This is the first post in a series about building an online course quickly, not just transitioning a F2F class to remote teaching. If you are gearing up for a third trimester of teaching, preparing for an intensive May term, or looking ahead to summer (when classes probably won’t be gathering F2F) or fall (when… Continue Reading →
Online-by-Design: A Table of Contents
Some of us are just days away from the start of our Fall semester. And whether that is already fully online or hybrid or in-person, it’s likely that your classes may end up being fully online. Successful online teaching is very different from successful in-person teaching, and while no one expects a novice to be… Continue Reading →
Teaching Them How to be Online Students: Suggestions for Lessons and Assignments
This blog post is part of a longer series to help you quickly design an effective online course. If you began with the Start Here post, you’ll have already written your syllabus, chosen your materials and assignments, and built your online shell. Next, we turn to designing lessons and activities. Typically, I recommend designing these… Continue Reading →
Successful Grading in an Online Classroom
This post is part of a series to help you prepare for and navigate online teaching. While you can read the posts in any order, if you are just now building a class, you might want to start here. In online courses, creating careful feedback is even more important than in F2F classes. This is… Continue Reading →
Welcoming Students to Their Online Class
This post is part of a series to help you build an online class. If you want to begin at the beginning of the series, start here. A warm relationship with at least one professor is a high leverage practice–one that helps protect vulnerable students from dropping out. Small schools with low teacher to student… Continue Reading →
6 ways to use live sessions in asynchronous classes
Today’s Zoom crash, on the first day for many colleges and public schools (but certainly not the first day of all–we have weeks ahead of us where daily many more people will be trying to learn online), is a reminder that online teaching requires frustration tolerance for technology, which will always fail sometimes. This becomes harder… Continue Reading →
Privacy from Apps in Online Classrooms
While we should be thinking about student privacy in all settings, online classes present an entirely different set of challenges, given that students are often working from their homesand that they are using technologies that allow them to be viewed and recorded there. This is particularly challenging this semester, when we are teaching students who… Continue Reading →
No-neutrality teaching
“You can’t be neutral on a moving train” is the title of radical historian Howard Zinn’s autobiography. It’s a reminder that if we stand still as the world moves, we move in the same direction as the world, even though we experience ourselves as stationary. It’s the same when we teach in the classroom and… Continue Reading →
Why and How to “Handhold” in an Online Classroom–For Students’ Sake and Yours
This post is part of an ongoing series to help you prepare an online course thoughtfully but, if needed, quickly. If you begin at the beginning, I’ll take you through the major decisions you need to make to launch a class as quickly as possible while still doing a great job. Today’s post is about… Continue Reading →
Policies for Online-by-Design Courses: Grades and Grading
This blog post is part of a series to help you build an online course quickly. It is for people who are preparing to launch their third trimester in course that they thought would be F2F but will begin instead as an online course, those looking ahead to intensive May terms, and those who had… Continue Reading →