of your face-to-face class (i.e., do not record hour-long lecture videos!). My face-to-face lectures naturally break into 10 minute pieces, with thought/discussion questions at the end of the segment. When designing my asynchronous online version of this class, I recorded 8-10 minute lecture videos and posed the thought questions as an activity to do after the video. At 8-10 minutes, I have been told that my lecture segments are still too long. I should have (according to the experts) aimed for just 2-3 minutes. YMMV. I design my LMS pages to include the lecture videos surrounded by text that highlights the material on the videos. I also provide the powerpoint slides, just as I would do in a face-to-face class. The advantage of online is that you can accomodate students who are audio learners (lecture videos), visual learners (lecture videos and ppt slides), and those that learn best by reading (the associated text).
You should be aware of regulations regarding online courses and peer-to-peer interactions (there have been threads on this). Consult with your teaching and learning center regarding their interpretation of these rules. In particular, because everything will be set up in your LMS, it is easy for people to investigate whether you are meeting these obligations. Do not put your students at risk of losing their federal financial aid because you were too busy to learn the difference between an online course and a correspondance course. While regulators may be willing to ignore what happened in the spring semester, they may not be so forgiving when classes are labelled as being online courses in the fall.
Quote from: arcturus on May 19, 2020, 05:41:41 PM
At 8-10 minutes, I have been told that my lecture segments are still too long. I should have (according to the experts) aimed for just 2-3 minutes. YMMV. I
I'm always doubtful of this. I've been told the same, but when I have asked for clear research on this, it has not been forthcoming (happy to welcome it from y'all). My online lectures have ranged from 8 to 26 minutes the last many years. I do provide note taking guides (not just slides, but questions I want them to consider) and prompts to pause the video to reflect and answer those questions.
Someone, somewhere, in the 1970s, told me that the reason sit-coms are 1/2 hour with 2-3 min commercial breaks before, after, and in the middle, is because 8-12 min. is the average length of an 8-year-old's attention span, and they figured many adults weren't much better.
I think they cited a study, but I'm sorry to say I don't recall what it was.
It takes 2-3 min. to sing one basic 2-verse song with chorus, usually, in my experience (I construct my own play lists that way)--so I don't think that's long enough to get content across with any nuance or sense of connection to the larger topic.
Not even sure if 8-12 min. is but at least they're reinforced for that.
Pavlov would be so proud...
M.
Oh---and in other news, if you use the search engine here, or on the old CHE threads (if it's back up and running....or limping, as was its wont...) there is a lot of discussion of the things you're asking about. - M.
Quote from: nonsensical on May 19, 2020, 04:18:45 PM
(1) Is synchronous or asynchronous a better format? I am leaning toward synchronous because my regular lectures are very interactive, and I don't want to lose that.
You're absolutely going to lose it. You might be able to recapture some semblance of it synchronously, especially if it's a smallish group of students, they're upper-level students, or you've forced them to do a lot of preparatory work (e.g. come up with a question ahead of time and post it).
.
Quote
(3) How have people done assessments? Most of the grade for this course normally comes from exams, but the kinds of exams I typically use wouldn't work in a non-proctored situation.
Mine aren't usually well-suited to being online, either. So I just changed them all. It was a fair bit of work to put the exam online, and IMO it's not as good an evaluative tool as my usual exam is, but--and it's a
huge but--I don't have to grade it at all, because the LMS does it for me. I could conceivably introduce questions which I would grade, which would be more pedagogically sound, but then that would defeat the point of all the work I put into making the rest of it auto-gradeable. You can usually have the LMS restrict their access to other tabs and things, but I just take that into account when designing the exams, which are now open-book.
FWIW, I think my online exams for non-formal courses are actually
harder than the exams which contain lots of short answer and essay questions, because the multiple choice/matching/etc. is really tricky and subtle. For my quantitive reasoning class, however, I think it's a little easier for them, since there's less pressure to memorize the core stuff they need to reason their way through the questions.
Quote
(4) What else should I be thinking about? I really would value your thoughts on anything related to teaching large courses online, even if I haven't asked about that specific topic above.
It's a lot of (very draining) work to teach online, even when you're just recording asynchronous materials. That's been my experience, at least. And there are even fewer of the usual rewards of teaching. So I'd say: go easy on yourself. Don't try to build the perfect course from scratch. Instead, build something adequate, and tinker your way to a better course over time. I'm pretty sure we'll have more than just the next semester to improve our offerings. And don't be afraid to do stuff which will make your life easier (like using the LMS to grade all or some portion of your exams, or your reading quizzes, etc.).
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on May 19, 2020, 07:51:45 PM
It's a lot of (very draining) work to teach online, even when you're just recording asynchronous materials. That's been my experience, at least. And there are even fewer of the usual rewards of teaching. So I'd say: go easy on yourself. Don't try to build the perfect course from scratch. Instead, build something adequate, and tinker your way to a better course over time. I'm pretty sure we'll have more than just the next semester to improve our offerings. And don't be afraid to do stuff which will make your life easier (like using the LMS to grade all or some portion of your exams, or your reading quizzes, etc.).
