March 16, 2020

The transition to online teaching as an emergency contingency for the COVID-19 pandemic is causing concern, even panic, amongst both students and faculty. Faculty need technical training and support but the best online courses are not simple transfers of face-to-face instruction. You have limited time, you did not design your current courses for online, your have limited resources and experience, and the circumstances are highly unusual. I suggest that mastery of online teaching is not the short-term goal.

Relationships First

Start instead with relationships. The best online experiences embed a sense of presence, engagement and community. There are different ways to do this, but hopefully your F2F course has already created a sense of shared purpose.

Students will be feeling anxious, unsettled and probably angry about this move to online. They came to your institution precisely because they believed in the power of relationships with you. They now need to be reassured that you still care and that even though you are separated by miles, you still value and can deliver these relationships.

Now is the time to be high touch. This is something all online instructors already know—online teaching is about 24/7 responsiveness. Since all communication is online, it comes at all times, and there is more of it. Be prepared for that, but also lean into it. There is an old-fashioned technology called the phone. You would not normally use this between classes, but talking to your students in small groups or individually as much as possible will provide a similar (but yes, still different) value to the F2F experience. (Use whatever platform your university is providing, but add your phone to the list.)

This idea of presence has been key to good online teaching from the beginning and is captured in this image of the communities of inquiry model. Your first questions should be about how you can create community and support learning, and then ask what technology you might need.

(Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2 (2-3), 87-105)

You did not ask for this, and hopefully it is temporary, but it is still a chance to try connecting with your students in a different way. You will need to be MORE available to them: hopefully relief from your commute will provide you with the extra time.

Content

Students will still need content, but this should not be the hardest part of the transition, or what occupies most of your time! Your explanations or lectures may be the best on the subject, but for most subjects, there will be plenty of ways to get content to students. There is no shortage of great content from elite universities (edx, coursera, Open Yale) well-funded serious educational sites (Crash Course, Khan Academy, Merlot) and even YouTube and Google are loaded with content. may even provide you with all you need. SmartScholar.com has meta listings of content (including free courses on learning to teach online.) My point is that your time is best spent on continuing to provide the high-touch relationships that brought them to your campus in the first place.

Don’t try just to move your F2F class into a virtual space using new untested (for you) technology. Even with all of the resources, time and money, that never works.

Making a few (short!) videos is a good idea, but mostly as a way of communicating that you as a person remain committed and interested in your students. Seeing and hearing you is more important that any content you transmit. I would not make long lecture videos.

Think beyond just content. Merlot, and PheT, for example, offer many free simulations, interactive experiments and games. Edpuzzle allows you to embed questions in video

Engagement and Motivation

Prioritize motivating students to do the work. In learning, only the person who does the work, gets the benefit. Watching someone else do pushups is not that useful—even if they are intellectual pushups. Attending your riveting lectures may have been slightly motivating, but it was never as useful as doing the work yourself. Teaching is largely about designing for motivation. Yes, interaction with you is motivating, which is why I’ve suggested this be your focus. But thinking about that interaction primarily as engagement and motivation.

Students are going to be isolated and separated from their friends. This might create more time for study, but it will also be hard to focus and stay engaged. Again, there is a version of this in online design, but it is different when both you and the students chose to be woring together online. It will be even more important under current circumstances to build community, to keep them engaged and to think about what work is most important and what will keep students motivated.

For example, students can join in the hunt for good content and share content they find (it is a good digital skill.) Or they can make videos to explain content to each other: they will use examples you would not and this will also help them continue to interact and build community. Use polling tools like survey monkey and Socrative.

Now would also be a good time to talk about the pandemic. Students are highly motivated to learn more about this topic and it is the ultimate interdisciplinary problem. I’ve written here about the various ways you could intersect your course with this topic.

Reading and Writing

One thing finally less in short supply: time. Students will be spending even more time online in the coming weeks and will be hungry for a break. Now is a great time to talk about the value of reading and to help students learn to learn on their own through reading. You will almost certainly have to be far more specific than you ever imagined about how to do this, but try it.

