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Remote Learning

Screenshot from 2020-04-25 22-33-23.png

In the unlikely event that some more unfortunate student instructors have to deal with remote learning (as we did in the second half of spring 2020), we decided to collect our notes and tips about this experience. But with any luck, this section will be ignored by student instructors for many years to come.

 

First and most importantly, make your voices heard. During an abrupt transition to remote learning, most of the school will forget that SLCs exist (if they even knew they were happening in the first place). Documents and online courses about how to handle remote learning will circulate amongst faculty. These materials will be helpful to you too. If you can't get yourself on the mailing list, talk to your advisers and make sure you have someone who can forward you materials that might be helpful for your course.

 

After perusing the teaching tips and courses that were forwarded to us by our advisers and a few select faculty that really had our backs, we created a notes document with a list of takeaways. What follows is our original notes along with updated commentary (in red) based on our 5 weeks of experience teaching in this remote model.

 

  • set a schedule or routine to your emails and updates

  • meh, consistency is hard, most important thing we found was to email out all important announcements instead of just saying things in class

 

  • give more detailed feedback than normal

  • not sure we really changed our feedback model, grading became MET/UNMET so students probably paid less attention to our feedback

 

  • don't recreate the wheel - if an online video exists for something - use it!

  • we are under the (potentially misguided) impression that our students just want to hear our wonderful voices (but really, the wheel just didn't already exist for our course)

 

  • include some short concise videos of yourself

  • hmm uhh, sounds cute, but you are students too and probably won't have time (or maybe that was just cause SCOPE ate our lives)

 

  • over communicate everything - see pb&j video

  • this is good advice and an even better video, if we had more time we were gonna make a version of the pb&j video for our final project instructions, 10/10 would recommend

 

  • check in often - easy for students to disengage with online courses; check ins helpful for making sure they are still engaged

    • minute papers

    • short mastery quizzes

    • project checkpoints

    • discussion boards

    • ** busy work not helpful, focus on substance & essentials of content instead of just "reading checks" or the equivalent

  • we started doing weekly check in surveys on Canvas, not many people responded but we got good insights from those who did

 

  • include recommended timeline & dates to hit

  • seems like a good idea in general, regardless of online or not

 

  • reduce number of clicks it takes to get to things

  • we did try to organize our Canvas page a bit more, again seems good regardless of online or not

 

  • include visuals of you to help students feel connected to you

  • WE LOVE MEMES! though we didn't really do this

 

  • include humor

  • we have none :(

 

  • downloadable things for people with wifi and accessibility issues

  • instead of just embedding google drive videos, we also included share links

 

  • include a mix of synchronous and asynchronous (for example live class/discussion but that is recorded for later viewing)

  • despite all the warnings and all our initial preparations and pre recordings, everyone except our one student in a vastly different time zone continued to come to class and want to participate synchronously (this was a surprise to us)

 

  • use a headset if possible

  • yeah.. no, it's totally fine if you don't have one

 

  • encourage students to turn on video but mute them except when they are talking - apparently there is some gallery view where we can see all the students

  • wasn't super an issue, most people turned on video anyhow

 

  • if you ask a question, direct it at someone

  • we prefer the awkward wait for someone to answer strategy

 

  • stop frequently to ask for questions & pause to allow for wifi lags, etc.

  • pausing is always good

 

  • if team teaching (that's US) you can use the chat box & have another teacher monitor it for questions

  • with a small class, people can just unmute and speak up when they want to, especially in this student to student teaching and learning game

 

  • some potential tools for asynchronous final presentations: 

  • we decided to just go with comments on Canvas discussion board instead of adding the stress of learning a new tool for us and our students

 

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