Yes! I tried to explain this to people before the great migration and they just looked at me like I was crazy. I think they thought it must be easier to teach online because you just prep everything in advance and press the "go" button at the start of the semester. Good online teaching requires instructor engagement (all good teaching requires instructor engagement!) and it is more time consuming because you end up with much more one-on-one interactions. I try to use the analogy that with a 200 student lecture class I can do a think-pair-share, check in on a handful of groups, and invite summary discussion all within a few minutes, whereas if I do the same activity through a discussion post in an online course I need to read all the students submissions, which takes much much longer. However, after the great migration this spring, I have had several folks acknowledge that an online course is actually quite challenging to do well, and can be more time consuming (and resource intensive) than a similar face-to-face course.
I am heavily in favor of asynchronous. You will have students with all kinds of challenging situations. Some will have poor internet in their buildings. Some will live in rural areas, where internet is still very spotty. Some will be taking care of children during the day, or working, or sharing a computer with other people who have time-essential requirements like working from home. I had a student who couldn't be online one day because he was living back on the family farm and had to help with the lambing, which doesn't stop for a synchronous class. Don't assume they're all carefree young adults with lots of time and technology. When some of them want to get online, they have to drive to McDonald's, which has free wifi, and sit in the parking lot. Sure, they "should" be more available, and they "should" have other childcare or jobs that don't interfere. But if we want to help the students where they are, and not make things worse for the segment that are strained in time or resources, I think it behooves us to be flexible.
The thing about successful online teaching is that it is not just classroom teaching broadcast via computer. It is a whole different ballgame. Don't try to just import your regular teaching style online. Your in-person classes sound great, with all the real-time interaction, but that's just not the strength of online classes. Instead of trying for a third-rate version of in-person classes, instead magnify the strengths of what online teaching can do.
One real bonus to online teaching is that both you and the students will have more time to think before you discuss. In asynchronous teaching, nobody is put on the spot, everybody genuinely has an equal chance to contribute, and the formerly shy and hesitant people can also shine.
As an example, my own son has a stutter that only comes out when he feels everyone is looking at him. Occasionally he feels confident enough to speak in class, enough so that his teachers deny to me that there is a problem. But I know there is one, because he's confided in me and because I've observed it. The real result is that he very rarely speaks in class, because he dreads the stutter coming out. But he's voluble and thoughtful in online classes, because he can write out his thoughts and post them when he's ready, and no one will ever hear that he has a stutter. There are more of these hesitant students than you may think. You will love hearing from them in an online discussion board.
But about the lectures. They simply don't work. It's not a format that works online. It is boring as hell — a talking head droning online. Even if it were synchronous, it's far removed and impersonal-seeming, and students will feel very awkward chiming in. They will also not watch long videos. YouTube has done a lot of study of this, and the average YouTube video is watched for under 4 minutes. I don't mean that the average YouTube video is under 4 minutes — I mean it's longer and the viewer gives up in under 4 minutes. I also had occasion to watch a number of recorded lectures of my fellow professors, a while back. OMG, the tedium. Not only are they grueling to watch, but you are competing with the polish of TV, which every student will be familiar with. Look at how news broadcasts do it. They break frequently, they have fancy graphics, they have clips — there is no footage of just a head talking for many minutes in a row. That's for a reason. And TED talks? Massive rehearsal, polished script, polished graphics, walking around — those are as good as it gets, and none of us are going to have that degree of polish.
Go ahead and watch these online lecturers, who are trying hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AycTgPJtBP0 (quick roundup of the history of philosophy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fbrl6WoIyo (introduction to psychology)
How long before your attention started to wander? And these guys are doing a good job. They are much better than a random prof talking in front of a computer screen. But still — I can bet you stopped watching partway in.
Also, if you have a either a video of you talking or a lecture in real time, how do hearing-impaired students access it? You will need to interpret or caption it — in fact the ADA requires it. Hearing-impaired and deaf students take more online classes in greater proportions than other students, because they are more accessible. So when you think about formats, think about whether it's easy to make it accessible for them.
Instead of lectures transferred online, put the same information up spread between a variety of formats. If you insist, have a 1-2 minute video of you talking informally and showing something visual that is relevant to the course — a Napoleon hat, or a fossil, or something you can light on fire, or something. Then have a little online video made by a professional outfit, like a TV documentary about Napoleon, or whatever. There are tons of these for almost every subject. Bonus: they will usually be already professionally close-captioned. You can also include the occasional delightful video, like a relevant song from Horrible Histories, or a clip of Monty Python doing the Philosophers' Football Match.
Then have a little sheet of interest facts and questions about Napoleon, with pictures. TOP TEN MYTHS ABOUT NAPOLEON, or whatever. Sneak a lot of learning and thinking in there. Then have a substantive PowerPoint about Napoleon's campaigns, with snazzy graphics and information they should know. Then have the readings, which will be the same readings as an in-person class.