Then have them write—a lot. This is a great exercise to do in isolation. This writing can also be shared and responded to. My colleague Gretchen Kreahling McKay uses learning journals (set to private!) so students can write anything they want, but connect with you. Note: you must answer them or at least let students you know you have read some of their work.

Clarify Expectations

First generations students already have a host of disadvantages. They have had to come to your campus and must learn a new culture, but the behavioral rules they may have extracted may not translate online—and they may also have less access to broadband or laptops at home. Some of them will mostly be using their phone. (Another reason to call them on it.)

Transparency and clarity are good learning tools for everyone in most situations, but they are more critical now. Use checklists, rubrics and explicit instructions to guide student learning experiences. I always include timings: when students know that this reading or problem set will take 15 minutes they both plan—to take long enough, but also have a way to self-regulate when something goes wrong and they are stuck after an hour.

Make as much visible as you can—especially things YOU consider common sense like stopping to think and paraphrase after you read or before you start a paper. Make a concept map to clarify your thoughts and help you remember what you just read (5-8 minutes). This is a good time for more focused and less open-ended assignments.

Learning Together

Purpose, proximity to a goal and relevance are all motivating. So is community. This might be the perfect time to engage students more in supporting each other in learning. This might be using technology that your campus CTL is so eagerly offering to teach you, but it also might include more clarification of expectations.

Many students will already know and understand apps we have never encountered—they may need little guidance in finding ways to communicate with their classmates (apparently 1 in 4 were sexting in high school): but they might need permission. They might need clarification of what shared learning looks like.

This would be a great time to get students to stay in touch with each other by reading and editing each other’s papers or having one on one conversations about ideas and books. We assume these things happen on our campuses, but now would be a good time to be explicit about the value of learning together and even better, to provide some structure for this.

Note too that discussion online is writing: that is good but also different. It also offers a chance for more inclusive dialogue. We know from Solomon Asch’s famous experiments that if you go 4th or 5th in the discussion you are being influenced. If you follow wrong answers, some people will just go along, even when they know the group answer is wrong. Humans are highly sensitive to social status and group harmony. If we like you or your group, we are more likely to believe you (ask any salesperson). All of these dynamics are a part of F2F classrooms: we wait to speak and then agree with the consensus. A good F2F discussion technique , therefore, is to ask students to write first how they would respond—before they hear any other responses. This can actually be an advantage of online discussions. Help students think more for themselves and with polling and mobile tools (like survey monkey and Socrative again).

Testing and Cheating

A student asked me last week if I had ever cheated in college. I said I had learned a lot by looking at my roommate’s problem sets. This led to a robust exchange of views about what was permitted and had I indeed cheated. Is comparing answers ok? Work too? It occurred to both of us that this was a gray area.

One of the challenges we are about to face is how to assess learning. If students really spend more time writing and doing work and you spend less time delivering content—you might just have more time for feedback. But I would also rethink what assessment means for your course. What is it that you most want students to be able to do? Is there a way for them to just do that without have to go through the intermediate step of reciting content? Can you do a final project instead of an exam?

If you need exams, I would do more not less. Is doing something over and over again until it is mastered cheating or learning? If there are enough exams, then cheating becomes more of a chore and starts to look more like learning work. All LMS allow you to do timed tests too. This is an adjustment for students—so do many of them—but it reduces the ability to google everything or get help.

Synchronous or Asynchronous

Online teaching is different. It probably prohibits some things you do naturally, but it also provides some opportunities to try new approaches. The most important difference is that you will need to think very differently about your synchronous time together.

Do you really need the entire class at once? Or can you meet in smaller or individual sessions less often? Do you need synchronous sessions at all? When you meet synchronously you need to do more than what you could deliver in a video—so not just you talking. That is a video I can watch whenever.

Every LMS will also have discussion boards and they are critical. Again, you will need to monitor more often than you normally do, but the less you say the better. Help students help each other and build community. These are both high value relational practices that are time consuming, but relatively easy to implement.

