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 →
Managing Email in an Online Classroom
One of the lovely and also hardest parts of teaching online is that you often feel like you are teaching one student at a time. Student-faculty interaction can be quite high, and many students open up quite vulnerably in an online setting. Some will use the class as individual coaching--which may work well in a... Continue Reading →
Building Your Online Classroom Shell: Final Steps
If you’ve been following this series of posts about building an online course by design, you’ve framed your course, selected your materials, chosen your assignments, written your syllabus, established the frame of your online course, added your lessons, and added your activities. This post helps you add the final touches. Has it felt hard and... 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 →
Building Your Online Classroom Shell: Level 3: Lessons and Assignments
If you’ve been following this series of posts about building an online course by design, you’ve framed your course, selected your materials, chosen your assignments, written your syllabus, and established the frame of your online course. In this post, you will be adding your lessons (the material you want them to engage) and the activities... Continue Reading →
Building Your Online Classroom Shell: Level 1 and Level 2
If you’ve been following this series of posts about building an online course by design, you’ve framed your course, selected your materials, chosen your assignments, and written your syllabus. In a typical F2F course, you'd be making copies of your syllabus and writing your assignments. For an online course, it's time to build the shell... Continue Reading →
A Plan for Saving the Fall Semester
By now, virtually everyone has canceled school for the remainder of the year. Some colleges have already announced that summer courses, many of which begin in just a month, will already be taught online; the announcement allows us time to do more than pivot to remote teaching but to build, even if hurriedly, online-by-design courses.... Continue Reading →
Should we assign grades in a pandemic?
It's been the question filling up faculty listservs: What should we do about grades? I can see the variety of perspectives here (except the one about law schools and med schools demanding letter grades--they will figure something out if we refuse to give letter grades). BUT--let's be honest for a moment. The average GPA of... Continue Reading →
And 8 Things You Might Just Love about Teaching Online
Online teaching is hard. I don't know anyone who does it well who thinks that it's easier than teaching in person. But there is a lot to love. Here are a few: 1. Your students will open up in ways that they cannot in a face-to-face class. Without worrying about how they look or how... Continue Reading →
8 Things You Probably Won’t Like about Teaching Online
If you are new to online teaching, here are some things that might grate on your nerves. I'm sorry. 1. Your administrators can enter into your digital classroom without notice, without warrant, and without you knowing about it. I'm sorry. It stinks. 2. For good and for bad, there is a digital record of all... Continue Reading →