Then have the lively discussion board, with an intriguing question that requires real thought (but not outrageously complex) and allows for differing interpretations. They have to make the first post by a certain point in the week, and then two substantive responses to others' posts later in the week. Grade these posts afterwards by slapping a number on them. (I give full points for each unless the post is really, really stupid — but I make it clear up front that saying "I agree!" or "I really like your remark" gets a failing grade. But you won't have that trouble — they love the discussion boards.) Comment widely yourself on the boards, in supportive ways, but redirecting in a kindly way if they start to get facts wrong or interpretations that really won't fly. Divide your discussions ahead of time into groups of 8-12, or they become too big for everyone to read everything. The computer will divide them automatically (be sure to do this at the beginning of the course — it won't divide them once discussion has started).
Then have a short computer-graded multiple-choice quiz about the essentials. Make sure it's uncheatable (have the system select random questions from a larger question bank, have it mix up the order of the answers, and make it time-limited). That will keep them on their toes, focused on the facts as well as the interpretations, and give an incentive not to slack on the reading.
At regular intervals you also have short writing assignments (2-4 pages works best, I find) that allow them to integrate the material and work on questions at greater length.
These elements let students go back over the material and find things with ease, and the combination of words and visuals makes providing the visual material easier than in an in-person class. Another bonus is that you can set it up ahead of time (indeed, you have to) and push a button and it does run by itself. Then what you do is to send out chatty reminders when deadlines are approaching — summing things up and providing a personal touch — stop by the discussion boards when discussion is going (this part is really fun and you will have to restrain yourself from being on there too much), and grade assignments when they come in.
I've done this for a number of years and I find them really great. The student feedback is that they find these classes engaging, admirably organized, and very worthwhile — and that they really appreciate the flexibility and the lack of demand to be synchronous. That's in normal years — even more so in a pandemic.
I actually have handouts on how to do all this if anyone is interested and wants to PM me — but it's basically the same as I've said here, with some details about the LMS.
Thanks for all the great advice, Hegemony!
I'm very jealous of my friends and acquaintances, who are using this as an opportunity to have their friends and acquaintances come in to their virtual classrooms (usually a short recorded Q&A with the instructor), which seems like fantastic leveraging of the online format, and helps to personalize the dry, abstract articles students have to read.
I'd love nothing more than to do that myself, but unfortunately my research network, while pretty extensive, does not extend to the subjects I teach here. Sigh. I think I'll try some cold-emailing, but it's just not the same.
Quote from: arcturus on May 19, 2020, 08:05:17 PM
Yes! I tried to explain this to people before the great migration and they just looked at me like I was crazy. I think they thought it must be easier to teach online because you just prep everything in advance and press the "go" button at the start of the semester. Good online teaching requires instructor engagement (all good teaching requires instructor engagement!) and it is more time consuming because you end up with much more one-on-one interactions.
To be perfectly honest, I'm doing a
poor job of teaching online, and even that's exhausting!
Thanks for the post and the great advice!
Quote from: Hegemony on May 19, 2020, 09:15:12 PM
I am heavily in favor of asynchronous. You will have students with all kinds of challenging situations. Some will have poor internet in their buildings. Some will live in rural areas, where internet is still very spotty. Some will be taking care of children during the day, or working, or sharing a computer with other people who have time-essential requirements like working from home. I had a student who couldn't be online one day because he was living back on the family farm and had to help with the lambing, which doesn't stop for a synchronous class. Don't assume they're all carefree young adults with lots of time and technology. When some of them want to get online, they have to drive to McDonald's, which has free wifi, and sit in the parking lot. Sure, they "should" be more available, and they "should" have other childcare or jobs that don't interfere. But if we want to help the students where they are, and not make things worse for the segment that are strained in time or resources, I think it behooves us to be flexible.
The thing about successful online teaching is that it is not just classroom teaching broadcast via computer. It is a whole different ballgame. Don't try to just import your regular teaching style online. Your in-person classes sound great, with all the real-time interaction, but that's just not the strength of online classes. Instead of trying for a third-rate version of in-person classes, instead magnify the strengths of what online teaching can do.
One real bonus to online teaching is that both you and the students will have more time to think before you discuss. In asynchronous teaching, nobody is put on the spot, everybody genuinely has an equal chance to contribute, and the formerly shy and hesitant people can also shine.
As an example, my own son has a stutter that only comes out when he feels everyone is looking at him. Occasionally he feels confident enough to speak in class, enough so that his teachers deny to me that there is a problem. But I know there is one, because he's confided in me and because I've observed it. The real result is that he very rarely speaks in class, because he dreads the stutter coming out. But he's voluble and thoughtful in online classes, because he can write out his thoughts and post them when he's ready, and no one will ever hear that he has a stutter. There are more of these hesitant students than you may think. You will love hearing from them in an online discussion board.
