Remote teaching field notes

When the coronavirus hit last spring, it forced faculty accustomed to teaching in person to become adept at remote teaching almost overnight. Ten months have passed, and the faculty have made great strides.

“We know that they are coming up with creative and successful strategies to meet the challenges of remote teaching,” said Emily Boehm, faculty development consultant with the Center for Faculty Excellence. To share those strategies, Boehm and her Center for Faculty Excellence colleague Bob Henshaw, instructional technology consultant and EdTech liaison, created an ever-growing website of tips called Remote Teaching Field Notes. It’s part of a larger initiative, What’s Working.

“We wanted to find a way to connect faculty to each other to share their wisdom. We call this larger initiative What’s Working as a reminder that remote teaching isn’t all obstacles and setbacks — instructors are doing great things in this format.”

Someone might share a tip for handling group work. Someone else might suggest a way to encourage participation. The advice is organized by categories such as assessment and grading, student engagement and building course community. The goal is to hear from as many instructors as possible rather than feature only a few on the occasional panel discussion. The format also gives faculty 24/7 access rather than requiring them to attend a specific event.

“We have so much to learn from each other. There’s always room to improve teaching or simply try something new,” Boehm said. “Instructors are facing many of the same challenges and share instructional goals for their classes. It just made sense to create a resource that allows faculty to tap into their colleagues’ experience.”

Here are a handful of examples from faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences:

Virtual token system

From Susan Bickford, associate professor, political science department
Course: POLI 472, Problems in Modern Democratic Theory
Format: synchronous remote
Enrollment: 25

I used a virtual token system. Each student gets three tokens at the beginning of the semester. A token can be used, NO QUESTIONS ASKED, for:

• a 36-hour extension on any written assignment;
• the chance to revise (within a week) an assignment that I graded and returned; and
• an otherwise unexcused absence for students who have an attendance requirement.

This system gives students autonomy, flexibility and the chance to improve their work. It’s their judgment; they don’t have to convince some authority figure that they “deserve” it. It is more work for me — keeping track, regrading revised assignments — but definitely worth it. Students say that flexibility has helped keep their stress level under control. (Full disclosure, even though some students used up their tokens, I was still flexible about late assignments!)

Music videos to start class

From Rosa Li, teaching assistant professor, psychology and neuroscience department
Course: PSYC 250, Child Development
Format: synchronous remote
Enrollment: 120

I used Google Slides’ YouTube embedding feature to play music videos related to that day’s course content just before class. It let us begin on a positive note while also filling that awkward time as folks are trickling into Zoom. I enjoyed selecting the videos (I’m most proud of picking Salt-N-Peppa’s “Push It” for our class on childbirth), and students reported looking forward to seeing what that day’s music video would be. I chose a mix of older and newer songs, and it was fun to get Zoom chat messages from students saying things like, “I love this song!” or “This is my mom’s favorite song!”

(Almost) daily deadlines

From Desiree Griffin, teaching associate professor, psychology and neuroscience department
Course: PSYC 242, Clinical Psychology
Format: all asynchronous remote
Enrollment: 120

I assigned tasks to be due throughout the week (e.g., reading quiz on Tuesday, first forum post on Wednesday, lesson activity on Thursday, second forum post on Friday). The majority of students reported in their course evaluations that they appreciated having assignments due throughout the week because it helped them engage with the material more regularly for an asynchronous class and it didn’t “pile up” at the end of the week when the majority of assignments were due for their other classes. They also liked the rhythm of having the same assignments due on the same day each week.

Participation buffet!

From Mara Evans, teaching assistant professor, biology department
Course: BIOL 464, Global Change Ecology
Format: mostly asynchronous remote
Enrollment: 26

Class participation looks different in an online setting, especially if lessons are delivered asynchronously. So how does one incentivize class engagement and reward steady and thoughtful effort? In summer 2020, I invited my students to demonstrate engagement with the course and one another with a participation buffet (a smorgasbord of engagement, if you will). Students could: attend a synchronous session with a guest speaker and ask questions; ask and answer questions in the forum; attend one-on-one office hours during the term; and complete pre-class discussion questions. Each activity was worth a certain quantity of points, and students had to earn a certain point total to fulfill the class engagement aspect of their course grade. It wasn’t possible to earn all points from just one category, but they could combine items to “fill their plate.” It made for an enriching experience and office hours were full!

Using music to build community and support learning

From Elizabeth Tolman, teaching assistant professor, romance studies department
Course: SPAN 204, Intermediary Spanish
Format: synchronous remote
Enrollment: 19

I frequently ask my students to sing, since music helps students to learn Spanish in a relaxed and fun way. I was worried about how this would translate to a virtual environment but decided to give it a try anyway. On the first day of class, I began class by showing my students the video of Marc Anthony’s song “Vivir mi vida” (includes subtitles) and told them we were going to sing it together. I gave them a pep talk about singing despite their embarrassment and found that most of them did. We did indeed sound terrible, but that made them laugh, which was a great ice breaker. At the end of class, I broke them into groups in the Zoom breakout rooms and had them rewrite the lyrics, asking them to write lyrics for what we would do in Spanish this semester. So instead of, “I’m going to dance,” they wrote things like “I’m going to study.” The groups voted on their favorites and ended class by singing the new version together.

Making course content easy to navigate

From Jennifer Morton, associate professor, philosophy department
Course: PHIL 61, First Year Seminar
Format: synchronous remote
Enrollment: 25

Sakai organization:

• Creating a page for every section with links to the readings for that week, assignments, discussing questions, etc.
• Easily accessible links to classroom and ‘office’.
• Warpwire introductory videos. I put together a 3-minute video introducing myself that was a bit serious and a bit silly. I asked students to upload short videos of themselves before the first day of class.

For the complete list of Remote Teaching Field Notes visit the website. Or submit your own. “This is an ongoing project, so please keep the submissions coming,” Boehm said. “Even after we get back to in-person instruction, we’ll all benefit from sharing what’s working in our classes.”