What Students Are Saying

A survey was sent out to College of Business and College of Engineering students, during the last week of face-to-face classes, asking them what challenges they anticipated in shifting to remote learning. These are some of their comments:

This is a class that i feel you cant just look videos online to know how to do examples. I hope the instructor can post videos of himself doing lectures. ~ I don't learn near as good for online lectures. I learn way better in person. This makes me nervous for my GPA because I have the Regents scholarship and my whole capability of going to college depends on that Regents scholarship, so I have to keep a high GPA. ~ Instead of live lectures, I think it would be much better to have prerecorded lectures that we can go back and rewatch in the event that our internet is not functioning at the exact time of the lecture ~ I am worried I will not have somewhere to go to do course work, I live in a rural community with limited internet access ~ I am cautious about moving away from in-person lectures, I feel that many of my professors are not prepared to teach/continue coursework in the online setting. Many of them haven’t taught online courses before, and I’m worried that my grades could potentially be affected

Introduction

*A colleague told me that without my facial hair I look a bit like Quentin Tarantino...I don't buy it.

We recommend delivering the majority of your content asynchronously and not relying too heavily on synchronous lecture. Providing Zoom sessions as an option can be a nice way to keep in touch and maintain community, but delivering a majority of your content in that mode can be inequitable (consider students who are going home to rural areas with slow internet). Before you dive into the daunting task of creating all your instructional materials on a short timeline, consider reaching out to the libraries course reserves or browsing a few online sources for something you can share with your students. You could also browse some of the catalogues of Open Educational Resources (check out the Open Textbook Library [we're a part of the Open Textbook Network], OpenStax, Open Course Library, and MERLOT, just to name a few) to see if there are materials that suit your needs there. If it already exists, don't feel like you need to recreate it! And if you're not sure it exists, your department's subject specialist should be able to help you search.

Keep in mind that some students will share books with roommates as a cost-saving strategy, so if you have students that reach out because they don't have the required textbook for your course please don't take it as a slight against you or your course.

If the materials you need don't exist, here's what to do if you generally...

Share Resources

You can share plenty of resources in digital form. Here's some technical instructions about adding a file to your course. We recommend incorporating these into a page so that you can provide context around them. Consider the classroom environment; usually instructors will give a couple guiding comments in the classroom, distribute a resources for students to review, and then bring the class back together to connect those resources to the lecture. Speaking of which...

Lecture

Just like when you make your course tour video, VidGrid works great for recording your computer screen alongside your webcam. It also has a webcam-only mode if you are just lecturing without a visual aid. If you're recording video in this manner you might consider the following guidelines to make your videos look better:

Keep them short. Consider how you chunk your content in the classroom and aim for making videos that are 10 minutes or less.
If you are uncomfortable speaking extemporaneously in front of a camera, feel free to write a script for yourself.
Don't put significant time and effort into editing. If you make a small error, just correct yourself and move on. If the error is too significant to overcome just re-record it.
Smile and keep it light. This doesn't mean that you need to make yourself become the next YouTube sensation, but a little bit of friendliness in videos goes a long way. This will also help you sound excited and passionate about your subject.
Don't record with a window directly behind you. The light will flood the camera and you'll turn into a silhouette.

Whiteboard Demonstrations

If you rely on whiteboard demonstrations in your classroom a simple VidGrid recording might not cut it for you. But, if you dig in a little deeper you'll find a Drawing Tool in VidGrid that might do the trick, especially if you are working on a touchscreen device of some sort! If you have an iPad from the past three years or so, you can also record the screen using the native screen recorder, just make sure you enable your microphone if you're narrating the video as well.

Physical Demonstrations

If you rely on physical demonstrations in your classroom, see if there is a way to scale down the demonstration, or orient your computer far enough away to capture the entire demonstration. Without knowing the nature of the demonstrations you're trying to provide it's rather difficult to provide more generalized recommendations, but if you're grappling with one of these challenges please chime in on the discussion board for this module and we'll try to brainstorm together.

Lead Classroom Discussions

We'll discuss this more in Day 4: Fostering Engagement, but please don't give up on the idea of maintaining a community of learners just because of the transition to an online space. This is a time when everyone is living in isolation. You could find that your students end up being more hungry than ever for interaction with their classmates.

Other

There are certainly lots of other ways that you deliver content for your course, but this was all we could feasibly anticipate. If you have other approaches that you're trying to figure out how to replicate online, please let us know in the discussion board and we'll try to help!