But about the lectures. They simply don't work. It's not a format that works online. It is boring as hell — a talking head droning online. Even if it were synchronous, it's far removed and impersonal-seeming, and students will feel very awkward chiming in. They will also not watch long videos. YouTube has done a lot of study of this, and the average YouTube video is watched for under 4 minutes. I don't mean that the average YouTube video is under 4 minutes — I mean it's longer and the viewer gives up in under 4 minutes. I also had occasion to watch a number of recorded lectures of my fellow professors, a while back. OMG, the tedium. Not only are they grueling to watch, but you are competing with the polish of TV, which every student will be familiar with. Look at how news broadcasts do it. They break frequently, they have fancy graphics, they have clips — there is no footage of just a head talking for many minutes in a row. That's for a reason. And TED talks? Massive rehearsal, polished script, polished graphics, walking around — those are as good as it gets, and none of us are going to have that degree of polish.
Go ahead and watch these online lecturers, who are trying hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AycTgPJtBP0 (quick roundup of the history of philosophy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fbrl6WoIyo (introduction to psychology)
How long before your attention started to wander? And these guys are doing a good job. They are much better than a random prof talking in front of a computer screen. But still — I can bet you stopped watching partway in.
Also, if you have a either a video of you talking or a lecture in real time, how do hearing-impaired students access it? You will need to interpret or caption it — in fact the ADA requires it. Hearing-impaired and deaf students take more online classes in greater proportions than other students, because they are more accessible. So when you think about formats, think about whether it's easy to make it accessible for them.
Instead of lectures transferred online, put the same information up spread between a variety of formats. If you insist, have a 1-2 minute video of you talking informally and showing something visual that is relevant to the course — a Napoleon hat, or a fossil, or something you can light on fire, or something. Then have a little online video made by a professional outfit, like a TV documentary about Napoleon, or whatever. There are tons of these for almost every subject. Bonus: they will usually be already professionally close-captioned. You can also include the occasional delightful video, like a relevant song from Horrible Histories, or a clip of Monty Python doing the Philosophers' Football Match.
Then have a little sheet of interest facts and questions about Napoleon, with pictures. TOP TEN MYTHS ABOUT NAPOLEON, or whatever. Sneak a lot of learning and thinking in there. Then have a substantive PowerPoint about Napoleon's campaigns, with snazzy graphics and information they should know. Then have the readings, which will be the same readings as an in-person class.
Then have the lively discussion board, with an intriguing question that requires real thought (but not outrageously complex) and allows for differing interpretations. They have to make the first post by a certain point in the week, and then two substantive responses to others' posts later in the week. Grade these posts afterwards by slapping a number on them. (I give full points for each unless the post is really, really stupid — but I make it clear up front that saying "I agree!" or "I really like your remark" gets a failing grade. But you won't have that trouble — they love the discussion boards.) Comment widely yourself on the boards, in supportive ways, but redirecting in a kindly way if they start to get facts wrong or interpretations that really won't fly. Divide your discussions ahead of time into groups of 8-12, or they become too big for everyone to read everything. The computer will divide them automatically (be sure to do this at the beginning of the course — it won't divide them once discussion has started).
Then have a short computer-graded multiple-choice quiz about the essentials. Make sure it's uncheatable (have the system select random questions from a larger question bank, have it mix up the order of the answers, and make it time-limited). That will keep them on their toes, focused on the facts as well as the interpretations, and give an incentive not to slack on the reading.
At regular intervals you also have short writing assignments (2-4 pages works best, I find) that allow them to integrate the material and work on questions at greater length.
These elements let students go back over the material and find things with ease, and the combination of words and visuals makes providing the visual material easier than in an in-person class. Another bonus is that you can set it up ahead of time (indeed, you have to) and push a button and it does run by itself. Then what you do is to send out chatty reminders when deadlines are approaching — summing things up and providing a personal touch — stop by the discussion boards when discussion is going (this part is really fun and you will have to restrain yourself from being on there too much), and grade assignments when they come in.
I've done this for a number of years and I find them really great. The student feedback is that they find these classes engaging, admirably organized, and very worthwhile — and that they really appreciate the flexibility and the lack of demand to be synchronous. That's in normal years — even more so in a pandemic.
I actually have handouts on how to do all this if anyone is interested and wants to PM me — but it's basically the same as I've said here, with some details about the LMS.
+1 to Hegemony's generous post full of wisdom on how to teach well online. I also prefer asynchronous, especially during the pandemic.
There are tradeoffs with all of it -- asynchronous, synchronous, Zoom, Blackboard, in-person, etc.
Some faculty are spending substantial time creating, viewing, and revising videos of themselves. If they enjoy that, fine. I don't.
In class, when I say something, I say it once and done or quickly clarify if needed. When posting on Blackboard, I have to think carefully about how I'm conveying it in the flat text on a screen, fix typos and grammar problems, post, re-read to make sure it posted properly, and deal with the Bb software which frequently messes up fonts and spacing.
So, a sentence uttered in seconds in-person can take minutes on Bb. This adds up.
BBd and all its comrades have horrible online editing setups.
What's with that????
M.
