{"id":1122,"date":"2020-05-18T23:25:51","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T03:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/?p=1122"},"modified":"2020-07-11T17:15:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T21:15:02","slug":"teaching-round-up-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/2020\/05\/18\/teaching-round-up-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching round-up, part two"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the first post<\/a> reflecting on this wild semester, I discussed a class that went from face-to-face meetings to Zoom meetings. I turned my other class upside down completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding Science, as it happens, is the only thing I’d ever taught on-line before. When I designed the course for Summer 2015, I faced up to some basic realities of the medium: Asynchronous interactions are best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

For a course that starts out on-line, students taking it have a reasonable expectation that the schedule will be flexible.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This semester was a bit different, because it changed over midway. I knew that students wouldn’t have another class scheduled at exactly the time as mine, because we’d been meeting at that time for the first half of the semester. But I couldn’t presume that the time fit with their work and family responsibilities during the ongoing crisis. It might not even be a sensible time of day, because they were back in their home time zone rather than here in Albany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I basically blew up the course structure and adapted asynchronous modules from the on-line Summer class. The face-to-face class started with active class discussions about articles, culminating in in-class tests. Now students would read an article, take an open-book multiple-choice quiz on it, make a post in answer to a discussion prompt, and then comment on other students’ posts. That was the flow of things for each topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to make it one topic per week.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I found that some students weren’t keeping up with the work, though, so I extended the deadlines. They ultimately had two weeks to complete each topic, but they still started a new topic each week. So at any given time they’d have the old topic from previous week which they needed to finish up and the new topic from this week that they needed to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gave them lots of chances at extra credit. There was one module that didn’t fit in the new schedule, so I let them read the article and take the quiz on it for extra quiz points. I gave them points for answering a survey at the end of the course on how it went. And so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the survey, I asked about internet access: A little over half of the students reported having stable, reliable internet. Among those who said that they didn’t, most reported that connectivity issues weren’t so bad as to interfere with their course work.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also asked, as I usually would on the last day of class, what topics they thought I should definitely keep in the course and which I should abandon. Respondents were generally upbeat about everything. The topic with the fewest votes in favour had 12, and only two had more than 4 votes against.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n