Teaching in a Pandemic Part Two
Like every other teacher on planet Earth at the moment, I have been adjusting to teach during a pandemic. I am privileged to have an internet connection, a laptop computer, and a team of experts at my institution to provide technological advice and support, and not every educator has access to the same resources. I am mightily grateful for these advantages.
Still, as someone accustomed to face-to-face contacts with my students in the classroom, as a teacher using and promoting active learning, this has been a challenge all the same. While there are many things I can do online with Canvas, our current online learning management system, and with the other applications I have become only too familiar with in the last eight months, Panopto and Zoom, I still believe they fall short of face-to-face teaching. But to give the technology its due, it allows me to make fair substitutions under the circumstances, and I want to discuss how I have been integrating them into our new learning situation.
I have, of course, been using the university’s email system to help maintain some direct contact with students, which I combine with Canvas’s Announcement feature to maintain an almost daily contact with my students, to apprise them of daily or weekly tasks, new or updated features, and instructions and guidelines for using technology or completing assignments. I had used these technologies before, of course, but I am even more reliant on them now, and, as far as announcements go, I use them more frequently.
Canvas also has a general Discussion feature which I began using with more regularity last spring to pull responses from the entirety of each class. In the past, I had divided students into groups and allowed them to confer on specific prompts so that each group could share their results with their other peers. Asking them via lecture videos and written instructions to post individual responses in the general discussion area isn’t as pedagogically satisfying to me, but it does at least continue to let them hear other voices besides mine reacting to their class material.
I set up each Discussion prompt with a window of response time when posting is allowed (for example, between noon and 6 p.m. for each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday post) and with the requirement that they must post their response before they can view those of their classmates. I activate the “like” feature so that I, and they if they choose to, can at least minimally respond to the posts, and I also write some brief comments in response to a few posts each time. Furthermore, I scan each set of posts to select some of the best student excerpts to share anonymously in a new document I provide the class through Canvas.
I have also used the Group Discussion areas for more intimate and focused work among smaller groups of students, which I believe is less intimidating for them, and from what I have observed so far this year, also promotes more camaraderie among the students. And having arranged the students in groups of three to five members also allows me to use the Canvas Collaboration feature to good effect.
I have asked the students to use Google Docs, which can be integrated with Canvas, so that, using the Collaboration feature, I can set up a Google Docs space for each group to upload drafts of papers to conduct peer reviews, or to brainstorm ideas for papers and projects. Then, like other assignments connected to specific features, I can alert the students through an announcement, which may even include a video. For instance, when preparing these students for this kind of work, I have included a video in the announcement showing how to sign up with Google.
Our university bookstore enables me to offer all my students the option of trying and buying an e-textbook, which I make available through a Canvas Module, and though there are still a few who prefer printed texts, most of them choose the digital option. Naturally, I can also scan fair-use excerpts from other texts and place them as pdfs in Canvas to supplement the textbook reading, and I can either embed or link to other videos available on the internet like short films, play excerpts, and companion lectures.
In many respects, Zoom has been the most useful application for approximating an in-classroom experience. Obviously, it isn’t exactly the same, but it allows face-to-face contact in real time and, as digital technology goes, I find it more user-friendly than many others. Some of my peers are using it for synchronous class meetings at the times and on the days originally established by the university, but I have not used it this way.
Along those lines, I can still have my usual scheduled paper conferences with students by using the sign-up feature in the Canvas Calendar. I make the slotted appointments available and then use Zoom to create a new Conference link. Combining this with Google Docs, a student and I can confer on their draft in real time as we are each looking at their document, able to revise or edit it as needed and also in real time.
Apart from my skepticism about addressing a screen of 25 to 30 students four times each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while trying to orchestrate students “raising hands” or posting in the chat window, I’m more concerned about how available students can be to get online at prescribed times. Are any of them sick or assisting people who are sick? Are they in a place with a reliable internet connection? How reliable are their digital devices? For these and other reasons, I have chosen to keep my classes largely asynchronous, though of course through Zoom office hours or prearranged online meetings, there can still be some meaningful synchronous contact.
I know that there are even more applications and features that could be integrated into my courses, but at this point, less for my own sake than that of my students, I want to find that balance of overcoming the restrictions imposed by the pandemic with its inherent stresses. In short, I don't wish to add any more stressors to the students' lives than I need to in order to get the job done well.
Panopto, my other go-to technology, has been very useful in this respect. Because it allows me to simultaneously record the computer screen in one window while it films me speaking in another, I can integrate a Canvas tour, or guide students through a library database search, or show PowerPoint slides, or include any other useful demonstrations while I am discussing or elaborating on these things. I integrate the Panopto application with Canvas and then I can upload a video on just about any page I need it to be, including class announcements. To make them easy to find, I put the primary class Panopto lectures on their own designated page that I link to the class homepage.
Students continue to submit their graded work, written or spoken, through Canvas, which is also where I grade and return it to them, as I have been doing for years now. And, finally, since student cooperation, patience, and participation is so integral to making all of this work, I added class participation as a grade category this year, and then, as I have advised my students, Canvas tracks their page views and their class participation to rate it as low, moderate, or high in each category, which, in turn, helps me in assessing their performance over the semester.
While I anxiously await a Covid-19 vaccine and a return to teaching students in the classroom, I have no doubt now that many of these new technologies and techniques I have incorporated into my teaching because of the pandemic will remain a part of an improved class experience, not as a substitute, but as an enhancement. And though, as I said, I still prefer face-to-face teaching in a classroom, I no longer retain the skepticism I once had for online instruction as a viable means of being educated.