I don't have much to add to Hegemony's excellent advice, but here are two other tidbits I've learned:
1. Record lectures in small chunks. 15 minutes max, ideally half of that. For example, you might have one video giving an overview of a concepts, and three separate videos working through examples of that concept. Just look for natural breaks/stopping points in what you normally teach. Post the lectures as a series of well-labeled links (maybe on a Google Doc) to unlisted YouTube videos. YouTube is stable on all browsers, platforms, and devices. I do not edit lecture videos, and I only delete/restart the recording if I make an egregious mistake. Otherwise I just improvise like I would in a real class.
2. Discussion boards. Make them only worth a little credit, and don't rely on them to assess knowledge. Design discussion prompts for maximum engagement and interest. Although they are imperfect tools, they are an asynchronous way to maintain a sense of community.
Here's what I did:
Lectures - My edited and transcribed lectures are uploaded to a Google drive. The real pain comes in emailing an invitation to join the drive to each student. The students are required to watch the videos.
Quizzes - The students are required to complete a multiple choice quiz for each lecture/book chapter. These are measurements of comprehension and allow multiple retakes.
Tests - Tests are proctored and paper based. I have traditionally required test be taken at a testing center, but this semester i used Zoom to proctor the tests. Not exactly foolproof, but then again, necessity is the mother of inventions. It worked well enough.
Individual projects - Oral and written projects were completed as individual assignments. Oral projects were recorded and emailed to me.
Discussion - The students were grouped into small groups and required to research questions posed in the text book. We then met in Zoom for presentation and defense of their research assumptions. This was actually the most successful exercise. The students were given very broad instructions for required group interactions. I was a bit amazed at their inventive solutions to the communication barriers. During the Zoom discussion sessions we used a group text in addition to the oral discussion which turned out to be quite helpful in encouraging participation.
I was pleasantly surprised with the results of the mid semester pedagogy shift. Not that I don't prefer face to face instruction - I do. However, using tools both in and out of the campus CMS really helped approximate an on campus class. My results weren't perfect by a long shot, but they were acceptable under the circumstances.
QuoteOral and written projects were completed as individual assignments. Oral projects were recorded and emailed to me.
Just curious...What did your students use to record their oral work?
Thanks!
M.
Check with your institution regarding rules. Some of the tips posted violate best practices and even standard requirements for teaching online.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 25, 2020, 06:18:26 PM
Check with your institution regarding rules. Some of the tips posted violate best practices and even standard requirements for teaching online.
Yes. There is a distinct accreditation difference between an online course, vs. an emergency remote course as currently sanctioned by the DOE.
Online courses have specific requirements to comply with regional accreditors. Emergency remote courses are pretty much whatever.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 25, 2020, 06:18:26 PM
Check with your institution regarding rules. Some of the tips posted violate best practices and even standard requirements for teaching online.
Perhaps you could list some of your specific concerns?
For me, I have chose to go asychronous, as it allows me to potentially reuse some of the prerecorded lectures, and allows me to better juggle the challenges of having the kids at home.
I will also chime in that all of this seems to take more time than delivering the lecture in-person, as it takes time to set up the camera, ensure you picked the correct audio input, upload the video, wait for it to be processed, and link them to the correct part of the CMS.
I upload my videos to YouTube as unlisted videos, and link to them from Canvas. This gives me more control over the videos, which is important to me as my university's podcasting agreement seems to allow them to use the podcasts in future quarters without my permission, even though they have never actually exercised that option.
Quote from: mleok on May 29, 2020, 12:27:32 PM
Quote from: polly_mer on May 25, 2020, 06:18:26 PM
Check with your institution regarding rules. Some of the tips posted violate best practices and even standard requirements for teaching online.
Perhaps you could list some of your specific concerns?
I've written at length recently on various threads.
The short version goes:
* The difference between distance ed and correspondence courses matters a lot for federal financial aid. Find out what your institution requires to meet regular and substantive contact.
* Likewise, the amount of work for students to earn their credits is a big financial aid deal. Find out what's required at your institution. Too little work is how several institutions were in trouble with their accreditors about five years ago.
*FERPA remains in effect. Find out what the standard practices are at your institution.
* Posting material outside the CMS is a generally a bad idea for reasons that include violating local rules, accessibility concerns, and intellectual property rule oddities. Links to publicly available material is probably less of a concern, except for the accessibility issues. It's not the instructor's course; it's a work for hire that belongs to the institution.
Quote from: mleok on May 29, 2020, 12:35:10 PM
I upload my videos to YouTube as unlisted videos, and link to them from Canvas. This gives me more control over the videos, which is important to me as my university's podcasting agreement seems to allow them to use the podcasts in future quarters without my permission, even though they have never actually exercised that option.
At least for us, I found that if you post media on Canvas it actually goes through Kaltura, which means that it gets closed captions, which are usually pretty good. You don't get that capability on youtube.
Perhaps I'm naive, but this seems not worth worrying about? I have a hard time imagining the scenario in which anybody is actually going to take all your lectures and use them in another class, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe your online lectures are just better than mine, but I'm pretty confident my head talking above a powerpoint is not something that anybody else is going to really want to steal for their own class.
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PM
At least for us, I found that if you post media on Canvas it actually goes through Kaltura, which means that it gets closed captions, which are usually pretty good. You don't get that capability on youtube.
