Teaching in the Pandemic
In this time of pandemic and social distancing, I, too, have had to make my hybrid classes fully online. My students were already required to post occasional responses online and to submit most of their graded assignments online. All the class material was already online, including their digital anthology, and, of course, we already had email contact and some video lectures. When word came down that we had to go fully online, it was matter of ramping up what we were already doing.
Fortunately, as it turns out, I had taken a brief workshop about online teaching last December and had discovered that recording Panopto videos was within the scope of my abilities and easier to manage than narrated PowerPoints. My first step, then, was to take the five discussion prompts I would have used to distribute in class to student groups and respond to the first four myself while posting the fifth one for all my literature students to respond to online, allowing them a six-hour window to do so. Getting the first one done and posted was still a bit of a challenge, but our digital instruction support staff has been excellent and always on hand to assist. I will no doubt be using more Panopto material in future classes.
Though I had no idea if it would be effective, I used Google docs in both my literature and my business writing classes to create class share areas; though, they haven’t yet served any immediate purpose. However, most of my business writing students were already using Google Docs for their group projects. Thus far, the group and class discussion areas continue to be the best resource for having a reliable and fruitful exchange of ideas.
More than half of my business writing students have been responding to their ungraded discussion prompts, and most of them submitted their letters of application and resumés on time. It helped that they were advanced on that assignment before the spring break. My literature students have turned in their recitation and response assignment, and it has been nice, after sharing my recordings with them over the last two weeks, to hear the recordings they shared with me. I have also found a way to administer my final examination.
Several of my students have contacted me about having to work on phones and iPads, and at least one about having trouble with internet connectivity. There may be others who haven’t contacted me. In any case, some teachers have worried as well about cheating on tests under these circumstances. Considering all this, I was thinking of making my exam exclusively the “short essay prompt” response, which had been 70% of the planned examination anyway. To compensate for losing the other sections, I could require them to correctly incorporate a set number of words from our class glossary, and maybe even provide them a word bank. I could upload the exam in Canvas, and then have them submit the finished short essays in Canvas, allowing them a reasonable window of time to accomplish this. The principle idea here is that they’d be showing their familiarity with the material while also showing their reasoning and analytical skills, and that’s usually not an invitation to cheat.
I dismissed the idea of synchronous communication with my students. Zoom is a suddenly popular technology now for synchronous online communication, but it presented two large problems for my classroom situation. All my students are scattered about now, mostly in-state, but some out-of-state, and most of them are busy with jobs, or volunteer work, or looking after family and friends, and, possibly, some may have contracted the coronavirus. The idea of requiring them to be in front of a computer at a specific time to listen to or converse with me seemed an unreasonable expectation. Moreover, my literature class has eighty-eight still on role, and even with breakout rooms on Zoom and three teaching assistants, synchronous communication seemed unwieldy and unproductive. I was in two Zoom meetings myself this past week, and so I do see some value in it, and I propose to try meeting with my teaching assistants on Zoom next week, and, if it goes well, every week after for the rest of this semester.
I have been most fortunate under these challenging circumstances to be surrounded by outstanding academic and technical support, conscientious undergraduates, and very capable graduate teaching assistants. I suspect, as often happens in extreme times like these, that new ways of doing things, as well as new ways of seeing things, will emerge that will improve the work we do and the way we live.
