It's not online education. It's a return to physical campuses in the fall. And while this is in part practical--When you kill students, retention necessarily falls.--it goes beyond the numbers of dead and lifelong injured that will result from a physical reopening. Reopening campuses is an admission that science, math, logic, moral reasoning, history, and... Continue Reading →
Helping Students Stay Motivated in Online Courses
One of the realities of teaching online is that students have to be highly motivated to succeed. Drop-out rates at public colleges are an injustice that reflects broader inequities in American society, but they are even higher in online programs. What that means for Fall 2020, when many otherwise traditional students will be online students,... 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 →
A Reminder of Who is Hurt by Insisting that Students Share Images of their Personal Lives
If you require that students attend live classes digitally, you are putting their privacy at risk. The data that you demand is stolen by tech companies, the class can be terrorized by racists and other kinds of bigots, and the images that you require can be captured by others and circulated online forever. Students and... Continue Reading →
Policies for Online-by-Design Courses: Classroom Interactions and Recording
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 →
Policies for Online-by-Design Courses: Sensitive Material
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 →
Policies for Online-by-Design Courses: Office Hours and Contacting the Instructor
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 →
Some Suggestions for Online Exams and Quizzes
A friend asked yesterday how we can set up valid exams (ones that measure what we want them to measure) in the quick transition to online classes. Again, the process is different in a class that wasn’t originally online, during a time of crisis, for students who are not prepared to be online learners. So... Continue Reading →