It gets closed-captioned on YouTube, too.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on May 29, 2020, 04:03:34 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PM
At least for us, I found that if you post media on Canvas it actually goes through Kaltura, which means that it gets closed captions, which are usually pretty good. You don't get that capability on youtube.
It gets closed-captioned on YouTube, too.
Yes, indeed it does get automatically generated closed-captioning on YouTube as well, but I think neither that nor the one through Kaltura satisfies the ADA requirements.
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PMPerhaps I'm naive, but this seems not worth worrying about? I have a hard time imagining the scenario in which anybody is actually going to take all your lectures and use them in another class, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe your online lectures are just better than mine, but I'm pretty confident my head talking above a powerpoint is not something that anybody else is going to really want to steal for their own class.
I teach advanced graduate topics classes, so the content is quite unique and I would like to maintain control over them. As a research mathematics department, we hire postdoctoral researchers/instructors which are paid for using instructional funds, but who contribute towards the research life of the department. We want to ensure that the university does not use their ability to reuse our lectures to reduce their funding of our postdoctoral program.
This concern is sufficiently widespread in my department that we are acquiring local departmental servers where our automatically captured lectures will be stored, so that we can bypass the university level podcasting agreements.
Quote from: mleok on May 29, 2020, 09:03:56 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on May 29, 2020, 04:03:34 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PM
At least for us, I found that if you post media on Canvas it actually goes through Kaltura, which means that it gets closed captions, which are usually pretty good. You don't get that capability on youtube.
It gets closed-captioned on YouTube, too.
Yes, indeed it does get automatically generated closed-captioning on YouTube as well, but I think neither that nor the one through Kaltura satisfies the ADA requirements.
I do not know Kaltura, but YouTube auto-generated should definitely not be relied on for accessibility. It can, however, be a good starting place. Auto-generate and then edit those auto-generated captions to be accurate and synchronized.
Quote from: mleok on May 29, 2020, 09:08:54 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PMPerhaps I'm naive, but this seems not worth worrying about? I have a hard time imagining the scenario in which anybody is actually going to take all your lectures and use them in another class, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe your online lectures are just better than mine, but I'm pretty confident my head talking above a powerpoint is not something that anybody else is going to really want to steal for their own class.
I teach advanced graduate topics classes, so the content is quite unique and I would like to maintain control over them. As a research mathematics department, we hire postdoctoral researchers/instructors which are paid for using instructional funds, but who contribute towards the research life of the department. We want to ensure that the university does not use their ability to reuse our lectures to reduce their funding of our postdoctoral program.
This concern is sufficiently widespread in my department that we are acquiring local departmental servers where our automatically captured lectures will be stored, so that we can bypass the university level podcasting agreements.
Perhaps this just varies by specialty. The content in all my courses, even the introductory ones, is unique. I'm not in a discipline where there is an established model either in the university, or the department for anything but methods courses, which I don't teach. But, that ends up meaning that it would be very hard to imagine somebody coming in and using my lectures. If you wanted to create a course on the cheap, reusing my lectures wouldn't really help you do that, because to make them function you would have to be teaching the course in the particular way I do.
Another +1 to what Hegemony wrote. If you are not willing or able to commit at minimum the resources exemplified by Coursera and TED Talk productions, do not livestream video of yourself lecturing in the physical classroom. Unfortunately there are a lot of colleges and universities who are marching forward with a plan of nothing but livestreaming lectures for all "on-campus" courses in the fall semester -- to reach students not in the classroom at the scheduled times because of health conditions, lower room densities due to social distancing requirements, etc.
As I'm fairly sure someone wrote in a discussion thread here, given the federal definition of a credit hour, redesigning a 3-credit on-campus course for online means replacing only one-third of the course's content, because for an on-campus course there is supposed to be two hours of out-of-classroom study activity for every hour spent in the classroom. Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.
The current situation is demonstrating just how little some colleges and universities care about the quality of instruction. This is going to bite them in the ass in the coming academic year when they find out students are leaving despite a multi-million dollar investment in "classroom instructional technology."
Quote from: spork on May 30, 2020, 06:33:24 AM
Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.
Why do so many people have such odd ideas about lecturing? My lower level courses are mostly lecture based, but that doesn't mean class is just me prattling away at the students. The point of lectures is to give students context and tools through which they can understand the discipline and material. When my classes go well, lecture is participatory. We discuss how the context of the lecture relates to the reading, we talk about how to understand and think through documents and images, students ask questions etc. etc.
None of this is abnormal, everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.
Not at the same level, exactly, but as a smaller-scale model, my theory PowerPoints include 5-6 quiz questions about every 2-3 slides, which we cover during the class time: we may do two or three as examples during a class, then as we do a quick flip-through review of previous material covered in the next class, they answer the rest and we discuss them.
Obviously this is synchronous, and with a smaller group of students, but I recall large lecture classes as an undergraduate in which a similar model obtained.
So, yes, lecture ("reading") is really only one thing that happens in a lecture class.
