Unsolicited Advice: Suddenly Online Teaching?

Fig 1: Empty Tables, Empty Chairs


Welp, here you are. You’ve been asked to teach online for the first time. (Probably because of coronoavirus scares.) In a perfect world, you’d have lots of time to conceptualize your class in a whole new way to accommodate the strengths of the online format, providing a powerful educational experience. This is not a perfect world, though (e.g. coronavirus scares), so here’s some quick-and-dirty tips to convert your classroom experience online.

Setting Up I: Technology As soon as they hint your class might go online, start exploring your online options. Most universities have a learning management system like Canvas or Blackboard, and maybe you’ve already used it for your face-to-face classes, but explore what bells and whistles you might have missed. You might set up a phone call or consultation with a specialist at your school or just someone you know who has successfully taught online before.

Setting Up II: Adjusting Instruction Once you have a general idea of what you can do online, decide how you’ll adapt how you teach an online class. For example, if you teach a large lecture class, you may want to record your slideshow as a screencast; if you teach a small discussion-based class, you may choose to meet on Collaborate or Skype to discuss the material.

Setting Up III: Adjusting Assignments Just as you have been deliberate in deciding the best way to teach online, you’ll want to adjust your assignments. For example, if you used to administer a short-answer test in your face-to-face class, do you want to make that test online (your learning management system may have a feature that will make it easy to convert from a Word document to an online exam) or do you want to email your students the test and ask them to fill it out and email it back? You may also have to change some assignments: instead of performing a dissection themselves, could they watch a video of a dissection online and answer questions about what they saw?

Setting Up IV: Adjusting the Syllabus Let your students know if the grading breakdown from the beginning of class is going to be the same as before. Are any assignments canceled? How will attendance be counted now? This is also a good time to establish expectations for your students.

Establish Expectations I: Technology Let your students know that you won’t be able to answer all their tech problems and make sure they have the contact information for your university’s tech support. If they email a question about why their rtf document isn’t loading, cc them and forward it to your university tech support.

Establish Expectations II: Time use Let your students know approximately how much time they should expect to spend on classwork each use. The easiest way is to just use the ratio they tell freshmen: for everyone one hour in class, spend 2-3 outside in study and homework. So if your 3-hour class is now online, you should let your students know that they should block off 6-9 hours a week for online work. If you want to get more precise, you can load your course stats into a calculator like this one from Rice to get an approximation of your workload. Again, don’t forget to also figure in videos, group chats or whatever you’re doing to replace your traditional class.

Establish Expectations III: Instructor Responsiveness Let students know approximately how long it will take you to provide feedback on their work. I recommend using an outside estimation since you might not know how long it will take you for some recently adjusted assignments. Also let students know when to expect responses to their email. For example, I always tell my students not to expect me to respond over weekends. I might. But don’t expect it.

Online Teaching Tips I: Touch Base This is one of my favorite online teaching tools. I email students on the following schedule: (1) At least once a week to remind them what assignments they should be completing and where we are in terms of bigger projects. (2) After I’ve graded a batch of assignments to describe both strengths and weaknesses of the class overall and and tips I have for the class going forwards. [Sometimes I combine (1) and (2) in the same email.] (3) I send a form letter to any students who haven’t submitted any due assignments asking them if everything is okay and reminding them of the penalties of late work.Sometimes students don’t respond at all, but the little email touch helps stop small problems before they become big problems.

Online Teaching Tips II: Provide a Guide for Responses It’s easy to tell students to respond to each other in the discussion board, but you’ll get higher quality responses if you give them a guide. Giving these guides can aid students with writers block and avoid the vapid “looks good!” discussion response. For example, you might tell students, ``Identify what you think is the main claim of their paper. Then give the ‘devil’s advocate’ position and argue against their claim. Respond to at least two other students for >75 words.

Online Teaching Tips III: Give Occasional Review It’s easy in any class to forget what came before, but online classes, because of their neat folders, can be even more capsulated. Since you’re changing formats halfway through class, students might forget some of what they learned in the previous format. You can include periodic review quizzes that go back a couple of units, or you can ask students to write short reflective papers about what skills they have learned and how they have applied them. This is also nice to do at the end of the class.

Encourage Your Students (and Yourself) Teaching online is hard, especially last minute, especially because of a pandemic. There’s a lot to be scared about, but remind yourself, and your students, that they are able to do this. Find resources online and through your institution that can help answer the questions and concerns that will come up. And I’m one of those sources. We can get through this!