Crash Teaching Online

This is a guest post by my wife Elizabeth Georgian. She’s a professor at a local university and is one of many scrambling to move all her courses online.

This has been an interesting week for academics as we move to online instruction, perhaps for the first time.

At my university, we heard on Monday that we’re going online next week. Needless to say, this has been a pretty chaotic few days. Here’s what I’ve learned and the order in which I found it helpful to tackle the problem. For context, I’m a history professor at a regional public university, teaching four classes, with a lot of general education students. I mostly teach face-to-face, but I’m online in the summers.

Email your students right away

Contact them even if it’s just to let them know that you’re working on a plan. Give them a time frame of when you expect to be able to share more information. If you’re planning on taking your course in the Learning Management System (aka an LMS such as Blackboard or Moodle) offline while you work (more on that in a minute), tell them that, otherwise they’ll panic. Most importantly, let them know that you care about them and that you know it’s a stressful time for everyone. If your counseling center is offering remote help, tell them how to access it.

Let go of trying to be perfect and forget about best practices.

We aren’t teaching online—that takes a lot of time to do well—we’re teaching remotely in an emergency. The most helpful article I’ve read so far was “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.

Figure out what’s most important for the rest of the semester.

Here are some things that might be your top priority:

  • Delivering content
  • Helping them complete a particular project
  • Supporting students with limited technology
  • Making sure you set up your classes in a way that allows you to care for your own health needs or for your loved ones.

You can’t do it all and now’s not the time to try, so decide what matters most right now.

Ask what technology your students can access where they are.

Depending on your student body and location, maybe all of them will have laptops and high speed internet, but some of us teach at institutions where students may need to finish classes on their smartphone or are returning to rural areas with limited internet access.

Decide if you want to teach synchronously, asynchronously, or both?

Asynchronous instruction is easier for students who have to share computers with partners, who are switching to remote work or learning, it accommodates parents who are suddenly home schooling, and it helps students with limited internet access. But there’s a benefit to real time options too. For some of our students, we are the adult in their life they feel connected to and it’s important to preserve that connection. Optional video office hours or reading discussions can help them stay connected to the class and the university without hurting their grades if they can’t participate.

Plan ahead and minimize changes.

The more of the class structure and assignments you can preserve, the less confusing it will be for your students and the easier it will be on you. Free response assignments will take longer to grade but are faster and easier to set up in most LMSs. If you’re concerned about your students’ access to high-speed internet, keep new work based in printed resources your students already have whenever possible. Avoid timed tests or quizzes or ones that require remote proctoring. Planning assignments you can send by email or snail mail if needed will save you time and effort later.

Find or become a mentor.

If you haven’t taught online, try to find a mentor in your discipline who is comfortable with your LMS. If you have, help out your less experienced colleagues. Distance learning experts are over loaded and they may not understand the needs in your particular discipline.

Hide your course from your students temporarily (warn them first).

Students tend to get nervous when they see you making changes in the LMS. Particularly if you’re making substantial changes or creating new assignments, you will set something up wrong, screw up a deadline, or rethink an assignment, and you want to be able to fix that stuff and make changes before you take the course live. Just don’t forget to reopen access.

Communicate regularly with your students.

It’s a lot easier for them to disconnect from online class than it is in a face-to-face class, particularly right now when they’re stressed, suffering from vacation syndrome, or both. Since they may not be used to online learning, they will need more routine reminders about deadlines, particularly if you’ve adjusted them due to an extended spring break.

Don’t forget to be human.

It’s fine, even helpful, to let your students know you’re stressed too or that you don’t have all the answers. If you’re doing video lectures or office hours, go ahead and introduce them to the people or pets in your home that may wander on camera—I always let my students meet my two greyhounds before they show up uninvited. Now is the time to set some boundaries between work and life, maybe that means not checking your email after dinnertime or taking a walk at lunchtime. Taking care of yourself will help you be a better teacher.

Two greyhounds laying on beds on a hardwood floor.
Henry and Petey.

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