You also get an "ear" for when the dead silence in the room means people have stopped breathing for a moment because they don't understand something.
You re-explain the concept in a different way, ask if it's clearer, and go on when it's sunk in.
Those are all interactive parts of a lecture class that I'd just assume to incorporate in my teaching.
It's not like you're pontificating in a bubble...
M.
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 07:32:11 AM
everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.
How many classroom observations have you done, Caracal?
How many student complaints have you investigated regarding accusations on that particular point?
How many classes of hundreds or even literally thousands of students have you experienced in any capacity?
People have these views due to personal experience of lectures that are just the sage on the stage with perhaps a few minutes for questions between segments.
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 07:32:11 AM
Quote from: spork on May 30, 2020, 06:33:24 AM
Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.
Why do so many people have such odd ideas about lecturing? My lower level courses are mostly lecture based, but that doesn't mean class is just me prattling away at the students. The point of lectures is to give students context and tools through which they can understand the discipline and material. When my classes go well, lecture is participatory. We discuss how the context of the lecture relates to the reading, we talk about how to understand and think through documents and images, students ask questions etc. etc.
None of this is abnormal, everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.
It's not. Countless articles in higher education news, and hundreds of CHE postings on this over the last 12+ years clearly show that lecture based instruction is neither more or less monotype than any other form of instruction.
But sometimes people just refuse to listen, have already made up their mind about something, or would rather parrot the fruity opinions of others rather than think for themselves.
It's just embarrassing when any of those aforementioned individuals are professional educators.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 30, 2020, 03:51:46 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 07:32:11 AM
everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.
How many classroom observations have you done, Caracal?
How many student complaints have you investigated regarding accusations on that particular point?
How many classes of hundreds or even literally thousands of students have you experienced in any capacity?
People have these views due to personal experience of lectures that are just the sage on the stage with perhaps a few minutes for questions between segments.
People also have these views because narratives of this persist. Not everyone who thinks sage on the stage dominates has experienced sage on the stage. I've observed each of my department TT colleagues teach. Not all are particularly good at the interactive lecture (for a few that is why they asked me to observe) but not a one of them went sage on the stage. Also, not once in my undergraduate or graduate school experience did I have an instructor who was a non-interactive, non-engaging lecturer.
Your undergrad experience was different from mine.
Your colleagues are different from mine.
The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.
It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.
I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 30, 2020, 09:06:37 PM
Your undergrad experience was different from mine.
Your colleagues are different from mine.
The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.
It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.
I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.
Yeah. I've been to crappy workshops too. I also open up check-ins with my students they use to vent. They've never vented about sage on the stage. They've vented about load. About assessment techniques. About racism and ableism. But not once about lectures.
So your experience was different than mine. Mine was different than yours. Doesn't make yours or mine clearly more prevalent.
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 05:39:17 AM
Quote from: mleok on May 29, 2020, 09:08:54 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 29, 2020, 02:40:09 PMPerhaps I'm naive, but this seems not worth worrying about? I have a hard time imagining the scenario in which anybody is actually going to take all your lectures and use them in another class, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe your online lectures are just better than mine, but I'm pretty confident my head talking above a powerpoint is not something that anybody else is going to really want to steal for their own class.
I teach advanced graduate topics classes, so the content is quite unique and I would like to maintain control over them. As a research mathematics department, we hire postdoctoral researchers/instructors which are paid for using instructional funds, but who contribute towards the research life of the department. We want to ensure that the university does not use their ability to reuse our lectures to reduce their funding of our postdoctoral program.
This concern is sufficiently widespread in my department that we are acquiring local departmental servers where our automatically captured lectures will be stored, so that we can bypass the university level podcasting agreements.
Perhaps this just varies by specialty. The content in all my courses, even the introductory ones, is unique. I'm not in a discipline where there is an established model either in the university, or the department for anything but methods courses, which I don't teach. But, that ends up meaning that it would be very hard to imagine somebody coming in and using my lectures. If you wanted to create a course on the cheap, reusing my lectures wouldn't really help you do that, because to make them function you would have to be teaching the course in the particular way I do.
Maybe this just reflects differences in STEM vs. non-STEM fields.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 30, 2020, 09:06:37 PM
Your undergrad experience was different from mine.
Your colleagues are different from mine.
The meme persists because it's not nearly as rare as certain professors would like to think.
It's also not as rare among people who claim not to do it as they like to think.
I still laugh about one particular workshop on interactive classroom techniques that was a fabulous example of how to bore the audience through the driest lecture with exactly zero of the techniques being taught used during the workshop.
I have seen this on dozens of occasions, with workshops led by people from a variety of different disciplines. I'm now at the stage of my career where I am quite comfortable getting up and leaving the room when this kind of thing happens.
Most people think they are above average, a statistical impossibility.
The vast majority of doctoral programs that supply the faculty members teaching at universities provide little to no formal training in teaching techniques or in the research on learning from psychology/cognitive science.
