Make deadlines the same day and time each week; make all work, including exams, available for at least one weekday day and one weekend day. Most classes can function with a single deadline each week. I recommend Sundays at 11:59 pm since students may be relying on family to provide childcare and that is more... Continue Reading →
Preparing for Fall: Choose Your ICE contact
You probably have an In Case of Emergency (ICE) contact in your cell phone--the person to be called if you have a heart attack on the street, the number accessible even if your phone is locked. You need one for Fall 2020 teaching. It's possible that you, as a teacher, will become ill in the... 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 →
FERPA Updates in the time of COVID
During a crisis, it can be hard to remember that, no matter what else we do, we must protect student privacy. These FERPA updates from the Department of Education can help. Above, Woman in Her Bath, Sponging Her Leg, by Edgar Degas shows a woman in a copper bathtub, her auburn hair drawn up, lifting... Continue Reading →
Why was teaching today harder than two weeks ago?
Does it feel like you should have this figured out by now? That because you've made the decisions about how to teach remotely and had a few weeks of it behind you, it should be getting easier? But, somehow, it's not? That's okay. It's not easier for a lot of reasons. Here are a few:... 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 →
Hearts and Ingenuity to Teach Against the Status Quo
The foundational text of my teaching philosophy is "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes Towards an Investigation" (1970) by Louis Althusser. As many of us transition to remote teaching, I'm reminded of this passage: I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in... 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 →
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 →
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 →