Technology

You should still avail yourself of the wisdom that online instructors and designers are offering, but with limited time, play it safe—especially with the synchronous tools. Your time will be better spent creating engaging and motivating assignments with clear and detailed instructions and a rubric for success. As has been noted in many places—making sure everyone has access to whatever technology is being used is also essential

There also a host of new edtech companies eager for new business and seeing this pandemic as a market opportunity. Packback, for example, is an AI-powered discussion platform for higher ed to increase critical thinking and curiosity for students and is offering free licenses temporarily.

Why Try?

As far-fetched as it is to imagine that COVID-19 is a conspiracy designed by China, a Harvard Chemistry professor and neo-liberal administrators to further disrupt American higher education and move it all to online so that it can all be done by cheap adjuncts, let’s assume (for a very brief moment) that your college leadership is as timid, risk averse, conflict avoidant and even as incompetent as you imagine. When colleges and universities were last forced to come up with a plan for this sort of disruption (for H1N1 or 9/11 or some other disaster) some sort of remote learning was the obvious and seemingly easy way to reassure ourselves that “we have a plan.” We didn’t. Disaster contingencies feel off a lot of to do lists. In the end, the pandemic is here, and we need to teach with physical distance.

Many colleges and universities are already in weaker financial positions because of lower birth rates, student debt, shifts in public perceptions and skyrocketing tuition. COVID-19 is about to add financial strain. Endowments just took a massive hit and, at least a portion of room and board is going to have to be refunded, especially if students are home for the rest of the year. It will also not take long for parents and students to remember that they paid higher tuition for F2F instruction and there will be considerable pressure either to return a portion of tuition dollars (which will mean less revenue and more budget cuts) or to resume face-to-face instruction (which will carry other massive risks and seems forbidden by the new CDC advice). If your new online teaching is bad, this pressure will mount and that helps no one.

To the financial part of the conspiracy theory: online teaching is generally NOT cheaper or more efficient. It saves a bit on building maintenance, but it also requires massive investment in technology and course development (accelerated development labor you are indeed being asked to provide.) But, as discussed here, it is also very high touch when done well. Yes, the content distribution scales, but many universities already do that in huge lecture halls. We know how well that works… Students still need relationships, support, and engagement, and that is much more personal. It can happen online and it is different online, but it is not cheap and does not easily scale. If you are teaching a small class, that remains an expensive advantage, but only if you continue to connect with students.

It is reasonable to be afraid that the skills we have developed for our current classrooms will not all automatically transfer, but it hard to image this will become an argument for all teaching to go online. Relationships now will go a long way to demonstrating the value that justifies the extra cost of F2F instruction and campuses.

Virtually no one is prepared for this new contingency, so it is going to be bad. If it is really bad there will be other consequences, so at a practical level, we should try and make it less bad and maybe hope to save our institutions. But we also owe it to our students.

Learning to teach online is surely a daunting task and few of us were trained or have experience here. If you are new to the game, don’t try to take on LeBron in your first game. Yes, learn new tools, but mostly to look for ways to stay connected, show your care, create community and provide agency, engagement and motivation. Less is more. Be gentle on yourself and your students. All of this may change your teaching forever.

MORE Quick Conversion to Online Resources for Faculty

Completing a Face-To-Face Course Online Following A Campus Mandate from Todd Zakrajsek and Kathryn Smith: https://www.scholarlyteacher.com/post/completing-f2f-courses-online

Stanford Teac Anywhere site: https://teachanywhere.stanford.edu

Practical advice from IHE: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/11/practical-advice-instructors-faced-abrupt-move-online-teaching-opinion

Harvard Best Online Pedagogy Practices: https://teachremotely.harvard.edu/best-practices

UMass guide to Teaching and Learning Online (communicating clearly, creating community, and assessing student learning)

University of Central Florida Blended Learning Toolkit

Duke’s Online Teaching Guide

A great list of tools for building online community: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ux3lTnUTpzZRuvxE3rAsSQ4Ihub96S8_OYECNh8wv-A/mobilebasic#cmnt1A great summary of COVID-19 and Higher Education: https://bryanalexander.org/education-and-technology/covid-19-academia-and-the-big-push-online-an-update/