A lot of students at low- to medium-tier universities prefer sitting in lectures in which there is no interaction with the instructor because they are there to memorize facts during the time they have scheduled for this activity, because their main interest is to be able to repeat those facts on exams to get whatever grade they think they need in the course and move on to the next one.
Quote from: mleok on May 30, 2020, 09:58:08 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 05:39:17 AM
Perhaps this just varies by specialty. The content in all my courses, even the introductory ones, is unique. I'm not in a discipline where there is an established model either in the university, or the department for anything but methods courses, which I don't teach. But, that ends up meaning that it would be very hard to imagine somebody coming in and using my lectures. If you wanted to create a course on the cheap, reusing my lectures wouldn't really help you do that, because to make them function you would have to be teaching the course in the particular way I do.
Maybe this just reflects differences in STEM vs. non-STEM fields.
I'm sure this is part of it. There's much less room for "discussion" of the chain rule or equations of motion. I've also seen (either here or on the old fora) people suggest 30% of a course grade on "classroom participation". Maybe my experience is rare, but I've
never seen a STEM course with ANY of the grade based on "classroom participation".
(A corollary of this is that I
have seen instructors from STEM disciplines here say that it
doesn't matter if students attend classes
as long as they learn the material.)
And I've never heard a STEM faculty member talk about the class "making knowledge together" in the class, which I have heard from other disciplines.
In field courses, participation is not an uncommon component to the grade. In my classes, when it takes the effort of most of the class to do the field work, participation is essential.
Quote from: polly_mer on May 30, 2020, 03:51:46 PM
Quote from: Caracal on May 30, 2020, 07:32:11 AM
everyone I know who lectures a lot in class does some variation of this, so I don't know why this image persists of all of these instructors who just stand up in the front of the room and drone on.
How many classroom observations have you done, Caracal?
How many student complaints have you investigated regarding accusations on that particular point?
How many classes of hundreds or even literally thousands of students have you experienced in any capacity?
People have these views due to personal experience of lectures that are just the sage on the stage with perhaps a few minutes for questions between segments.
Well, obviously I'm speaking from my experience, which as I made clear, is based mostly on my discipline and related disciplines and what friends and colleagues do. I've never been in a position where I deal with student complaints. I've certainly done class observations, although I should do more.
As for experience with classes of hundreds, I've taught only one, although I have more experience with them in other capacities. As an undergrad, I took a couple. I also took a few classes that were smaller, but didn't really feature much interaction between the instructor and students, unless you wanted to ask a question at the end. I was also a TA in a really big class or two. Of those handful of courses, a couple were really great, one was really bad and the others were somewhere in the middle. I'm certainly not very good at it, the one time I taught a big class I thought that the same methods of engagement I use with fifty person classes would work and they really didn't. I've just never understood the belief that certain teaching methods are inherently bad. Some teachers are bad at teaching in certain ways. I certainly am not very good at formats that require me to lecture without any student participation. Some people are very good at it. I'm sure there are some really horrible flipped classrooms out there too. The point I was making at the beginning was that, at least in my discipline, there really aren't many people who actually just stand up there and talk anymore. Most of those people have retired. I don't really think we've all moved away from that model because it was bad, it just reflects changing styles and cultures of teaching.
Also this rhetorical device you keep using of questioning ther people's qualifications to weigh in is getting boring. Your basic assumption is that only people who have your experiences should get to say anything. Unfortunately, it is often obvious that your own perspectives often were pretty narrow. I don't doubt you heard more complaints from students about professors droning on at the front of the room. Probably some of these instructors were bad at lecturing, but students complain about the the things they think administrators will listen to. You're much more likely to hear that the instructor just talked all the time than "he made us split into groups and do stuff all the time," not because those classes were always better, but because students didn't know how to articulate what they found wrong with the other approach.
Quote from: spork on May 31, 2020, 03:01:13 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on May 30, 2020, 09:06:37 PM
A lot of students at low- to medium-tier universities prefer sitting in lectures in which there is no interaction with the instructor because they are there to memorize facts during the time they have scheduled for this activity, because their main interest is to be able to repeat those facts on exams to get whatever grade they think they need in the course and move on to the next one.
You know, I often hear this, but it doesn't really match either my experience as a student or an instructor. Overwhelmingly, the students I've had who dislike lecture formats the most tend to be weaker students. They complain because they want to memorize facts and don't like that they are being asked to think about how concepts fit together, or how ideas developed. They get frustrated because they want these very simple narratives where one thing leads to another and when their instructor is telling them about some weird thing as an example of how people tried to make sense of the world, they just get confused because they have a hard time holding more than one idea in place at a time.
As Piaget might suggest, they haven't matured into hypothetical-deductive thinking yet.
Some "get it" early--as early as 5 or 6, although the usual age is/was said to be 8-12.
For others, it takes decades.
Still others never do.
M.
Quote from: spork on May 30, 2020, 06:33:24 AM
Any instructor whose courses pre-pandemic were nothing but in-classroom lectures and exams should not be teaching face-to-face or online.
Most of the instructors in my department do exactly this. Some throw in a few clicker questions.
It's embarrassing and dreadful.