Structures and Tools

Timing Course Design and Construction
A Week in the Life of Your Class
Recording Videos
Software Tools
Hardware Tools


 

Timing course design and construction

In an ideal world, those of us teaching online in the Fall would have our Canvas sites up and running and wholly populated with videos, assignments, quizzes, and exams by the start of the term. But most of us don’t live in that world: we have a preparation window consisting of a shortened summer, perhaps now including unexpected responsibilities to care for children and other family members, where we still need to get research done. We might also want to maintain some flexibility in our Canvas plans so we can see what kinds of activities and assessments work well as the semester gets going.

So – at a minimum, aim to stay three weeks ahead of your students. Starting the semester with three weeks of materials open to your students will give them an opportunity to learn the new rhythms of the course, which are probably different from their in-person analogues (and probably a little different from week 1 to weeks 2-3). When should they have finished doing the readings, watching the lecture, attending a discussion section, taking a quiz, contributing to discussion forums, etc.? Most online courses will have more moving parts than traditional in-person classes. Having three weeks loaded into the Canvas calendar will help them plan their own schedules to prepare adequately for what is likely several courses, each with a lot of components. If you are comfortable doing more in advance, great.

Getting feedback to students promptly is even more important for online teaching than in-person teaching. Students can no longer buttonhole you after lecture to ask “quick” questions about course materials or how they’re doing, and they may not be able to attend your online office hours. For any assessments that aren’t automatically graded in Canvas, aim to get feedback to students within two weeks. Even for auto-graded assessments, consider uploading a short video explaining common patterns of mistakes you noted.

A Week in the Life of Your Class

Many of us have a good sense of how long it will take students to do a reading or problem set outside of class, and we can directly control how long to give in-class activities. Much of that experiential knowledge goes out the window as we shift to largely asynchronous online delivery modes.

Here is a helpful guide from Penn State for how long to budget for students to work on different kinds of activities – for example, a journal entry, reflection paper, or peer review assignment. We can use these guidelines to plan our weekly course structure so it falls within approved guidelines for hours of work per credit hour (1 semester credit hour = 15 hours of instructional time plus 30 hours of outside work), and communicate explicitly to students how much time they should budget for themselves.

Every course is different, but common elements cited in faculty reporting positive outcomes of student engagement and mastery of course material included:

  • 2-3 shortened video lectures (max 20 minutes or divide into shorter modules)
  • 1-2 additional videos from Youtube etc.
  • Weekly quiz
  • Problem set or short written response clearly keyed to lecture materials
  • Optional Zoom meeting for discussion/Q&A
  • Required contribution to some collaborative discussion platform (discussion forum, collaborative Google Docs, Perusall, Flipgrid, etc.)

More detail on each of these elements will be found below.

Common principles of course structures that ended up satisfying students and faculty alike included variety without incoherence (each week structured the same, clear common themes uniting videos, activities, and assessments) and a balance of asynchronous delivery methods with synchronous interaction opportunities.

Crucial in all of this is communication with your students about the purpose of each element and its expected workload. Several students who acknowledged they had violated the Academic Integrity Code cited the “extra work” they were required to do after the shift to online teaching in March. It seems likely that they perceived “more but smaller pieces” as “more work,” so we can help address the integrity issues by clearly communicating how the new kinds of activities and assessments we ask of them compare to old activities (sitting through a longer lecture, etc.) that they are no longer doing.

Recording videos

  •  There is considerable evidence that multiple shorter videos enable better information retention. Faculty have reported greater student engagement with videos of 20 minutes or even less. Don’t just deliver your old lectures in one piece; instead, think about how you can break your content up into short modules.
  • Embedding low-stakes quizzes into your videos with Kaltura or Panopto (or constructing quizzes on videos right in Canvas) is useful not just to incentivize viewing, but also to help you and students diagnose common misunderstandings. Think of it like clicker quizzes, or pauses for questions and discussion, for in-person lectures. Quizzes can be multiple choice or open ended; you can even just provide “reflection questions” that students don’t have to respond to right away. (I like to feature adapted versions of these questions on essay exams.)
  • Don’t be afraid to use high-quality videos from other sources. For many subjects (especially big intro courses), you can find good videos produced by real live professionals to cover some of your information delivery needs. You can rededicate the time you save on video production to hosting in-person sessions with your students.
  • For making your own videos, check out the suggestions for recording and editing from John Castillo, who teaches video production at McGill and has made a series of short videos to help faculty catch up.

Your face does not have to be the star of your recorded material. Many faculty have good results from just recording their voice over slides, though others suggest having a little talking head in the corner makes it easier for your students to maintain a sense of connection to you as they absorb the material. (Just double-check your recording to make sure your talking head isn’t covering up anything important on your slides.)

Other, more creative audio options move in the direction of podcasts. There’s a lot you can do with an audio-only format, like short readings or interviews.

Software tools

In the March transition, most of us went with familiar (or now-familiar) tools like Powerpoint, Zoom, and Panopto. If you want to experiment with other software tools, here are a few that faculty seem to like (nb. these programs are not supported by CIT):

Hardware tools

Software is just a piece of the puzzle. For planned online teaching, you may want to invest in some hardware and other tools. If you pick just one of these, make it a microphone.

  • Your laptop microphone may tend to cause your voice to become unrecognizably tinny or cut out. Blue’s Yeti is a popular mid-range choice – so popular, in fact, that it is often hard to come by these days, so keep an eye out if you’re interested.
  • You might also consider a green screen – these can be cheap and low-tech, and it’s reasonably easy to get started using them in your teaching – here’s a quick guide from Duke.
  • Better lighting: it’s not just to keep you from looking like a zombie as you are lit only by your laptop screen. Bad lighting forces your camera to try to raise its sensitivity, and dropped frames can result. You can do a lot with just a diffuser – even bouncing lights off the ceiling over you will already help. If you have more money to spend, you might consider an LED light panel kit. You can get pretty fancy if you have the money.
  • If you write a lot on chalkboards or whiteboards in class, you can feed input from a tablet (like an Ipad/Surface if you like to see what you’re writing, or a Wacom if you don’t) into your video (here’s a guide).
  • Document cameras provide more flexible opportunities to incorporate writing or other manual operations into the video, but they can be pricey. We can take a tip from the army of Youtube cooking, drawing, etc. instructors who use their phone camera for this: mount your phone on a boom arm with a phone holder, its camera facing down at your hands, and then you can record yourself writing or doing any other manual or demonstration tasks where a close-up view is desirable.

Next Topic: Assessments

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