An introduction to some of the ideas informing the Fall 2020 graduate seminar Online Teaching and Learning.

A version of this essay appeared in the University of Waterloo’s Daily Bulletin on 27 March 2020. Thanks to Pam Smythe and Brandon Sweet for their help and encouragement.

Disclaimer haiku

This is what I’ve done
It won’t work for everyone
The students like it.

In the time of COVID-19, March seems so long ago. At that time, shortly after closing campus for the Winter Term, the University of Waterloo announced that its Spring Term courses (May-August 2020) would not meet in classrooms but only be delivered remotely, and that this might even extend to the fall. Fall is now upon us, almost all UW courses will be delivered online, and now there’s talk of extending the classroom teaching ban until Spring 2021.

It quickly became apparent that teaching in the time of COVID-19 would require more university and other higher education instructors to convert entire courses from a classroom setting to an online setting. The University of Waterloo’s Keep Learning site is but one of many that have sprung up to provide tips about certain aspects of online teaching and learning. But very few of them (eCampusOntario’s being a notable exception) give us a sense of just how to conceptualize and implement an online course. I’d like to address that using some of the knowledge I’ve gained from teaching online courses for over 15 years.

Way back in the Before Times (as Stephen Colbert says), I developed and launched, and redeveloped and relaunched, three fully online courses. I’ve realized that we can set up good online courses without losing our minds or spending more time on them than we would on regular classroom courses.

If you’ve been reading about how to stock a pantry during a COVID-19 lockdown, you’ll be happy to know that our “teaching pantry” is already amply stocked for us to create courses that can be taught and taken remotely. We can create good online courses largely on our own with easy-to-use tools already available to us, namely our computers and our learning managements systems or LMSs (e.g. Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, Blackboard).

This requires some adjustment to teaching style, of course. If we replicate a classroom teaching style online, that necessitates recording lectures in audio or video, which is sometimes technically challenging. A simpler approach - narrated slide shows - has been a staple of online teaching for years and can work well, but the fact is that students find these slide shows tedious over an entire term. (I’ve taken an online course, and the students are right.)

What might help here is to adapt our teaching style to the space in which we’re teaching. In the online space of an LMS, one of the best tools available to us is the discussion forum, as clunky as these forums (or fora for you purists out there) can be. So what I’ve tried to do is shift from teaching content (i.e. lecturing) to facilitating discussions about content. This won’t work for certain kinds of courses, but for courses with readings and videos and podcasts that can be discussed, structuring the course around discussion can work quite well. What I also like about this approach is that students don’t study for tests, they study for discussions, and the feedback I’ve had from students is that this shift in instructional focus improves their learning.

Here is a quick run-down of how I do this in my cultural studies courses:

• I organize my course content into topic modules, each module lasting a week.

• For each module, I create 5-8 content items. Each of these will comprise one or two readings/viewings/listenings.

• Each of the content items are embedded in separate discussion forums instead of being standalone pages. I will often add some commentary to contextualize the content.

• For each content item, a discussion task is posed. Since the students are already in the discussion forum, they then respond to the discussion within their discussion group (8-10 students per group is a good size).

• My role as instructor is two-fold: to frame the discussion (by curating and contextualizing readings etc), and then to facilitate the discussion. I’ll pop into the various discussion groups, ask and answer questions, encourage participation, correct outrageous errors, that sort of thing. I try to hit that Goldilocks sweet spot of just the right amount of presence – I don’t want to dominate the discussions, but I also want students to know that I want all of us to be engaging with the course ideas.

These discussions are all asynchronous, which I find is really the way to go. Offering that flexibility will be rewarded by more thoughtful engagement on the part of most students.

Students in the courses have three main “deliverables,” each weighted about the same. Their participation in the discussion forums is really their study time, so that is graded more for involvement than accuracy. Each module has a wrap-up module review essay; they need to complete a certain number of these. Finally, the course has a term-long metaproject, MyModule, in which they create their own module for the course where they research a topic and curate content about it. This project really helps them reflect on how the course has structured their learning. Three different weeks of the term are set aside for students to complete the checkpoints of this scaffolded assignment.

I’ve only skimmed the surface here, but if you go to my teaching online website you’ll find more detailed information on how I’ve structured my online courses along with some tips on good online course management skills (you’ll especially want to check out how to “flatten the curve” of student email, the volume of which is one of the banes of online teaching).

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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