Teaching Online:

Webinar - Grad Student Edition.

Online Teaching Series

• Overview of my approach to online teaching

• Structuring and curating

• Learning through discussion

• Tasks and assignments

• FAQs

• Resources

• Webinar

• Webinar - Grad Student Edition

• Webinar Series - Examples and Tips

Disclaimer Haiku

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

An extra webinar for graduate students (and anyone else, really)

Simple and Effective Online Teaching - Grad Student Edition
was held on Thursday June 8, 2020, 1-2pm EDT

Here’s an outline of the webinar along with links to all the resources mentioned.

Here’s the recording of the webinar:

Q&A

60+ people attended the webinar. Here are the questions and comments they had.

Would you recommend assigning all the readings and homework for the week before the live session, and then use the live session to review these new concepts?

If you’re going to have a live/synchronous session with your students via Zoom or some other video chat, that would be a good way to go about it. For a virtual chat to go well with your students, it’s good to have it focused on some particular topic or activity. In essence what you’d be doing is flipping the classroom: having students engage with the material before you engage with them about the material.

Have you ever experimented with creating a databank of study materials that students could add to with materials such as digital flip cards, etc? 

No, not exactly like that, though I do like the idea. Having students contribute to the instructional part of the course (as opposed to the learning part of the course) is a great way of incorporating authenticity into the course. Giving them assignments that contribute to their individual learning and to the learning of their peers makes the assignments less disposable, which increases student engagement.

Do students need to download the programs such as Kialo or Mentimeter in order to use them in class? Are these tools "user friendly"?

Some apps that exist outside of your institution’s learning management system (LMS) may require the downloading of extensions, apps, etc. That’s not ideal as not everyone may have a set-up that can accommodate the new software. Mentimeter is good this regard - users don’t have to download anything. Kialo is web-based as well.

As for “user friendly,” that is a big requirement for me as well. If I use any kind of app in a course, I try to make sure the learning curve is minimal, otherwise it can be too much of a bother. Some apps are complicated, and if I decide to use them, it’s because the learning benefits outweigh the learning curve.

Discussion forums  take a lot of time to monitor: any tips on how to get students to monitor? 

How do you engage students to participate in discussion threads if there’s not a lot happening?

Yes, it takes time to read the contributions of students to discussion forums. It’s usually time well spent, however, as you learn so much about how the students think and what they understand about the concepts under discussion. Building student review into the discussion process might be a good way to have students take more ownership of the discussions.

As discussion forums become more popular in online teaching, there is more reflection on how they might best aid student learning. Many instructors and students report growing tired of discussion forums. These two short articles address that issue:

”Discussion Boards: Valuable? Overused? Discuss.”

”Finding the Instructional Value in Peer Review Discussion Boards.”

What are ways in which students can do group/pair work?

Online learning affords a number of collaborative possibilities. The most obvious approach is contained in the LMS at your institution: the discussion forum. You can bring students together to do a number of tasks in an asynchronous manner.

For synchronous pair work, many LMS’s will have built in video chat functionality. There are also many platforms such as Google Docs, some Microsoft products, and wikis (I particularly like Notion) that allow students to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. And of course, don’t forget all of the video chat services that we all use and to which students often have access through their institutions.

For a discussion of considerations, both theoretical and practical, surrounding online collaborative learning, check out this chapter from Teaching in a Digital Age.

Could you give an example of the Checkpoint activities that help the students construct their own Module? 

So, in a number of my online courses, students complete a term project called MyModule. In it, they imitate or replicate, with their own content, the basic module structure that I use in that course. During the term there are two Checkpoint weeks where they complete stages of this scaffolded project. In the first Checkpoint I have them analyze one of my modules: how is it structured, what kinds of content items do students find in it, how do the content items fit together, etc. In the second Checkpoint, the students identify the topic of their module, produce an outline of the sub-topics, and identify a couple of content items that they would like to use. I give them feedback on both Checkpoints.

 Some comments received in the webinar chat