Teaching lecture courses online

[polly_mer]

Check with your institution regarding rules.  Some of the tips posted violate best practices and even standard requirements for teaching online.

[Aster]

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.

[mleok]

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?

[mleok]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[Parasaurolophus]

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.

[mleok]

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.

[mleok]

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.

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.

[Bonnie]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

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.

[spork]

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."

[Caracal]

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.

[mamselle]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.